Neerja Chowdhury > Quotes

“As many as eight out of the fourteen PMs were from Uttar Pradesh”
― Neerja Chowdhury, How Prime Ministers Decide

“The power of the position has been growing. Some have even called it a prime ministerial dictatorship within a parliamentary democracy.”
― Neerja Chowdhury, How Prime Ministers Decide

“42nd Constitutional Amendment passed during the Emergency, which stipulated that the president had to abide by the advice of the council of ministers. Finally, Jatti fell in line.”
― Neerja Chowdhury, How Prime Ministers Decide

“Before he became prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee used to joke that he was the longest prime minister-in-waiting in India.”
― Neerja Chowdhury, How Prime Ministers Decide

“The Janata government, when it came to power in 1977, dismissed nine state governments run by the Congress. Indira Gandhi paid them back in the same coin when she came to power in 1980.”
― Neerja Chowdhury, How Prime Ministers Decide

“M. O. Mathai, who was private secretary to Nehru. Mathai became famous later when he fell out with the Nehrus and wrote a sensational tell-all book about the family.”
― Neerja Chowdhury, How Prime Ministers Decide

“Six of the fifteen prime ministers were Brahmins, at the top of the social ladder (Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Morarji Desai, Rajiv Gandhi, though he was a half Brahmin from the mother’s side, Narasimha Rao, and Atal Bihari Vajpayee). V. P. Singh and Chandra Shekhar were Rajputs, Shastri a Kayastha, and Gulzari Lal Nanda and I. K. Gujral were Punjabi Khatris—all upper castes. Two were”
― Neerja Chowdhury, How Prime Ministers Decide

“Very soon into the campaign, Indira Gandhi realized things were not going according to plan. As she told journalist Pran Sabharwal, a few days after she announced elections, ‘Jab se election announce hua hai, chaprasi theek se paani tak nahin pila rahe hain (From the moment I have announced the election, even the peons are cold-shouldering me).”
― Neerja Chowdhury, How Prime Ministers Decide

“This was partly because Allahabad was a hub of the freedom struggle but also because it was home to the Nehrus who influenced the country’s politics for half a century and more after Independence.”
― Neerja Chowdhury, How Prime Ministers Decide

“When you stifle the flow of information to the people,’ Krishan Kant, the Congress’s one-time young Turk, had warned in parliament, ‘you are blocking the channel of information to yourself.”
― Neerja Chowdhury, How Prime Ministers Decide

“In 1999, the collegium, consisting of the chief justice of India and the two most senior judges of the Supreme Court was enlarged, providing for five judges, who were expected to make their decisions collectively”
― Neerja Chowdhury, How Prime Ministers Decide

“Indira Gandhi used saam, daam, dand, bhed (persuasion, bribery, punishment, and division),”
― Neerja Chowdhury, How Prime Ministers Decide

“How, for instance, did she win over her arch opponent, the maverick Janata Party leader Raj Narain who had damaged her the most? It was he who had got her disqualified from parliament in 1975, and defeated her in 1977 but she used him to implode the Janata government.”
― Neerja Chowdhury, How Prime Ministers Decide

“March 1977. The defeat had come as a real shock. She had even lost in her own constituency of Raebareli”
― Neerja Chowdhury, How Prime Ministers Decide

“Could Rao have done more to stop the demolition—which represented the failure of the Indian state to protect a place of worship, even though it was disputed.”
― Neerja Chowdhury, How Prime Ministers Decide

“there has been none from eastern or Northeast India so far. As many as eight out of the fourteen PMs were from Uttar Pradesh—”
― Neerja Chowdhury, How Prime Ministers Decide

“There were five men who influenced Indira Gandhi’s life and decision-making, according to the historian Ramachandra Guha: her father and India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru; her husband, Feroze Gandhi; and her principal secretary cum political advisor, P. N. Haksar, who guided her between 1967–73, considered her best years in politics. Then there was Jayaprakash Narayan, who opposed her rule, leading her to impose the Emergency. But it was her son, Sanjay, who wielded the maximum power over her. He was her ‘blind spot’, and she had ‘very little control over him’.”
― Neerja Chowdhury, How Prime Ministers Decide

“Prime minister for less than a year, V. P. Singh changed the political history of India with his decision to implement the Mandal Commission Report.”
― Neerja Chowdhury, How Prime Ministers Decide