India Since Independence

Acknowledgements

It was in the course of formulating and teaching a module on political reporting at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai, that I felt the need for a book of this kind. The module was intended to equip the aspiring journalists with a sense of history while they looked into the contemporary political events. However, I found in them a sense of remoteness whenever I lectured to them about an event that I felt was contemporary. It then occurred to me that even the national Emergency of June 1975–March 1977 belonged to the distant past to them. The book was conceived in that context.

The training that I received from Professor Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, my supervisor at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, ...