In 1979, the publication of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s memoir, A Dangerous Place, reignited debates in the subcontinent over CIA interference in India’s internal affairs. Four years later, in 1983, a vituperative assault on Henry Kissinger published by the American investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, in his book, The Price of Power, further fanned flames surrounding the CIA’s activities in India. Hersh’s book claimed that the former Indian prime minister, Morarji Desai, had been a CIA asset and passed intelligence to the Agency at the time of the Indo-Pakistan hostilities in 1971. The accusation levelled by Hersh, which prompted Desai to sue in an American court, served as a cause celébère, and saw Kissinger forced to take to publicly testify on CIA operations in India. This chapter examines how perceptions of the CIA in India towards the end of the Cold War were influenced by memoirs, books, and articles ‘exposing’ Agency misdeeds. It analyses the motivations behind such works, their impact on the Agency’s reputation at home and abroad, and the effectiveness of strategies employed by actors in India and the United States to enhance and suppress their reach.

In the late 1960s, a spotlight cast upon some of the CIA’s more questionable activities in the subcontinent had a profound and enduring impact on Indian perceptions of the United States’ government and its external intelligence service. In the wake of the Ramparts scandal, the CIA came to occupy a prominent place in mainstream Indo–U.S. cultural and political discourse. For the remainder of the twentieth-century, and beyond, anti-American elements in India drew repeatedly upon the spectre of CIA subversion as a means of undermining New Delhi’s relationship with Washington. The blanket exposure given by the world’s press to CIA indiscretions, exemplified by the international media circus surrounding Congressional probes into the U.S. intelligence community, made a deep psychological impression in South Asia. This chapter traces the socio-political impact of Indira Gandhi’s assertions that the malevolent hand of the CIA lay behind India’s problems, foreign and domestic. It recovers South Asian agency in intelligence terms by interrogating the utility of Gandhi’s policy of exploiting the CIA’s reputation as a socio-political malefactor to court popular legitimacy.

The Epilogue traces the factors that caused a steady diminishment in the role and influence of the Planning Commission from the mid-1960’s onward—a combination of economic setbacks and changes in key players. After briefly tracing the fortunes of planning through the following decades, until its ultimate dissolution in 2015, it will conclude with a discussion of how the Rahul Gandhi—leader of the Congress Party, and Nehru’s great grandson—revived the specter of the Planning Commission on the 2019 general election campaign trail in order to contrast himself with Modi. It also discusses the current controversy over India’s statistical system, and why observers describe it as dismantling “the house that Mahalanobis built.” Planning Democracy concludes by underlining the key themes that emerged in the preceding chapters and underscore why understanding independent India is impossible without understanding planning.

In this chapter, we examine how, less than forty years after accession to the Indian Union, the Sikhs’ uneasy accommodation erupted into armed conflict. The chapter begins by reviewing the post-independence constitutional framework by focusing on religion and the rights of religious minorities. It then assesses how Nehru and his daughter, Mrs Indira Gandhi, managed ethnic tensions in the Punjab. We examine how opposition to the Centre’s policies was sustained by the SAD by the campaign for a Punjabi Suba (a Punjabi-speaking state), that was conceded in 1966 without the state capital of Chandigarh and some Punjabi-speaking areas. The chapter then evaluates the Centre’s policies in the Punjab and the SAD’s response in adopting the Anandpur Sahib Resolution (ASR), which called for autonomy and sovereignty with radically reduced powers of the Centre. It concludes by reflecting on the autonomy movement in 1982–4 that ultimately led to Operation Blue Star.