Congress Party: Consensus Politics to Autocratic Regime Javeed Alam ONE of the features that has had considerable influence on Indian politics in the post-independence phase has been the transformation of the Congress party. From a democratically maintained coalition of different classes under the leadership of the capitalists and the landlords it has become a highly centralised and autocratic political machine owing subservience to a single individual. In this disintegration, the 1969 split of the Congress party under Indira Gandhi's leadership remains, by far, the most important landmark. It has in fact been treated as the basis of dividing the rule of the Congress party into old and new. It is significant because the tendencies towards centralisation of power and their concentration in the hands of the individual which were historically at work became pronounced thereafter, culminating in the Emergency and institutionalised authoritarianism. It is therefore important to look at the 1969 split both in terms of the continuties and breaks with the past in some detail. The author of the book under review* considers the events of 1969 as "perhaps the most momentous upheaval in the organisation since the split between the Moderates and Extremists at its Surat session in 1907'-(p 1), In an Introduction written as J postscript which updates the connections upto the return of Indira Gandhi to power in 1980, and in a long theoretical chapter the author sets out the conceptual framework for the study. In this* the 1969 split in the Congress party treated as forming part of the larger analytical category of what has been called "party schism". This in turn is explained "as the outcome of three major factors: elite tensions within the party organisation, changes in the level of political mobilisation in the larger society, and the institu- tionalisation of the party system and the nature of the party concerned" (p 22). These factors are then subjected to an order of explanatory importance; Split in a Predominant Party: The Indian National Congress in 1969 by Mahendra Prasad Singh; Abhi- nav Publication, New Delhi, 1981;
