Durbar by Tavleen Singh

Durbar is a first-person account of some of the most impactful incidents that took place at the hands of the Central Government. It begins with an account of the Emergency in 1975, when the author began her career as a junior reporter with The Statesman, and moves on to chronicle the instabilities of the times that followed.

The Emergency was a landmark event that set the course of the spiral of incidents that followed it: Indira Gandhi’s assassination followed by Rajiv Gandhi’s ascent to power, a period fraught with struggles and turbulence in the government. He was accused of following nepotism in the corridors of power, and was associated with many controversies such as the the anti-Sikh riots, the Bhopal Gas tragedy and the Bofors scam, which served to tarnish the impeccable image of the Congress in the days to come.