A PULSATING PANORAMA

The 1995-2005 decade was perhaps politically the most complex since Independence. We kept our lens razor-sharp through the reign of five prime ministers as single-party dominance gave way to coalition compulsions

- By PRABHU CHAWLA

INDIA TODAY magazine entered its 20th year in the post-liberalisation panorama of India.

As the economic ebb and flow fused with political disruptions and social surges, it was the nation's oracle—the mind reader that deciphered the dynamics of a democracy in flux. From 1995 to 2005, as India transitioned from the tentative tremors of the 1991 reforms to a burgeoning behemoth, our team of brilliant editors and writers mirrored this metamorphosis, morphing our fortnightly fixture into a weekly whirlwind of wisdom, recording the present and setting the agenda for the future.

The decade in question was perhaps the most politically complex since Independence. India got five prime ministers—P.V. Narasimha Rao, H.D. Deve Gowda, I.K. Gujral, A.B. Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh—each representing sharply different ideological impulses, social bases and governing temperaments. This was the era when single-party dominance gave way to coalition compulsions. Rao's minority Congress government, which initiated economic liberalisation with stealth and pragmatism, gave way to the unstable United Front experiments, followed by the BJP-led NDA's nationalist-coalition model, before the Congress returned again at the head of the UPA in 2004.

INDIA TODAY covered this ideological churn with consistency and balance. We neither romanticised coalition consensus nor demonised political compromise. Instead, we documented the contradictions inherent in coalition governance—the tug of war between reform and redistribution, federal assertion and central authority, ideology and arithmetic. Whether examining Deve Gowda's grassroots federalism, Gujral's moral foreign policy, Vajpayee's coalition statesmanship or Manmohan Singh's technocratic restraint, the magazine treated all governments with equal scepticism and analytical rigour.