Beyond the Congress: Jana Sangh, Socialists, Liberals, Swatantra and the Communists Who Ran Kerala

For the first two decades after independence, the Indian National Congress was not so much a party as the weather: it rained everywhere. But the opposition was never empty, and UPSC keeps asking about the parties that stood outside the Congress umbrella, because each of them marks a turning point. The Bharatiya Jana Sangh of 1951 is the ancestor of today's ruling party. The Socialist Party of 1948 is the first great split in the Congress family. The All India Liberal Federation of 1919 is where the old Moderates went. The Swatantra Party was the largest opposition in the Lok Sabha of 1967. The Communists formed the world's first elected Communist government in Kerala in 1957. And the nationalization of banks in 1969 is the moment Indira Gandhi broke the Congress itself. This article tells all six stories.

Bharatiya Jana Sangh: the alternative founded in 1951

The Bharatiya Jana Sangh was founded on 21 October 1951 by Syama Prasad Mookerjee, who had resigned from Nehru's cabinet in 1950 over the Nehru-Liaquat Pact and the handling of East Bengal's Hindus. Mookerjee built the party with the organisational muscle of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, whose workers became the Jana Sangh's cadre, and the party's first general secretary was Deendayal Upadhyaya, the RSS pracharak who would give the party its doctrine of Antyodaya and integral humanism. The Jana Sangh's platform was cultural nationalism: Akhand Bharat as an ideal, opposition to Article 370 and the special status of Jammu and Kashmir, a uniform civil code, and the promotion of Hindi.

In the first general election of 1951-52, the Jana Sangh won just 3 Lok Sabha seats, Mookerjee himself being one of them, but it had established the template of a disciplined, cadre-based national opposition. Mookerjee died in 1953 in a Srinagar jail after entering Jammu and Kashmir without a permit to protest the permit system, and the party grew slowly under Upadhyaya's organisation through the 1960s. In 1977 it merged into the Janata Party that defeated Indira Gandhi after the Emergency; when the Janata experiment collapsed, the former Jana Sangh members walked out in 1980 and founded the Bharatiya Janata Party. For the exam, the chain is 1951 - Mookerjee - Jana Sangh - 1977 Janata merger - 1980 BJP, and the party is the standard answer to questions about the BJP's origins.

The Socialist Party: the Congress's first great split

Socialism entered the Congress through the Congress Socialist Party, formed in 1934 inside the Congress by Jayaprakash Narayan, Acharya Narendra Deva and Ram Manohar Lohia as a left pressure group. After independence the tension between the socialists and the Congress leadership, particularly over the party's drift and Sardar Patel's hard line against the left, became unbearable, and in 1948 the socialists walked out and formed the separate Socialist Party. It was the first major breakaway from the ruling Congress, and it carried away some of the most gifted political minds of the generation.

The socialists never became a national ruling party, but they shaped the opposition's language for decades. Ram Manohar Lohia built a doctrine of seven revolutions (against caste, class, gender and language hierarchies among them) and made the Socialist Party the champion of the backward classes and of Hindi. Jayaprakash Narayan moved from party politics to Sarvodaya and, in the 1970s, to the Total Revolution movement that became the moral engine of the anti-Emergency struggle. The Socialist Party itself fragmented through mergers and splits, the Praja Socialist Party of 1952 and the Samyukta Socialist Party of 1964 being the landmarks, but its 1948 break remains the exam's fixed point: the first split from the Congress after independence.

The Liberals: Sapru and the Federation of 1919

When the Congress split at Surat in 1907, the Moderates lost the organisation to the Extremists and never fully returned. After the war, as the Congress moved toward mass agitation under Gandhi, the old constitutionalists needed a home of their own, and in 1919 they formed the All India Liberal Federation. Its leaders were the great names of Moderate politics: Tej Bahadur Sapru, Surendranath Banerjea and V.S. Srinivasa Sastri. The Liberals believed in constitutional advance through councils and cooperation, not boycott and satyagraha: they contested the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, served as ministers and council members, and argued that India should earn self-government by working the institutions the British offered.

Tej Bahadur Sapru is the figure the exam names. A brilliant Allahabad lawyer, Sapru was the Liberals' intellectual leader, a member of the Muddiman Committee, a delegate to all three Round Table Conferences, and the chairman of the Sapru Committee of 1945, whose report proposed a constitutional settlement on the eve of independence. The Liberals faded as mass politics swallowed constitutionalism, but Sapru's afterlife was remarkable: he became one of the most respected mediators of the transfer of power, and his committee's report is a staple of questions on pre-independence constitutional proposals. The chain is 1907 Surat - Moderates out - 1919 Liberal Federation - Sapru - Round Tables - Sapru Committee 1945.

Swatantra Party: the free-market opposition of 1967

The Swatantra Party was founded in 1959 by C. Rajagopalachari, the first Indian Governor-General, in revolt against what he called the permit-licence-quota raj of Nehruvian socialism. Its co-founders included Minoo Masani and N.G. Ranga, and its platform was classical liberalism adapted to India: free enterprise, private property, dismantling of state controls, and opposition to the cooperative-farming and heavy-industry thrust of the planning era. Rajaji, who had been Congress's elder statesman, argued that the state was strangling the peasant and the entrepreneur alike.

The party's great moment came in the 1967 general election, the first in which the Congress lost its aura of invincibility. The Congress fell to 283 seats, and the Swatantra Party won 44, making it the largest single opposition party in the fourth Lok Sabha, ahead of the Jana Sangh's 35 and the two communist parties. Swatantra's strength lay in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Odisha and Andhra Pradesh, where princes, landlords and business communities funded a professional campaign. The party declined after 1971, when Indira Gandhi's Garibi Hatao wave swept the old right away, and it was formally dissolved in 1974, many of its leaders joining the anti-Emergency movement. For the exam, Swatantra is the answer to largest opposition party in 1967, and the embodiment of the free-market critique of planning.

Kerala 1957: the world's first elected Communist government

In the 1957 Kerala assembly election, the Communist Party of India emerged as the largest party, and on 5 April 1957 E.M.S. Namboodiripad was sworn in as Chief Minister at the head of a Communist ministry. It was the first time in world history that a Communist party came to power through the ballot box in a parliamentary democracy, and the event was watched across the globe as a test of whether communism and constitutional government could coexist. The EMS ministry moved fast: a radical land reforms programme to break landlordism, and an Education Bill to regulate private (largely church-run) schools and improve teachers' conditions.

The reforms detonated a backlash. Landlords, the Catholic Church and the Congress combined in the Vimochana Samaram, the Liberation Struggle of 1959, a mass agitation that paralysed the state. The Nehru government, though uneasy, dismissed the ministry on 31 July 1959 under Article 356, the first use of President's Rule against an elected state government. The dismissal remains one of the most debated acts of the Nehru era: a precedent for the misuse of Article 356 that later governments would exploit freely. The exam's fixed points are 1957 - Kerala - CPI - E.M.S. Namboodiripad - first elected Communist government in the world - dismissed 1959 under Article 356.

1969: the nationalization of banks and the splitting of the Congress

On 19 July 1969, the Indira Gandhi government nationalized 14 major commercial banks, those with deposits exceeding Rs 50 crore, by ordinance. The stated purpose was socialist: to direct credit to agriculture, small industry and the poor instead of reserving it for big business houses, and to break the nexus between banks and industrial conglomerates. A second round in 1980 nationalized six more banks. The 1969 move was enormously popular, it made Indira Gandhi a hero of the poor, and it became the economic signature of her leftward turn.

But the nationalization was also a political weapon. Through 1969 Indira Gandhi was locked in a power struggle with the Congress old guard, the Syndicate, and above all with Morarji Desai, her Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister, who opposed nationalization as Finance Minister on principle. Days before the ordinance, she stripped Desai of the finance portfolio; he resigned, and the party split into Congress (R) (Requisitionists, Indira's) and Congress (O) (Organisation, the Syndicate's). The banks were nationalized into the middle of this split, and the Supreme Court's 1970 verdict in the R.C. Cooper case striking down the first ordinance as inadequately compensatory only deepened the confrontation between the government and the courts. For the exam, 1969 - 14 banks - Rs 50 crore threshold - Indira vs Morarji - Congress split is the complete frame, and the event is the bridge between the party histories above and the Emergency decade that followed.

The Communists before Kerala: from Kanpur to Telangana

The Kerala victory of 1957 did not come from nowhere; it was the harvest of three decades of communist organisation. The Communist Party of India was founded at Kanpur in December 1925, growing out of the communist groups that M.N. Roy had organised from exile and the Peshawar and Kanpur conspiracy cases that made communism a national talking point. Through the 1930s and 1940s the CPI worked inside the Congress, the trade unions and the All India Kisan Sabha, building the peasant base that would later deliver Kerala.

The party's great pre-independence upheaval was the Telangana armed struggle (1946-51), the peasant revolt against the Nizam's landlords in what is now Telangana. Led by the CPI and its peasant front, the struggle liberated thousands of villages, redistributed over a million acres of land, and set up village republics before the Indian army's Police Action of 1948 and the subsequent military pressure wound it down. Telangana taught the CPI both its strength in the countryside and the limits of armed struggle in independent India, and the party's turn to parliamentary politics in the 1950s, the road that led to Kerala 1957, was the direct lesson of the Telangana years. For the exam, the communist timeline is 1925 Kanpur (founding) - 1946-51 Telangana - 1957 Kerala.

The socialist alphabet: PSP, SSP and Lohia's seven revolutions

The Socialist Party of 1948 did not stay one party for long, and its splits are themselves exam material. In 1952 it merged with the Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party of Acharya Kripalani to form the Praja Socialist Party (PSP), which became the principal socialist opposition through the 1950s. In 1964 Ram Manohar Lohia led a breakaway to form the Samyukta Socialist Party (SSP), accusing the PSP of softness toward the Congress. The two streams later fed the Janata coalition of 1977, and Lohia's followers became the backbone of the backward-class politics that transformed north India in the 1990s.

Ram Manohar Lohia's doctrine of seven revolutions (Sapta Kranti) is the socialist text the exam can quote: simultaneous revolution against caste, class, gender, language (for Hindi and the mother tongues), colour, nation (against imperialism) and for civil liberties. Lohia's genius was to translate socialism into the idiom of caste and language, arguing that in India class could not be fought without fighting caste. The socialist alphabet for revision is SP 1948 - PSP 1952 - SSP 1964 - Lohia's Sapta Kranti, and its afterlife is the politics of social justice that outlived every socialist party.

1967: the year the Congress system cracked

The 1967 general election is the hinge of the whole story, and every party in this article meets there. The Congress, campaigning under Indira Gandhi after the deaths of Nehru and Shastri, the 1965 war and two droughts, fell to 283 seats, its worst result ever, and lost power in eight states, including Madras, Bengal, Punjab, Bihar, Odisha and Kerala. For the first time, non-Congress governments took office across the country: the Samyukta Vidhayak Dal coalitions in the Hindi belt, the DMK in Madras, the United Front in Bengal. Political scientists call what followed the era of one-party dominance giving way to multi-party competition, and 1967 is its starting gun.

In that cracked landscape the Swatantra Party's 44 seats made it the largest opposition in the Lok Sabha, the Jana Sangh's 35 made it the second, and the two communist parties together held over 40. The opposition had, for the first time, the numbers to imagine power, and the next decade, bank nationalization, the Congress split, the JP movement, the Emergency, was the working-out of 1967's verdict. For the exam, 1967 is the date that organises everything: 283 (Congress) - 44 (Swatantra, largest opposition) - 35 (Jana Sangh) - non-Congress governments in eight states.

Morarji Desai: the man who said no

Morarji Desai is the indispensable antagonist of the 1969 story. A Gandhian administrator of legendary austerity, Desai had been Finance Minister under Nehru and became Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister under Indira Gandhi in 1967, the Syndicate's guarantee of continuity. He opposed bank nationalization on principle, as a matter of fiscal orthodoxy and property rights, and when Indira Gandhi stripped him of the finance portfolio in July 1969, he resigned from the government rather than serve a policy he rejected. The Desai-Indira clash is the personal core of the Congress split: the old guard's discipline against the new leader's populism.

Desai's afterlife is the irony of the story. The man who resigned over nationalization became the figurehead of the Janata Party that defeated Indira Gandhi in 1977, and served as Prime Minister from 1977 to 1979, the first non-Congress Prime Minister of India. For the exam, Desai is the answer to who was Finance Minister when banks were nationalized (he was removed days before), who led the first Janata government, and the human symbol of the Syndicate-Indicate divide.

Syndicate versus Indicate: anatomy of the 1969 split

The Congress split of 1969 was a battle between two machines. The Syndicate was the old guard of state bosses, Kamaraj of Tamil Nadu, S.K. Patil of Bombay, Atulya Ghosh of Bengal, Nijalingappa of Mysore, the men who had chosen Indira Gandhi as Prime Minister in 1966 expecting a pliable figurehead. The Indicate, a pun on Syndicate, was Indira's camp: younger leaders, left intellectuals, and the parliamentary majority she built around her populist turn. The flashpoints came in sequence: the 1967 election weakened the Syndicate's state machines; the 1969 presidential election, when Indira backed V.V. Giri against the Syndicate's Sanjiva Reddy and Giri won as an independent, proved she could defy the organisation; and bank nationalization gave her the popular weapon.

In November 1969 the split became formal: the party divided into Congress (R) for Requisitionists, Indira's party, which kept the parliamentary majority and the government, and Congress (O) for Organisation, the Syndicate's rump. The Election Commission recognised Congress (R) as the real Congress. The split destroyed the old Congress system and created the personalised, populist politics of the 1970s: Garibi Hatao, the 1971 triumph, and eventually the Emergency. For the exam, the split's anatomy is Syndicate (Kamaraj, Patil, Ghosh, Nijalingappa) - Indicate (Indira) - V.V. Giri vs Sanjiva Reddy 1969 - Congress (R) vs Congress (O).

From nationalization to Emergency: the road of 1969-1975

Bank nationalization was the first step on a road that ended in the Emergency of 1975-77. The logic connected each milestone. The 1971 election, fought on Garibi Hatao, gave Indira Gandhi a two-thirds majority and seemed to vindicate the populist turn. The privy purse abolition (1971) and the continued leftward economic rhetoric consolidated her image. But the 1973 oil shock, inflation, and the 1974 railway strike led by George Fernandes eroded the economy, while Jayaprakash Narayan's Total Revolution movement and the Gujarat and Bihar agitations challenged her politically. The Allahabad High Court verdict of June 1975 unseating her from the Lok Sabha was the trigger; the Emergency proclaimed on 25 June 1975 was the response.

Every party in this article stood somewhere on that road. The Jana Sangh and the Socialists merged their identities into the JP movement and then the Janata Party. The Swatantra leaders joined the anti-Emergency resistance before the party dissolved. The Communists split over the Emergency itself, the CPI supporting it, the CPI(M) opposing it. The 1969 nationalization thus belongs in the exam not as an isolated economic measure but as the opening move of the Indira decade, the moment when populism defeated the old guard and set the terms for everything that followed.

The Dravidian alternative: the DMK story

No account of non-Congress politics is complete without the Dravidian movement, the only regional ideology to build a durable alternative to the Congress. Its roots lie in the Justice Party of 1916, the non-Brahmin political platform of the Madras Presidency, and in E.V. Ramasamy (Periyar), who broke with the Congress in 1925 over caste and Hindi, founded the Self-Respect Movement, and led the Dravidar Kazhagam (DK) from 1944. Periyar's lieutenant C.N. Annadurai split in 1949 to form the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), carrying the Dravidian ideology into electoral politics.

The DMK's breakthrough came with the 1965 anti-Hindi agitation, when the party led Tamil Nadu's resistance to Hindi imposition, and in 1967, the same election that made Swatantra the national opposition, the DMK swept the Congress out of Madras, the first Dravidian government under Annadurai. The Dravidian parties have ruled Tamil Nadu ever since, alternating between the DMK and M.G. Ramachandran's AIADMK (founded 1972). For the exam, the Dravidian chain is Justice Party 1916 - Periyar - DK 1944 - DMK 1949 - anti-Hindi agitation 1965 - DMK government 1967. It is the great exception to the Congress system: a regional ideology that outlasted it.

The Akali Dal and Punjab's party

In Punjab, the non-Congress pole was the Shiromani Akali Dal, founded in 1920 during the Gurdwara Reform Movement to free the Sikh shrines from hereditary mahants. The Akalis' first great victory was the Sikh Gurdwaras Act of 1925, which created the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) to manage the shrines democratically. After independence the Akali Dal, led by Master Tara Singh and later Sant Fateh Singh, demanded a Punjabi Suba, a Punjabi-speaking state, achieved in 1966 with the creation of Punjab and Haryana.

The Akali Dal's later history is the tragic half of the Punjab story: the Anandpur Sahib Resolution of 1973 demanding greater state autonomy, the Dharam Yudh Morcha of the 1980s, the descent into militancy, Operation Blue Star (1984) and the long insurgency. For the exam's party-history purposes, the Akali Dal is the 1920 Gurdwara reform party that became Punjab's regional party, the Sikh counterpart to the DMK's Dravidian regionalism. The pair to remember is Akali Dal 1920 - SGPC 1925 - Punjabi Suba 1966.

The Communist split of 1964: CPI versus CPI(M)

The CPI that won Kerala in 1957 did not survive the decade intact. The Sino-Soviet split in world communism, the 1962 India-China war, and the debate over whether the Congress was a progressive ally or a bourgeois enemy divided the party, and in 1964 it broke into two: the Communist Party of India (CPI), which stayed closer to Moscow and to cooperation with the Congress, and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), CPI(M), which took the harder revolutionary line. E.M.S. Namboodiripad went with the CPI(M); the Kerala of 1957 thus belongs to the undivided party's history.

The split redrew the left's map. The CPI(M) built its bastions in West Bengal, Kerala and Tripura, coming to power in West Bengal in 1977 under Jyoti Basu, who would serve as Chief Minister for 23 years (1977-2000), the longest-serving CM of his era. The CPI remained the smaller parliamentary partner. A further split in 1969 produced the CPI(ML), the Naxalites, born of the Naxalbari uprising of 1967 under Charu Majumdar and Kanu Sanyal. For the exam, the communist family tree is CPI 1925 - split 1964 (CPI vs CPI(M)) - Naxalbari 1967 - CPI(ML) 1969, and Kerala 1957 belongs above the fork.

The Janata experiment: 1977-1979

Every party in this article converged in the Janata Party, the coalition that defeated Indira Gandhi in 1977 after the Emergency. Its components read like the dramatis personae of this article: the former Jana Sangh (as the BJP-to-be), the Socialists of the JP movement, the old Congress (O) of Morarji Desai, the Swatantra remnants, and Charan Singh's peasant party. Morarji Desai became Prime Minister, the first non-Congress premier, with Charan Singh as Deputy Prime Minister and Atal Bihari Vajpayee as External Affairs Minister.

The experiment collapsed in 1979 over the dual membership issue: the former Jana Sangh members' continued links to the RSS proved unacceptable to the socialists, and Charan Singh walked out to form a rival government that lasted weeks. The Janata's fall taught Indian politics its central lesson about coalitions: that ideological incompatibility, papered over by a common enemy, reasserts itself in power. But the experiment also ended the Congress's unbroken rule and proved that a national alternative could be assembled. The Janata chain for the exam is 1977 victory - Desai PM - dual membership crisis - 1979 fall - 1980 BJP born. It is the epilogue to every party history in this article.

The Hindu Mahasabha: the other nationalist right

The Jana Sangh was not the first party of Hindu nationalism; that was the Hindu Mahasabha, founded in 1915 at Haridwar. The Mahasabha organised Hindu political identity in an age of separate electorates and communal awards, and its great ideologue was V.D. Savarkar, who became its president in 1937 and gave it the doctrine of Hindutva, first formulated in his 1923 tract: the Hindus as a nation bound by common blood (jati), culture (sanskriti) and holy land (punyabhumi). The Mahasabha's leaders included Madan Mohan Malaviya in its early years and Shyama Prasad Mookerjee himself, who was a Mahasabha president before he founded the Jana Sangh.

The Mahasabha's decline is the Jana Sangh's opportunity. Tainted by association, however unfairly contested, with the atmosphere around Gandhi's assassination in 1948, the Mahasabha faded electorally, and its cadres and voters migrated to the better-organised Jana Sangh. For the exam, the Mahasabha is the answer to which party Savarkar led (president 1937) and which party Mookerjee led before 1951, and the Hindutva doctrine's origin point. The right-wing succession is Hindu Mahasabha 1915 - Savarkar's Hindutva 1923 - Jana Sangh 1951 - BJP 1980.

1971: Garibi Hatao and the populist triumph

The Congress split of 1969 was vindicated, in Indira Gandhi's judgement, by the 1971 general election. Campaigning on the slogan Garibi Hatao (abolish poverty), nationalization, and the abolition of privy purses, she won 352 of 518 Lok Sabha seats, a two-thirds majority that crushed both the Congress (O) and the right-wing opposition. Months later the Bangladesh war of December 1971, and the Simla Agreement of 1972, made her the most powerful Prime Minister since Nehru, and the combination of electoral and military triumph seemed to prove that populism worked.

The 1971 victory is the hinge between this article's parties and the Emergency. It destroyed the Swatantra Party as a national force, reduced the Jana Sangh to the margins, and convinced Indira Gandhi that the people were with her against the institutions, the courts that struck down her bank nationalization and privy-purse laws, the press that criticised her, the opposition that could not unite. When the Allahabad verdict of 1975 threatened her seat, she reached for the Emergency with the confidence of 1971 behind her. For the exam, 1971 is the Garibi Hatao election - 352 seats - Bangladesh war, the populist peak from which the Emergency fell.

Charan Singh and the politics of the peasant

Charan Singh, the Jat leader of western Uttar Pradesh, represents the peasant pole of non-Congress politics. A Congressman who broke with Indira Gandhi, he built the Bharatiya Lok Dal on the kisan (peasant) vote of the north, the middle castes left out by both Congress patronage and socialist ideology. As Deputy Prime Minister in the Janata government and briefly Prime Minister in 1979-80, he embodied the promise and the limits of peasant politics: a mass base without a national organisation, a leader without a stable coalition.

Charan Singh's significance for the exam is sociological. He is the answer to who led the peasant politics of north India, the founder of the Lok Dal tradition that his son Ajit Singh and the later Rashtriya Lok Dal continued, and the Prime Minister of the interregnum between the Janata's fall and Indira's return in 1980. His career shows what the party histories of this article share: that in Indian politics, caste and class bases outlast the parties built on them. The socialists' backward classes, the Jana Sangh's traders, Swatantra's princes, Charan Singh's peasants, the bases survived; only the banners changed.

Key Terms

• Bharatiya Jana Sangh: The Bharatiya Jana Sangh is the party founded on 21 October 1951 by Syama Prasad Mookerjee with RSS support, built on cultural nationalism and opposition to Article 370; it merged into the Janata Party in 1977 and its members founded the BJP in 1980.
• Syama Prasad Mookerjee: Syama Prasad Mookerjee is the founder of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, who resigned from Nehru's cabinet in 1950 over the Nehru-Liaquat Pact and died in a Srinagar jail in 1953 while protesting the permit system for Jammu and Kashmir.
• Socialist Party: The Socialist Party is the party formed in 1948 when the socialists led by Jayaprakash Narayan, Acharya Narendra Deva and Ram Manohar Lohia broke away from the Congress; it was the first major post-independence split from the ruling party.
• Congress Socialist Party: The Congress Socialist Party is the socialist pressure group formed inside the Congress in 1934 by Jayaprakash Narayan and Acharya Narendra Deva, the parent body of the 1948 Socialist Party.
• All India Liberal Federation: The All India Liberal Federation is the party formed in 1919 by the old Moderates, led by Tej Bahadur Sapru, Surendranath Banerjea and V.S. Srinivasa Sastri, committed to constitutional advance through councils rather than agitation.
• Tej Bahadur Sapru: Tej Bahadur Sapru is the Liberal leader, Allahabad lawyer, delegate to the Round Table Conferences and chairman of the Sapru Committee of 1945, the most frequently named Liberal in UPSC questions.
• Sapru Committee: The Sapru Committee is the 1945 constitutional-proposals committee chaired by Tej Bahadur Sapru, a staple of questions on pre-independence constitutional schemes.
• Swatantra Party: The Swatantra Party is the free-market party founded in 1959 by C. Rajagopalachari, Minoo Masani and N.G. Ranga, which won 44 seats in 1967 to become the largest opposition party in the fourth Lok Sabha and was dissolved in 1974.
• C. Rajagopalachari: C. Rajagopalachari, or Rajaji, is the first Indian Governor-General of India and the founder of the Swatantra Party in 1959 in revolt against the licence-permit raj.
• E.M.S. Namboodiripad: E.M.S. Namboodiripad is the Communist leader who became Chief Minister of Kerala on 5 April 1957 at the head of the world's first elected Communist government, dismissed under Article 356 in 1959.
• Vimochana Samaram: The Vimochana Samaram, or Liberation Struggle, is the 1959 mass agitation by landlords, the Church and the Congress against the EMS ministry's land and education reforms, which led to the dismissal of the Kerala government.
• Bank nationalization (1969): The 1969 bank nationalization is Indira Gandhi's takeover of 14 major banks with deposits over Rs 50 crore on 19 July 1969, aimed at directing credit to the poor and small industry, which precipitated the Congress split and the clash with Morarji Desai.
• Congress (R) and Congress (O): Congress (R) and Congress (O) are the two parties formed by the 1969 Congress split: the Requisitionists under Indira Gandhi and the Organisation under the Syndicate old guard.
• Article 356: Article 356 is the constitutional provision for President's Rule in a state, first used against an elected government in the 1959 dismissal of the Kerala Communist ministry.