The club of long-distance runners

06 August 2025 

Narendra Modi has surpassed the record of Indira Gandhi's eleven straight years in office. How do their eleven years compare? This piece is a further elaboration of my 25 July 2025 interview to Barkha Dutt on Mojo Story

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A week ago, on 25 July to be precise, a piece of news assumed center stage for a short cycle and quietly disappeared. It was designed to provoke only a mild celebration. Nevertheless, it had placed a statistic on record, and that showed that someone was really counting. If one understands how the Narendra Modi establishment functions, nothing could have been unplanned or accidental. There was a nicely wrapped message of confidence and invincibility in the statistic. 

A few days later, Home Minister Amit Shah said on the floor of the Lok Sabha, during the Operation Sindhoor debate, that the Congress-led Opposition will be where they are, that is outside government, for twenty more years. His saying so may have only been rhetorical flourish, he may not have meant it literally, but it looked like an unintended extension of the statistic that had seen circulation around 25 July.

What was that statistic? It was about Modi having broken Indira Gandhi’s record by completing 4078 straight days in office. Indira Gandhi had spent 4077 continuous days in office, and the record of consecutive terms that now remained to broken for Modi was only that of Jawaharlal Nehru, who had spent 6130 straight days in office between August 1947 and May 1964. Modi had officially joined the club of long-distance runners in post-independent Indian history.

If one were to continue the game, and build further statistical nuance, then the number of days that Nehru spent in office does not account the eleven months he spent as head of an interim government between 02 September 1946 and 15 August 1947. But some Modi enthusiasts may jump in and say that the five years between 1947 and 1952 was a time when he was not elected, so the interim term in office, plus the first five years should actually be discounted, and only elected terms should be counted.

If the record books have to be further sliced and diced, then it can be argued that a full year in Indira Gandhi’s eleven continuous years in office should be knocked off because she had postponed the elections in 1976 when the Emergency was in force. In principle, that fell into the unelected category.

By this measure, the revised numbers for Modi to target look different. In the case of Indira Gandhi, however, he would have surpassed it a longtime ago, that is the consecutive terms minus the Emergency bonus. But if one were to take into account her entire time in office, which included the 1752 days between 14 January 1980 and 31 October 1984, when she was assassinated, Modi has some more distance to cover. 

In the case of Nehru, minus the interim period and the first five years of national government that were spent settling down, becoming a republic, and preparing for the first general election, Modi would have a shorter distance to cover in terms of consecutive elected terms. If this sort of warped count is done, then Nehru spent only 4423 days as elected head of India. That would mean Modi, as of 25 July 2025, has to survive for only 345 more days in office to match Nehru’s elected record. 

If Modi has to break all of Nehru’s terms in office, that is 16 years and 286 days, he has to wait till 09 March 2031 when he will be six months short of 81 years. This will mean he’ll have to win the 2029 polls. With all the retirement narrative his rivals within the Sangh Parivar and outside are attempting to build, this is an interesting target and a terrific challenge, but not too difficult to achieve given his current state of dominance and ruthlessness of action. Checkmating Vice President Dhankhar could be the most recent example. This signals sharply to those out of step within his ideological family. But politics is never an easy game to predict. A million variables will have to remain largely stable between now and March 2031. 

Anyway, if ones put this wild statistical game aside and focused on the record that has been broken – Modi surpassing the unbroken eleven years of Indira Gandhi, one is tempted to compare the first eleven years of the two prime ministers. It has to be said at the outset however that the India of the 1960s and 1970s cannot be compared with the India now. For one, it did not have the economic strength of today. 

When Indira Gandhi took over in 1966, India faced severe food crisis. It waited for PL 480 wheat shipments to arrive from the United States for people to be fed. By the end of March 1966, when Indira Gandhi went to Washington, although it was officially a good will visit, she had privately admitted that it was to get food and foreign exchange. By contrast, Modi inherited an economy that had long begun flexing its muscles. 

Since there is so much chatter now about ‘dead economies’, Indira’s first decade in power was about keeping the patient alive on ventilator. A piece by Ashok Mitra, who had been the Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India, in 1976, in the Economist, said the proportion of poor below the poverty line, according to official figures, had grown during the decade, and between 1972 and 1975 prices had risen by 80 per cent.

Politically too, Indira Gandhi had to wait till 1969 to take control of the Congress party, only by splitting it. This was after the 1967 election when Congress for the first time had gone below 300 seats in parliament. She was perceived as a ‘dumb doll’ (goongi gudiya) by the Socialists and her own party colleagues till then. The 1971 polls gave her a substantial majority, but her problems at the border and problems with the economy never gave her any peace. Her democratic credibility also declined rapidly, and by 1975 she clamped the Emergency to save her chair. In comparison, Modi has never faced instability or dissent within his ranks. Laymen have perceived him as strong from day one. 

As regards the liberal commentary on Modi’s democratic deficit, a future historian may give us a more measured picture. Interestingly, the seemingly anarchic provocations that Indira Gandhi faced in 1974-75, is what the Congress-led Opposition is trying to create for the Modi regime. But Modi, who appears shrewder and more tactful, is unlikely to react in an extreme fashion like Indira Gandhi. In case he does, then their records will smile at each other in the chambers of history. ###