Between 1964 and 1967, India's political system suffered two exogenous shocks. Nehru died in May 1964. And two successive droughts brought food production down to the level of 1956–7, creating near-famine conditions and leading to doomsday predictions about India's economic future. After a mere eighteen months in power, Nehru's successor, Lai Bahadur Shastri, also died, and a weak and uncertain Mrs. Gandhi was elected to India's highest office.

Politically, this period in India has been described as an era of the “passing of the tall men”: there were no charismatic leaders from the national movement left and none of equal stature had emerged to replace them. Economically, according to many in the West, it was the beginning of India's long famine, something akin to what one normally hears about sub-Saharan Africa these days. Using an analogy from the battlefield, a “popular” book of the mid-1960s argued that those wounded in the battle were of three types: the slightly wounded, who could be cured with small degrees of medical attention; the more seriously wounded who required surgery but could be saved; and those so gravely wounded that they were generally left to die, for it was pointless to attend to them. India belonged to the third category: “no matter how one may adjust present statistics … it will be beyond the resources of the United States to keep famine out of India during the 1970s.”