In the book To Kill a Democracy: India's Passage to Despotism by Debashish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane, I came across this sentence about the political defeat of the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi from 1975 to 1977: More than a few observers reassuringly noted how Indian citizens had set a global example: they had demonstrated that demagogy could be defeated using democratic means, and that the arrogant could be humbled, taught that they couldn't make a table eat grass.