The great citizens of a country are not those who bend the knee before authority but rather those who, against authority if need be, are adamant as to the honour and freedom of that country. – Albert Camus

The prolific British historian, AJP Taylor, wrote major works on modern Germany, modern Britain, and the two World Wars, as well as a life of the media magnate, Lord Beaverbrook. However, he himself considered the best of his books to be The Trouble Makers, a study of British dissenters who opposed their country’s expansionist and imperialist foreign policies. In the academic world of Oxford of his time, Taylor was a bit of a troublemaker himself, which may explain this choice. Nonetheless, the book remains compellingly readable, not least because of its cast of characters.

Among Taylor’s troublemakers was the nineteenth-century Liberal politician, John Bright. Bright – whom the historian, Asa Briggs, called “the most important figure in mid-Victorian radicalism” – was a brilliant orator, some of whose speeches in the House of Commons took apart his country’s campaigns abroad, such as the war in Crimea in the 1850s. His criticisms of government policy angered Conservatives, who charged him with betraying the interests of the nation.

To these accusations, Bright combatively responded: “How indeed can I, any more than any of you be un-English and anti-national? Was I not born upon the same soil? Do I not come of the same English stock? Are not my family committed irrevocably to the fortunes of this country? Is not whatever property I may have depending as much as yours is depending upon the good government of our common fatherland? Then say to one of his countrymen, because he happens to hold a different opinion on questions of great public policy, that therefore he is un-English, anti-national?”

I first read these words 30 years ago. They immediately struck a chord, for that damning epithet, anti-national, was used ubiquitously in the India of my youth. And by our then prime minister, no less. Elected in 1971 on a popular mandate, Indira Gandhi turned increasingly authoritarian, stifling dissent, capturing public institutions, and making the Congress Party a family firm. When a popular movement led by the veteran freedom-fighter,........

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