Half a century has passed since the end of the Emergency, an episode in independent India’s history that Gen Z has little knowledge of. Even parents from that generation seem to have forgotten it. Those with lived experiences of it are now in their Seventies and Eighties. Why, then, should we remember it?
Well, an event remembered by a nation or a community is not determined by how old or recent it is. On June 25, the day marking the 51st anniversary of the imposition of Emergency rule by Indira Gandhi’s Congress government, a clip went viral on social media. In it, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian joined mourners, all clad in black, at a Muharram ceremony. They were not mourning the deaths of those who perished in the recent war on Iran by the US and Israel. Rather, it was the annual Ashura commemoration, when all Shias mourn the killing, more than 1,300 years ago, of Imam Hussein ibn Ali, the grandson of Prophet Muhammad. Such remembrance is not a ritual. It is an antidote to protect what one regards as precious and sacred.
India should remember the Emergency for three reasons.
Democracy is precious and sacred for us. It is the main pillar of our Constitution, and the defining identity of our Republic. Hence, we should remember the Emergency of 1975-77 because it was the darkest period in the history of Indian democracy. Almost all opposition leaders were imprisoned, including Morarji Desai, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Lal Krishna Advani, George Fernandes, Chandrashekhar, A K Gopalan, and, above all, Jayaprakash Narayan, who did not belong to any political party but was the Gandhian ‘conscience keeper’ of the Republic.
Along with the top leaders, tens of thousands of anti-Congress political activists were similarly punished, most spending the entire 19 months of Emergency rule in prison. Parliament became the handmaiden of the ruling party. Many anti-democratic provisions were introduced into the Constitution by the Congress party’s brute majority in the House.
General elections, due in 1976, were postponed. Press freedom came under the severest censorship, the kind not witnessed even during British rule. Independent judiciary, the pride of India and the guarantor of people’s inalienable democratic rights, was muzzled. Congress president Dev Kant Barooah infamously said, “Indira is India, and India is Indira.”
India should remember the Emergency for another reason. Beneath the calm surface, underground resistance was building. The eerie silence itself was making threatening sounds that those in government could hear, and what they heard made them nervous. Indira Gandhi understood that the continuation of the Emergency was unsustainable, and she lifted it on March 21, 1977.
In the parliamentary elections that followed, Indian voters taught the Congress—also, future dictators—a sobering lesson. Not only was the party unseated from power, but even Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay, one of the main architects of the assault on democracy, could not retain their seats.
But there is also a third, and most important, reason why we should remember the Emergency. No evil ever becomes a thing of the past completely. It has a way of being resurrected—sometimes by the very forces that fought against it. History bears witness to the fact that leaders and cadres of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, then led by Vajpayee and Advani, played a key role in opposing Indira Gandhi’s authoritarianism.
They even enthusiastically supported JP’s call for all non-communist pro-democracy parties to unite under the banner of the Janata Party, which won a thumping majority in the 1977 Lok Sabha elections. How and why the Janata Party experiment failed, and the circumstances that led to the founding of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the new avatar of the Jana Sangh, are beyond the scope of this article.
What is relevant and cautionary is that the same party is now weakening India’s democratic institutions and ethos. The integrity and independence of all constitutional bodies, including the Election Commission and the judiciary, have come into question.
Splits within and defections from opposition parties to manufacture post-poll majorities have been normalised. Corruption must be fought, but why misuse the coercive power of the investigative agencies only against political opponents and turn a blind eye to corruption within the ruling dispensation?
Without overt press censorship, the government is trying to silence the media and make it fall in line. Advani, who became information and broadcasting minister in Morarji Desai’s Janata Party government, criticised the pliant media during the Emergency, saying, “You were asked only to bend, but you crawled.” His words have become part of the global encyclopaedia on press freedom.
Of course, today’s BJP leaders are clever enough to know that they cannot curb democracy in exactly the same way as Indira Gandhi did in 1975. Hence, something insidious is happening, a new danger absent during the Emergency. Secularism, another foundational pillar of the Indian Republic, is being attacked, and this attack is being used to cover up—even legitimise—the attack on democracy. This has been achieved by maligning secularism as an anti-Hindu concept.
For the ruling party and its ideological parivar, the foremost priority is to establish Hindutva as the dominant ideology governing every aspect of the nation’s life and to transform the nation itself into a ‘Hindu rashtra’. Hence, they believe that everything—democracy, constitutional morality and even all dharmic guidelines on governance, which are embedded in the core principles of Hinduism—can be sacrificed to perpetuate power. This has become an unstated governance philosophy.
Since India’s undeniable reality at present is that its democracy is in danger, remembrance of the Emergency becomes an act of vigilance and resistance. After all, “eternal vigilance is the price” democracy-loving people must pay to protect their liberties and rights.
Sudheendra Kulkarni | Gandhian peace activist and aide to former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee
(Views are personal)