40 years on, the ‘Emergency’ still haunts Indian politics

Between June 25, 1975, and March 21, 1977, prime minister Indira Gandhi ruled by decree in what the current premier, Narendra Modi, has called 'one of India's darkest' periods.

India’s then prime minister, Indira Gandhi, is pictured at a rally in New Delhi on September 5, 1976. She attended the rally to launch the ruling Congress party's campaign for the next parliamentary elections, which were held the following March. AP PhotoShow less

NEW DELHI // Forty years ago on Thursday, a state of emergency was declared in India, in which democracy and civil liberties were suspended for 21 months.

It was what prime minister Narendra Modi called “one of India’s darkest” periods, and its consequences continue to play out in politics today.

Newspapers and television channels in India marked the anniversary with special shows, columns and op-eds.

"Forty years ago this day India was gagged and muzzled," the business daily Mint said in its lead editorial on Thursday.

“The impression of the Emergency remains one of India coming close to a dictatorship.”

That dictatorship was the rule-by-decree of Indira Gandhi, the prime minister at that time, whom Mr Modi accused of having a “lust for power” in a series of tweets on Thursday.

The chain of events leading up to the Emergency – its first letter always upper-case in India – was complex and long. It began as far back as the late 1960s, when Ms Gandhi gradually tightened her grip over the Congress party after her father Jawaharlal Nehru, the party’s former leader, died in 1964. Two years later, Ms Gandi became both leader of the party and prime minister of the country.

Failing monsoons and steep oil prices had imposed difficult economic times upon India in the early 1970s.

In 1971, India fought a war against Pakistan, resulting in strained relations with the United States, which had aligned itself with Pakistan.

The same year, in elections held in February-March, the Congress won 352 out of 518 seats in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s parliament. Ms Gandhi used her majority to pass new amendments to the constitution.

One amendment enabled parliament to dilute fundamental constitutional rights – such as the rights to equality before law, speech, and peaceful assembly.

Another restricted citizens’ right to private property. Ms Gandhi also filled the judiciary with her supporters.

When in 1973, a loyalist to Ms Gandhi was elevated to chief justice of India, bypassing three judges who had more experience, CK Daphtary, who had served as India’s first-ever solicitor general, called it “the blackest day in the history of democracy”.

Dissent against Ms Gandhi’s methods grew, not just within her own party and the political establishment but also in trade unions and student movements across the country.

The tipping point came on June 12, 1975, when a judge of the Allahabad high court found Ms Gandhi guilty of misusing government machinery during her parliamentary election campaign in 1971.

Justice Jaganmohanlal Simha declared Ms Gandhi’s election null and void, unseated her as a parliamentarian and as prime minister, and banned her from running for elections for a further six years.

On June 24, the Supreme Court upheld the high court’s decision. The next day, despite the growing clamour for the prime minister to quit, and without consulting her cabinet, Ms Gandhi convinced the president to declare a state of emergency.

Over the next 21 months, Ms Gandhi suspended all elections, and ordered the arrests of opposition leaders and journalists who criticised her.

Among the incarcerated were Atal Behari Vajpayee, who went on to become prime minister in the 1990s; Arun Jaitley, now the finance minister; and George Fernandes, a trade unionist.

Subramanian Swamy, an opposition politician at the time and now a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), recalled going on the run to evade arrest, disguised as a Sikh, in a turban and beard.

"I kept my plans secret or made them at the last minute, so the Intelligence Bureau wouldn't know," Mr Swamy told The National. "I would just climb on a train, without any advance reservation. Nobody would recognise me."

In 1976, Sanjay Gandhi, Ms Gandhi’s son who wielded immense influence in the government, began a compulsory sterilisation programme on Indian men to halt the country’s burgeoning population growth. According to one estimate, 8.3 million men were sterilised under Mr Gandhi’s programme.

The Emergency ended only in March 1977, after Ms Gandhi called for fresh general elections. The Congress lost its majority in the Lok Sabha, although it still won 154 of the 542 seats up for grabs.

The question of why Ms Gandhi chose to call for elections then remains something of a mystery and government records from that time are still sealed.

However, Srinath Raghavan, a Delhi-based historian who is working on a biography of Ms Gandhi, said that she may have been “misled into thinking that she might win the elections”.

As a long-term consequence of the Emergency, Mr Raghavan pointed to the “rise of the Hindu right as an electoral force in Indian politics”.

Parties such as the BJP had their origins in the movements against Ms Gandhi in the mid-1970s, when their ideological partners, such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Jana Sangh, fought the prime minister’s policies.

“The BJP of today would have been inconceivable without the RSS-Jana Sangh’s popular legitimisation owing to their opposition of the Emergency,” he said.