Besides political repression, the Emergency of 1975-77 was characterised by comical news bulletins reporting how everything was in good shape. Today, as the Emergency is being remembered, the name and image of the Leader are as ubiquitous as 50 years ago. From vikas to the well-being of cheetahs, everything happens thanks to the Leader. This similarity should make us sombre about commemorating the 50th anniversary of that moment.
Indira Gandhi’s Emergency was, in most part, for the sake of her personal authority. However, as we remember that episode — and we should indeed remember it — stopping at the personal level would be a mistake. Democracies often operate within the dialectic of the personal (political leadership) and the institutional, hanging perilously between an expression of popularity and that abstract thing called the rule of law.
Therefore, the act of “remembering the Emergency” should go beyond criticism of the past to introspection about the present. For one, we should ask what made the Emergency possible — how was it possible to persecute citizens? We should also ponder over the possibility of democracy being suspended again: Has the experience made our democracy more sabotage-proof? Or does the memory help
us make sense of the politics of undermining democracy — a more contemporary purpose?
Any analysis of the Emergency must begin with 1971. Election outcomes in a democracy are often enigmatic. The voter and the victor diverge in the meanings they attach to the outcomes. In 1971, Mrs Gandhi won a handsome victory. The slogan Garibi Hatao caught the imagination of a country whose economic growth had stagnated and failed to deliver. But following that victory and more so after the Bangladesh War, Mrs Gandhi must have concluded that the voters looked upon her as a benefactor, a saviour and, more particularly, as indispensable. This feeling was at odds with the protests that erupted in Bihar and Gujarat. The overall gloom that took over the country post-1973 was also in stark contrast to Mrs Gandhi’s idea of her destined role.
The vagueness of the constitutional provision made it possible to formally declare an “emergency”. The organisational weakness of her “new” Congress and the concentration of power in the office of the Prime Minister also facilitated the declaration. While the media’s timidity has been commented on, we do not give adequate attention to the swiftness with which the civil and police bureaucracies succumbed to the logic of authoritarianism, rejecting the rule of law in favour of rule by diktat of the popular leader. That’s not to mention the Supreme Court, which acquiesced to the interpretation of the Constitution dished out by the political executive. Here was a template for a diversion away from democracy.
Mrs Gandhi’s defeat and the subsequent amendment to the emergency provision created an impression that “democracy” had won — or, less poetically, that possible sabotage in the future was now averted. And true enough, India has not seen another such amateur attempt to divert the political process away from democracy.
In other words, the Emergency template has been discarded — but has it really? Conflating partisan interests with the national interest, pushing the judiciary to fall in line and above all, converting the police and the bureaucracy into weapons against citizens are the core pathways copied from the 1975-77 template.
There are striking similarities between then and now. The over-reading of election outcomes — not just in 2014 but subsequently, too — is one. There is no doubt the outcome was a clear rejection of Congress. No doubt each election since 2014, but 2014 in particular, was a spectacular victory for Narendra Modi. But these facts are understood and presented as a second Independence and are being etched into history as the dawn of Amrit Kaal. Megalomania apart, the texture of politics and public contestations has altered dramatically since 2014 — all protests are labelled anti-national or urban naxal, and like the foreign hand of the Emergency, the hand of Soros has become the pretext to attack any difference of opinion. These labels are used to liberally invoke draconian laws, particularly the UAPA. As they did during the Emergency, the bureaucracy and the police have happily joined the battle on behalf of the political executive. Above all, more than during the Emergency, the judiciary has submerged itself in the logic of the political executive.
In conceptual terms, the short moment of 1975-77 and the current long moment manifest similarities in the downgrading of rights, a contempt for federal polity, disdain for protest movements and the mutilation of institutions. Together, they amount to reducing democracy to an anti-people instrument of power. The Constitution and its core principles are the main casualty. No wonder we hear today echoes of “parliamentary sovereignty”, which made much noise 50 years ago.
But India today is marked by one grotesque and one deeply troubling distinction from the Emergency. The grotesque is the politics of vigilantism. Anyone who can lay claim to some elements of the establishment’s pet ideas has the licence to punish. A parallel system of identifying and cleansing “wrongdoers” seems to be almost institutionalised. Personalised authority, a vengeful state and vigilantes overlap in today’s politics and governance.
More worryingly, unlike the Emergency, the present moment is guided by a larger purpose: Of undermining the national movement’s legacy and rejecting the constitutional imagination. Operational wrongs can be corrected through institutional efforts but normative or ideological departures are not easy to stall once they are imposed on a society and crowned as the true ideas the nation should uphold. When a gigantic media machine joins the ruling party in legitimising Hindutva and when mobs are unleashed to delegitimise difference and opposition, you have a thoroughly new template of controlling government, politics and popular sentiment.
From Mrs Gandhi’s somewhat ad-hoc attempts to divert democracy in order to retain power, India seems to be moving into a very different terrain of using formal democratic mechanisms to undermine both democracy and Indianness. If the Emergency was a dark moment when democracy was suspended, the essence of that Emergency is being normalised in India’s current moment.
The writer, based in Pune, taught political science
