Emergency and Undeclared Emergency

Harsh Thakor

The imposition of Emergencyin India by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on June 25, 1975, ushered in a new epoch to shatter the spirit of liberal democracy. The 50th anniversary of the event should serve as a wake-up call or testament to the perils of authoritarianism. The suspension of constitutional rights of citizens, including the right to life, arrest of Opposition leaders and rights activists, censorship of the press, arbitrariness of government actions and decisions, championing politics of cult and rule centred around an individual–all showcased emergence of Asian variety of fascism and manifested dictatorship.

Spanning from 1975 to 1977, the Emergency did not merely suspend democratic norms and degrade constitutionalism; it exhibited with brutal clarity an all-round authoritarian thrust cloaked in constitutional legality.

Even now, civil liberties are trampled upon, free speech is scrutinised and placed under high surveillance, preventive detentions and targeting Opposition leaders and rights activists are a routine feature and Democratic institutions are threatened. Parliament’s position has been abused and there is untold intolerance of dissent. These all indicate the rise of neo-fascism. Although there is arguably an undeclared Emergency in the country, it would certainly be wrong to use the current situation, however gruesome or mortal, to legitimise what happened during the Emergency, or to nullify its gravity.

Emergency is not just a legal and political device wielded by an authoritarian government. It is a state of mind that works against freedom and the best values of the Constitution.

Fifty years have passed since the imposition of the Emergency by the Indira Gandhi government. On 12 June, 1975 Allahabad High Court found Indira Gandhi guilty of electoral malpractices, and in two weeks, the government formally declared Emergency, suspending the very foundation of India’s parliamentary democracy and the fundamental rights of Indian citizens. Nineteen months into the Emergency, elections were announced in January 1977 and by March 1977 India saw the first-ever ouster of the Congress at the central level and the formal lifting of the Emergency.

It must be noted that the Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi emanated from an authoritarian or bourgeois state that was established in 1947, which patronised or served the coffers of the big bourgeoisie and the landlord classes. India’s so-called democratic experiment was, from its inception, flawed. Morally power was not withheld or administered by the people. One can cite examples of the brutal crushing of the Telangana people’s armed Struggle, Bengal jute workers’ movement, anti-price rise agitations, historic food movement in Bengal, ruthless extermination of Naxalites, etc, before 1975. The emergency marked a political crisis to maintain the authoritarian political order to keep the genuine political unrest or rebellion of workers and peasants at bay. It served as a ploy to divert any progressive orientation of class struggle in the name of restoring law and order and eradicating corruption. The Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi emanated from an authoritarian or bourgeois state that was established in 1947, which patronised or served the coffers of the big bourgeoisie and the landlord classes. Morally, power was not withheld or administered by the people.

The ruling establishment imposed ‘Emergency’ not merely with the intention to project themselves as defenders of democracy, but also to create a “vipaksh-mukht-Bharat” or an opposition-free-India. 

India’s titular democracy collapsed on the intervening night of June 25 and 26, 1975, when the then President of India signed a four-line proclamation, virtually on command from the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi: “In exercise of the powers conferred by clause (1) of Article 352 of the Constitution, I, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, President of India, by this Proclamation declare that a grave emergency exists whereby the security of India is threatened by internal disturbances.”

This eradication of formal democracy in the country triggered an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation between Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and Lok Nayak Jayaprakash Narayan, popularly known as JP. While the former was the epitome of authoritarianism, the latter wielded liberal spirit, abjuring power. By March 1977, authoritarianism was relegated to the backseat and liberalism triumphed. 

An important feature that checked the grave perils of post-emergency was the emergence of civil liberties and human rights groups like the Association for Democratic Rights (ADR), Punjab, Association for Protection of Democratic Rights (APDR) in West Bengal, and Organisation for Protection of Democratic Rights (OPDR) and Civil Liberties Committee in Andhra Pradesh.

The outcome of the 1977 election was widely diagnosed as a historic mandate that resurrected parliamentary democracy in India. With political prisoners released after years of incarceration and press censorship lifted, for a brief period, there was indeed a mood of celebration in the country. But this jubilation was short-lived.

Elections were announced in January 1977, even before the Emergency was formally lifted. There was partial lifting of restrictions and a partial release of prisoners, and after the unexpected shock defeat, the Emergency was fully lifted. The people of India could electorally terminate the Emergency. Today, every passing day indicates that power in the BJP scheme of things is not to be constitutionally administered according to the code of rule of law, institutional scrutiny, and federal devolution. In the Modi-Shah-Yogi method of rule, power is totally centralised and arbitrary. This is a state of ever-expanding Emergency that seeks to turn India into a republic of fear and fetters.

There were three key phrases used to diagnose the character of the Emergency era in mainstream discourse: extra-constitutional authority, the aura around Indira Gandhi and the subsequent trend of ‘emergency excesses’. Today, the RSS has reached the stature of the supreme extra-constitutional authority, escalating penetration transcending almost the entire spectrum of institutions, especially academia, media and the judiciary. The triumvirate of Modi, Shah, and Yogi has made even the BJP’s own leadership structure largely superficial and ineffective, and the PMO has effectively become the real cabinet. Excesses are now built into the system, celebrated as the ‘new normal’. Parliamentary democracy, the form that was adopted by the Constituent Assembly, is being tossed aside to turn India into a presidential system.

If the Emergency struck a chord about the fragility of democracy in India, today people face risk of a much more lethal war. Threatened is not just the functioning of parliamentary democracy, but also its very constitutional foundation and the legacy of India’s anti-colonial freedom movement, the springboard of the vision of a multicultural and multilingual modern India. The grand unity of the non-Congress opposition could overthrow the Emergency through the elections in 1977, but a broad-based unity of non-BJP forces could only partially check the fascist Modi regime in 2024. It is imperative that, beyond electoral confrontation, people need to build a united and powerful resistance on every front. Democrats will have to fight to the last inch to overcome fascism to establish a truly democratic and egalitarian social order.

What spurred the emergency and was unable to check its moral resurrection in subsequent decades, culminating in Hindutva neo-fascism today, is a weak and fragmented Communist movement, which was disoriented from combating fascism at its roots. Erroneous or vacillating trends emerged by sections of Communist Revolutionaries to build a united front with opposition parties like the Janata Party, which charted no anti-imperialist programme, being bonded with Imperialist countries like the USA. Since 1975, there has been no effective concerted movement to confront Hindutva fascism at its grassroots, which sowed the seeds for its germination as a full-fledged authoritarian power in 2014, with the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The contrast or subtle dichotomy between the 1975 emergency and the situation today is the wall of ideology. However repressive or authoritarian, the Congress mechanism did not harbour a fascist agenda, while the current BJP dispensation has overtones of the ideological orientation of fascist regimes like Germany and Italy of the 1930s. The latter’s advocating the creation of a state based on the Hindutva agenda is oriented towards dismantling the roots of constitutional democracy. In an Emergency, constitutional rights were suspended, while today in India, unconstitutional laws like UAPA have been imposed, which can rip apart the fabric of constitutional democracy by arresting any citizen, without a warrant, passport to sanction terrorism to subvert minimal democratic resistance. In 1975, the state was not even half as empowered to extinguish dissent as today. The happenings in the Bhima Koregaon trial case were a classical exposition of proto-fascism. The extra-judicial murder of GN Saibaba classically illustrates the ‘undeclared emergency’. Today, even the Judiciary is rapidly turning towards an appendage of the Hindutva ideologues, with the rights of minorities like Muslims and Dalits, completely jeopardised or on the verge of being extinguished. In the days of the emergency of 1975, it was unheard of to witness such grave assaults on the Muslim community or sanctioning by the state, or laws like NRC, which stripped them of any citizenship rights. The State is designing a strategy to institutionalise Hindutva ideology as never before. In 1975, dictatorship was expressed openly, while today the state disguises its semi- fascist characteristics in a pernicious manner.

Noteworthy that the 1975 emergency was sponsored or had the backing of Soviet Russia or USSR, while today Hindutva neo-fascism of BJP and RSS has the backing of imperialism as a whole. In 1975, there existed a Socialist state of China which promoted world revolution, while today, morally, there is no genuinely Socialist state.
The advent of globalisation and neo-liberalism has patronised corporate fascism, which has looted tribals of their resources like land, forests, and water, and displaced them.

The complex question is how Communist revolutionaries can utilise extra-parliamentary methods to exploit contradictions amongst ruling class parties to check and combat the tide of Hindutva fascism. It must be noted that the deeply entrenched legacy or traditions of parliamentary democracy, however autocratic or defending exploiter classes, have prevented or checked the complete erosion of parliamentary democracy, liquidation of dissent, or the installation of full-fledged fascism.

[Harsh Thakor is a freelance journalist]

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Vol 58, No. 4, Jul 20 - 26, 2025