'Emergency' Takeaways

In a democracy, no ruler can be granted a carte blanche, like it happened during the Emergency, but the fact remains that we also learnt some valuable lessons during this period

- Harish Khare

EVEN before a holier-than-thou Narendra Modi government declared June 25 as 'Samvidhaan Hatya Diwas' to mark the imposition of the Emergency by the Indira Gandhi government on that day in 1975, there has been total unanimity that it was a rotten enterprise.

If there were any differences among scholars and partisans, these were to do with what was the dark side and what were the darker aspects of the Emergency. It is mostly agreed upon that the dark side included the suspension of fundamental rights, press censorship, the arrest of Opposition leaders, etc., whereas the darker side had to club the extraconstitutional power exercised by Sanjay Gandhi and his goonish aides. As it happens in all political debates over history, the villains are easily identified as are the heroes.

But even after nearly 50 years, we are nowhere near any understanding of the nature of the breakdown of normal politics that led to that midnight denouement on June 25, 1975.

It is helpful to keep in mind that the "JP Movement" was the first instance of mass mobilisation aimed at a regime change. Prior to the 1974-75 invocation of street power, the Indian State had faced only limited mass agitation. Early in the life of free India, there was the Vishal Andhra agitation; then the demand for bifurcation of Bombay between Gujarat and Maharashtra; and, later, the anti-Hindi agitation in south India. Each of these mass eruptions could be successfully dealt with because each was based on a clear-cut demand that could be conceded. The JP Movement, on the other hand, was expressly seeking a "total revolution".