Remember the Emergency to keep dictatorship at bay: Shah
Memories of the Emergency must be kept alive so that there can be no such imposition of dictatorial rule in the country again, Union Home Minister Amit Shah said on Wednesday (June 25, 2025), speaking at the launch of The Emergency Diaries: The Years That Forged A Leader, a book recounting Prime Minister Narendra Modi's experiences during that period.
The book — put together by BlueKraft Digital, with a foreword by former Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda — is drawn from the Modi Archive. This is a digital and video archive compiling first person accounts of various people's interactions with Mr. Modi from his earliest days to his years as Prime Minister.
'Today, we are gathered here to remember a dark chapter in the history of post-Independence India. We must keep the memories of the Emergency alive so that it is never repeated, and so that the youth of the nation (grow up) cultured and organised,' Mr. Shah said. Noting that Mr. Modi had been in his mid-twenties during the Emergency period, the Home Minister said that the youth should read the book as part of fostering understanding of how young people had resisted the suspension of democratic rights in India.
PM as a young activist
'Prime Minister Narendra Modi has rightly decided to observe the day Emergency was proclaimed as 'Samvidhan Hatya Diwas',' he said.
'The book chronicles his experiences as a young activist during the Emergency, a period in which he was actively involved in the movement for 19 months. At that time, secret newspapers were published and Mr. Modi played a key role in distributing them in marketplaces, among students, and to women,' Mr. Shah said.
'Prime Minister Modi worked underground disguised as a sadhu, a sardarji, a hippie, an incense stick seller, or a newspaper vendor,' the Minister said.
Quick thinking
Among the many anecdotes recounted in the book is one by Harish Raval, a senior RSS pracharak in Gujarat, about an incident when Mr. Modi had saved himself from arrest through a quick response.
'During the Emergency, Modi was traveling in a rickshaw with anti-Emergency literature. A police team stopped the rickshaw, but he immediately told the police officers that he worked at the local university and was on his way to collect exam papers. Modi advised the police to open the bundle and check. As the question papers were confidential, they would need to go to the university and inform the university officials, clarifying this and explaining the reasons. Astonishingly, the police did not touch the bundle. Consequently, Modi's name became prominent in police dossiers and posed a significant challenge for him to evade arrest. Sometimes, when he needed to travel by car, he disguised himself as a driver and continued the journey undetected,' Mr. Raval said, as quoted in the book.
In 1978, just after the Emergency was lifted, Mr. Modi himself penned a book in Gujarati on his experiences during that period, titled Sangharsh Ma Gujarat.
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