Indira Gandhi and the making of Emergency

Hindustan Times

11 hours ago

Almost 50 years to date, on June 12, 1975, Justice Jagmohan Lal Sinha of the Allahabad High Court delivered a judgement that came as a thunderclap. Justice Sinha held Prime Minister Indira Gandhi guilty of corrupt practices during the 1971 general elections, voiding her membership of Parliament and barring her from holding elective office for six years. Thirteen days later, Indira Gandhi got President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed to issue a proclamation under Article 352 of the constitution declaring an internal Emergency. This enabled her to inaugurate a spell of avowedly authoritarian rule, incarcerating her political opponents, muzzling the press, casting aside the fundamental rights, and mauling the Constitution.
Five decades on, the Emergency continues to haunt Indian democracy as a memento mori (reminder of one's mortality). This is hardly surprising, for many leaders who bestride contemporary politics — from Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin — were shaped in the crucible of the Emergency. The Union government has declared its anniversary on 25 June as 'Samvidhan Hatya Divas'. Public debates on the Emergency also tend to generate more heat than light. These focus all but exclusively on Indira Gandhi's decision to impose the Emergency: Was it solely to ensure her continuance in office or was it principally a response to the Opposition's drive to unseat her in the wake of the high court's verdict? How credible was her claim that there was a grave internal threat abetted by external powers?
Inasmuch as Indira Gandhi was responsible for imposing the Emergency, these questions will continue to be probed. Yet understanding her concerns and intentions is not the same thing as causally explaining the onset of the Emergency. As I argue in my new book, such an explanation must bring together changes and developments at the levels of structure, conjuncture and event.
Start at the structural or systemic level. Political systems should be understood not merely as agglomerations of leaders, parties or social groups, but with reference to two system-wide components that influence all actors. The first is the institutional arrangement of political actors according to their differing functions and relative power. In the Indian case, this is the functional separation of the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. The second component is the constituent rules — procedures, principles, norms, understandings — that regulate political competition: The 'rules of the game' of parliamentary democracy. The Indian political system underwent a significant transformation between 1967 and 1975. This transformation occurred on both systemic dimensions. Importantly, this transformation preceded the Emergency.
The years between 1967 and 1973 witnessed a dramatic shift in relative power towards the executive, especially the office of the prime minister. This began with the Congress party's poor showing in the general elections of 1967 — an event that catalysed a power struggle within the party, culminating in Indira Gandhi's move to split the Congress in 1969. This left the prime minister in stronger control of her party. Soon, Indira Gandhi gambled in calling for elections a year ahead of schedule. And her party won a stunning victory in March 1971. This was followed by India's military triumph over Pakistan later that year. This, in turn, propelled the new Congress to a dramatic win in the state elections of 1972. None of these could have been predicted, but cumulatively they cemented Indira Gandhi's hold over her party. The parliamentary party ceased to operate as a subtle check on the executive. On the contrary, the party was now beholden to the prime minister for its political survival.
The political opposition had coalesced against the Congress ahead of the 1967 elections and had reaped the dividends of the first-past-the post system. Yet their Grand Alliance in 1971 proved spectacularly ineffective and unravelled after their abysmal performance. However, the opposition parties' decision to go alone in the state assembly elections of 1972 also failed to revive their fortunes. The political opposition was now a blasted heath and the parliament's position turned merely topographical.
This extraordinary strengthening of executive power enabled Indira Gandhi to challenge the functions and powers of the judiciary, culminating in the assertion of prime ministerial authority by the supersession of judges and the appointment of a pliant chief justice in the Supreme Court in April 1973. A tame Supreme Court would go on to endorse the executive's actions during the Emergency.
These dramatic power shifts were accompanied by changes in the collective beliefs and expectations of political actors about the rules of the game of parliamentary democracy. As the game grew increasingly competitive from 1967 onwards, its rules, procedures, and norms were frequently cast aside in pursuit of power. Horse-trading of legislators, shifting party allegiances, weak and unstable governments, misuse of constitutional powers to undermine governments and dissolve legislatures — all became accepted features of the Indian political landscape.
This dimension of systemic change was accelerated by the global conjuncture; processes that played out concurrently and impinged decisively on India. In particular, the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates and the oil shock triggered by the Arab-Israel war of 1973 touched off a tidal wave of global inflation. The Indian economy experienced its most serious bout of inflation in the 20th century. Massive popular protests in Gujarat, Bihar, and elsewhere were a direct consequence of this economic crisis. The student movement's success in ejecting the Congress government in Gujarat and the upsurge in Bihar under Jayaprakash Narayan led the main opposition parties to regard extra-parliamentary mass agitation as the political route to weaken the Congress party, given their inability to humble it in the hustings.
This shift in beliefs and expectations occurred across the political spectrum. In April 1974, LK Advani told the Jana Sangh's general council that 'dethroning an elected government by extra-constitutional means had acquired legitimacy'. The Socialist Party adopted a resolution later that year: 'Since the capacity of the parliamentary system to achieve reform and renewal from within is getting severely limited, extra-constitutional action and popular initiative become absolutely necessary.' EMS Namboodiripad of the CPI(M) wrote that 'they do not accept the position that every issue must be solved only through constitutional means'. Above all, the prime minister herself had ceased to believe in the intrinsic value of democracy. As she wrote to Yehudi Menuhin soon after imposing the Emergency, 'Democracy is not an end. It is merely a system by which one proceeds towards the goal. Hence democracy cannot be more important than the progress, unity or survival of the country.'
Against the background of this systemic change and conjunctural crisis came the events of 12 June 1975 that threatened the prime minister's continuation in office. The lurch towards authoritarian rule was now unavoidable in the sense that the conditions needed to prevent it were no longer obtained.
Indira Gandhi was, of course, culpable for the decision to impose the Emergency. But its onset was caused by this larger structural transformation of Indian politics. This was, in turn, the outcome of a collective jettisoning of the rules of the game by the Indian political elite. This perspective on the origins of the Emergency when juxtaposed with its disastrous course and its turbulent aftermath invites a historical verdict in the vein of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: All are punished.
Srinath Raghavan is the author of Indira Gandhi and the Years that Transformed India. The views expressed are personal.