Why a Backdrop to Indira Gandhi's Emergency Holds Lessons for Today's India

On January 19, 1966, the parliamentarians of the Congress party had come together for an important undertaking. Incumbent Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri had died during a trip abroad to Tashkent to sign a peace treaty between India and Pakistan. His death sparked a political crisis at home and necessitated appointing a new PM, and so, Indira Gandhi, drawn from the ranks of the country’s illustrious ruling cohort, went on to take this mantle.

However, her premiership came at a time when the promise that post-Independence India had once held had begun to lose its appeal. The order that her father, India’s first Prime Minister, Jawahar Lal Nehru had crafted was beginning to come apart. 

His land redistribution policies and a concomitant thrust towards industrialisation had stripped a large percentage of country’s agrarian class off their crucial resources, and triggered a surge of “footloose labour” which streamed from rural countryside, and pockmarked India’s emerging urban landscape with slums and shanties. 

Additionally, Nehru’s swing towards industrialisation had stirred disenchantment among the agrarian base, triggering fissiparous tendencies within the party, which led to rise of new leaders with competing political aspirations such as Charan Singh. On the other hand, his emphasis on socialist model had alienated some of Nehru’s industrialist friends like C. Rajagopalachari, who formed the new Swatantra Party.

Under strain from mutually antagonistic forces, “Gandhi’s accession to power…thus came at a juncture when the developmental state had sputtered to halt amid war and drought,” writes Srinath Raghavan in his excellent new book ‘Indira Gandhi: And The Years That Transformed India’.

Raghavan’s work is painstaking for its detail, especially when the author is trying to locate the political developments during her reign into the wider context of geo-political changes and economic dislocations. This is what makes the book outshine those that have been written on Indira Gandhi before. 

The Caesarism of Indira Gandhi

Raghavan’s scholarship deconstructs Indira Gandhi’s politics in light of what he calls the ‘Caesarist’ model, where a leader mobilises charisma to whip up popular acclaim and skirts past the “crisis of representation and underlying social cleavages by (their) ability to directly connect with the people, unmediated by party structures or parliament.” 

Having entrenched itself as a phenomenon into the Indian polity once, the Caesarist model is exactly what seems to have been resurrected in the post-2014 political scenario in India. 

Nevertheless, matching her bid to craft an authoritarian persona was a steady build up of widespread political opposition.

As Raghavan writes, the green revolution of the mid 1960s had brought a degree of prosperity among the peasant class which led their misgivings against Congress to find expression through the politics of rival leaders such as Charan Singh. 

In south India, political players closed ranks over shared Tamil pride. At the same time, the rightwing parties like Jana Sangh began harping about cow slaughter in their attempts to corner the Prime Minister. Also, trying to cut her down was the “syndicate” – the old guard of the Congress with which she had grown at odds.

However, to these nascent expressions of mobilisation, Indira Gandhi responded with the extensive rebalancing over power within the structures of the government, with the PMO arrogating more authority to itself for the first time since Independence.

It led to her becoming more assertive in her exercise of power, culminating in a stand-off with the "syndicate.” As a result, the party split between Congress (R) led by Gandhi, and the rival Congress (O).

Short of majority in the Lok Sabha, Indira Gandhi managed to corral support from leftists groups, riding on the applause over the decisions such as the nationalisation of banks and abolition of privy purses of the former Indian princelings.

To further torpedo the growing political opposition, she dissolved the Lok Sabha a year earlier than its scheduled dissolution, and called for general elections in 1971 as she sensed a clement political atmosphere on the ground.  

The electoral victories of 1971

Three additional factors also played a role in turning her anticipation into reality: The crisis on the eastern flank of Pakistan which caused India to force its hand, and help bring about its severance from Pakistan, lead to the creation of Bangladesh. 

Having dismembered Pakistan, and imposed upon it a peace treaty on India’s terms (which forced it to accept Kashmir as a bilateral dispute), she turned her attention to the Valley, where the secessionist forces were naturally rendered vulnerable. 

She took advantage of the opportune moment and arm-twisted the regional leader Sheikh Abdullah into signing an accord, forcing him to walk back from his demand for plebiscite, or maximum autonomy. 

Capping all this was a string of victories in the State elections. All these fortuitous developments cast upon her a new halo of authority, which became a prelude to how she would tilt the institutional balance in India in her favour in the following years. Livid with the courts, on account of their decision to strike down ordinances on nationalisation of banks and revocation of privy purses, she then moved to cut the judiciary to size. 

Gandhi already had a bone to pick with the SC in the Golak Nath case, where the judges reaffirmed the inviolability of the fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution. These judgments had frustrated her left-wing lurch and threatened to stonewall her desire for land reforms and anti-poverty programmes.

Armed with a popular mandate, she passed the 24th amendment, giving Parliament the powers to amend any provisions of the Constitution. 

In April 1973, the political affairs committee of the cabinet appointed Justice AN Ray as the next CJI (he had a demonstrably pro-government record) to SC by superseding three judges in the seniority line. 

The move was in response to the landmark Kesavananda Bharati case, where the SC judges had upheld the ‘basic structure’ doctrine of the constitution. 

The economic blight in India

Raghavan deftly steers his narrative through the economic measures that wrought far-reaching changes to the country’s economic situation and, in combination with the oil shock of the 1970s, resulted in the declining incomes. 

It was hardly incidental that India’s perilous economic situation coincided with a rash of protests and labour strikes, with one such being led by the socialist politician Gorge Fernandes. “The strikes,” writes Raghavan, “were canaries in the coalmine of Indian democracy.”

Realising the seriousness of the situation around her, Indira rolled out an anti-inflationary package in 1974 and simultaneously decided to break up the protests using draconian laws. The demonstrators turned violent, leading into a cascade of events that resulted in the eventual downfall of the Congress government in Gujarat, with similar fires blowing into the direction of Bihar. 

The groundswell of anger morphed into a full-blown political movement galvanised by Jai Prakash Narayan, one of Indira’s foremost political critics, who had begun to canvas broad-based support from a cross-section of society. 

As Raghavan writes, “The rules of the game of parliamentary democracy would be disregarded by all political actors.”

This foreshadowed the drastic nature that the crisis in India will acquire in the following months, and herald the first proclamation of ‘Emergency’ in the history of Independent India.

In the run up to Emergency

The tipping point came with the succession of crises following a verdict of Allahabad high court in a 1971 case, accusing Indira of a raft of charges that violated The Representation of People’s Act, 1951. The court had largely acquitted her. The two charges, however, stuck as a result of which her election to the Parliament was set aside, and she was prohibited from holding any elective post for six years. 

Of course, with her government challenging the decision, the courts reviewed the verdict later, and realised that the judiciary will have to make a distinction between her impugned position as parliamentarian, and as a prime minister. Although the electoral disqualification was eventually revoked, she was forbidden from taking part in Lok Sabha proceedings.

The new verdict became a rallying point for the opposition as they stepped up the civil unrest across parts of the country, with leaders such as Morarji Desai vowing to “overthrow” her.

She now came to regard opposition against her in deeply conspiratorial terms, seeing it as a conspiracy backed by the Western powers as she had spurned them during the Bangladesh war of liberation, which is when she decided to take the ‘big’ step. Amid an unprecedented crackdown on political opponents, Gandhi went to All India Radio early morning in June 1975, adding in her stern voice, “The President has declared a state of emergency. There’s no need to panic.”

As Raghavan brilliantly sums up, “understanding Indira Gandhi’s concerns and intentions is not the same thing as casually explaining the onset of the Emergency. Such an explanation must bring together structure, conjecture, and event.”

He writes, “The Indian political system underwent a major transformation between 1967 and 1875. This took place in both the system-wide components: institutional distribution of functions and relative power, and the rules of the game.”

This is an important perspective which allows us to understand the Emergency, not as an overnight change, but as a denouement of years of systemic reconfiguration of the separation of powers in India of exactly the nature that we have been witnessing since 2014. 

Raghavan offers meticulous details on the  dramatic sterilisation programmes enacted during the Emergency regime; the slum demolition drives led by Jagmohan Malhotra, among the Indira Gandhi’s most zealous supporters; and her moves to further amend the constitution to entrench her power, a series of steps in which she was variously egged on by a coterie of advisors from her shared ethnic Kashmiri heritage – TN Kaul, PN Dhar and BK Nehru. 

The alleged ‘cowardice’ of RSS

Haunted by the Kesvanand Bharati case, several amendments were brought, making many laws beyond the purview of the judiciary. It is also during one of these amendments that the terms ‘socialist and secular’ were added to the constitution.

However, unlike the vehemence with which the Hindu nationalist supporters tend to make their opposition to this decision manifest today, the situation back then seems to have been quite the opposite. 

As Raghavan informs, the RSS supremo Balasaheb Deoras, when he was dispatched into jail for his association with JP movement, immediately turned contrite and apologetic. He began drafting letters praising the Prime Minister profusely, while disavowing that RSS had done “anything against any non-Hindu.”

Many RSS leaders even considered imbuing their organisation in “the colours of secularism,” Raghavan writes. 

“Dattopant Thegadi wrote to Deoras’s second-in-command, suggesting that the RSS’s constitution be changed to suggest openness to all Indians - not just Hindus.”

A big tree falls

However, Indira Gandhi later decided to release the fetters on all the political opponents, and announced general elections in January 1977. She was defeated by Narayan’s Janata Party, of course. But that “change” turned out to be very transient in nature, as Gandhi’s sharp understanding of India’s social cleavages allowed her to wriggle her way back into popular renown, and she returned to power one last time. 

The exploding situation in Punjab in the early 1980s, however, led to her assassination and brought an end to a highly consequential chapter of India’s history. Raghavan’s biography on Indira Gandhi has one vital takeaway for the young readers today – that Emergency or Emergency-like circumstances do not arise in the spur of the moment. 

They are preceded by a long chain of events in which the integrity of one institution after another is challenged and decimated. If one strains to read carefully, that’s precisely what is currently going on in India.

Shakir Mir is a journalist and book critic based in Srinagar. His work delves at the intersection of conflict, politics, history and memory. His can be reached at shakir.imtiyaz.mir@gmail.com

The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.