“The President has proclaimed Emergency. There is nothing to panic about.” These words of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi came out of All India Radio in the wee hours of June 26, 1975 as the proclamation of Emergency had been signed the previous night, i.e., on June 25, 1975, by President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed on recommendation of the Indira Gandhi-led Congress Government at the Centre. And June 25, 2023 marked the 48th anniversary of the Emergency.
The Emergency remained in vogue from June 25, 1975 to March 21, 1977, but to this date, it is one of the most hotly-debated chapters of modern Indian history and is often regarded as the darkest phase in independent India's history marked by indiscriminate state incarceration, stifling and mauling of dissent and unbridled government crackdown on civil liberties amounting to frequent human rights violations and repressive censoring of Press.
It is believed that the June 12, 1975 verdict of the Allahabad High Court which led to the conviction of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi for committing electoral malpractices and therefore being disqualified from Parliament and debarred from holding any elected post for six years actually led to the imposition of Emergency. Socialist leader Raj Narain was defeated by Indira Gandhi in the 1971 Lok Sabha election in the Rae Bareli Lok Sabha seat in Uttar Pradesh. However, Raj Narain assailed the poll outcome alleging electoral malpractices and violation of the Representation of the Peoples Act, 1951. It was also alleged that Indira Gandhi’s election agent Yashpal Kapoor was a government servant and she also used government officials for personal election-related work.
On March 19, 1975, Indira Gandhi became the first Indian Prime Minister to testify in a court. On June 12, 1975, Justice Jagmohanlal Sinha of Allahabad High Court in his judgment declared Gandhi’s election to Parliament as null and void, but she was given a span of 20 days to appeal to the Supreme Court. On June 24, the Supreme Court put a conditional stay on the High Court order wherein Gandhi was allowed to attend Parliament but would not be allowed to vote unless the court pronounced its verdict on her appeal.
The judgments gave both legitimacy and impetus to the Jayaprakash Narayan movement and its demand for resignation of Prime Minister Indira Gandh; and now even senior leaders of the Congress were of the opinion that her resignation would be in the interest of the party. However, Gandhi firmly held on to her position. And in the aftermath of the court’s verdict, Gandhi spelt the doom for Indian democracy by imposition of the Emergency the very next day, which included an unforeseen suspension of all fundamental rights, putting Opposition leaders in jails and imposing censorship on the media which turned to be a complete shock for the otherwise-unsuspecting nation.
Immediately a day after the Supreme Court judgment, an ordinance declaring a state of internal emergency was signed by the President. In her letter to the President requesting declaration of Emergency, Gandhi had written, “Information has reached us that indicate imminent danger to the security of India.”
The Congress Government cited threats to national security in the context of the recently-concluded war with Pakistan even though many within the Congress party were opposed to the idea of a declaration of a state of emergency in exception to a few loyalists, including the then Chief Minister of West Bengal, Siddhartha Shankar Ray, who advised Gandhi to go ahead with the plan of imposition of Emergency. The Prime Minister's younger son Sanjay Gandhi, too, put his weight behind the "extra-constitutional" measure of declaration of the Emergency.
In an interview with journalist Jonathan Dimbleby in 1978, Gandhi was asked about the precise nature of the danger to Indian security that led her to declare Emergency, to which she replied, “It was obvious, isn’t it? The whole subcontinent had been destabilised.”
Apparently, the goal of the 21-month-long Emergency was to control “internal disturbance”, for which the Constitutional rights were suspended and freedom of speech and the Press were withdrawn and other drastic measures were taken in the pretext of national interest. Indira Gandhi cited three reasons for imposition of Emergency; firstly, according to her, India’s security and democracy was in danger in view of the movement launched by Jayaprakash Narayan. Secondly, there was a need for rapid economic development and upliftment of the underprivileged; and thirdly, she apprehended intervention of foreign powers which could weaken and destabilise India.
It is a fact that the months preceding the declaration of Emergency witnessed growing unemployment, rampant inflation and scarcity of food, widespread riots and protests in several parts of the country. The disturbances began in Gujarat and thereafter in Bihar; and from there, it spread to several other parts of northern India. In fact, people were in streets against Gandhi’s governance. It was when Indira Gandhi was further troubled by the petition filed in the Allahabad High Court.
However, the ground realities were far from the reasons stated by the Government for imposition of Emergency which in fact was an instrument used by the Central Government headed by Gandhi to undemocratically and extra-constitutionally protect its tenure by torturing the governed, suspending their fundamental rights and oppressing the Opposition leaders and strangulating the voice of dissent. And to this day, we remember the phase of Emergency as a blot on the history of Indian democracy and vow to never let this happen again.
(The writer is Additional Central Government Standing Counsel, CAT, Cuttack Bench, Consulting Editor-Legal Affairs and Public Policy, The Pioneer, Bhubaneswar and a Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Law and Media Studies, School of Mass Communication, KIIT University. Views are personal)