By Karan Thapar

Wednesday is the fiftieth anniversary of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. Her most authoritative and profound biographer, Srinath Raghavan, whose book ‘Indira Gandhi and the Years That Transformed India’ is published this month, believes the Emergency was “the single most traumatic experience in independent India’s political history”. Today let’s remind ourselves of how terrible it was.

The cold facts of the Emergency are chilling. 34,988 people were detained under the Maintenance of Internal Security Act whilst 75,818 were arrested under the Defence of India rules; practically the entire opposition was jailed; the press was censored; the Constitution brutally amended; and even the judiciary accepted that the right to life had been suspended.

At the height of the Emergency L. K. Advani wrote in his diary that Indian democracy was over and done with. At the time most people would have agreed with him.

There can be little doubt that the Emergency was declared to protect Gandhi’s political career after the Allahabad High Court struck down her election and the Supreme Court only gave her a conditional stay. Her claim that it was necessary because the opposition was trying to paralyze the government and Jayaprakash Narayan had called on the army and the police to disobey orders was just a trumped-up excuse.

Srinath Raghavan believes the actual declaration of the Emergency on 25th June 1975 was “a coup d’etat”. First, under the Constitution there can only be one emergency at a time and in 1975 there was already an external emergency going back to the Bangladesh war of 1971.

Second, under Article 352 the President can only proclaim an emergency on the written recommendation of the Council of Ministers. Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed didn’t wait for that. He did it at the Prime Minister’s personal request.

Third, the mass arrests and the cutting of power to newspaper establishments on the night of 25th/26th June “had no legal basis and were done entirely at the behest of the Prime Minister”.

At this point let’s ask if Indira Gandhi was justified in claiming there was an “imminent threat to the security of India”? The Intelligence Bureau had not submitted any such report nor did the state governments convey such information to the Home Ministry. So did Indira Gandhi make up and manufacture this alleged internal threat? It seems like it.

The truth is, as Raghavan’s book points out, Indira Gandhi never thought very highly of democracy. She once wrote to the violinist Yehudi Menuhin: “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.”

Most people remember the Emergency for the two campaigns its closely associated with – sterilization and slum clearance. Both had at their head Gandhi’s younger son, Sanjay. And both destroyed the credibility of the Emergency and the Gandhi’s personal reputation.

Yet so dependent was Indira Gandhi on Sanjay that she was blind to this. She’s even on record claiming he was like an elder brother. Certainly, she considered him her strongest and most loyal supporter after the Allahabad High Court found against her. As her Principal Secretary, P. N.  Haksar, points out: “She was absolutely blind as far as that boy was concerned.”

To everyone’s astonishment, in January 1977 Indira Gandhi called elections even though they weren’t due for another year. It led to the collapse of her rule and the end of the Emergency. Did she do it because she thought she could win and legitimize the Emergency? Or was this a way of accepting it was a mistake and getting off the tiger’s back?

The truth is Indira Gandhi never apologized for the Emergency nor accepted it was a mistake. She only regretted aspects of it which she considered excesses. Asked by Paul Brass on 26th March 1978: “Would you have done anything differently in relation to the Emergency?”, her answer began with the word “No”. It couldn’t have been more pointed.