Review of 50 Years of the Indian Emergency

50 Years of the Indian Emergency: Lessons for Democracy, edited by Peter Ronald Desouza and Harsh Sethi (Orient Blackswan, 2025)

The completion of fifty years of one of India’s most contested periods—the Emergency of 1975-77—solicits a sober reckoning.

Answering that call, the book, 50 Years of the Indian Emergency attempts to offer a rich anthology that treats the events of the 1970s (and beyond) neither as a historical event of the past nor as a species of exceptional tyranny. States of emergencies are, according to the editors and authors of this volume, both continuous and structural. Naturally, then, the editors, Peter Ronald Desouza and Harsh Sethi, describe the period—or the phenomenon, if you will—of the Emergency as ‘a complex story of continuities and departures.’

Almost every essay of the volume looks bleaker in the light of the fact that twenty-first-century India has christened June 25, 1975 as ‘Murder of Constitution Day.’ Nevertheless, the editors suggest that the Emergency did not emerge out of nothingness. Based on gleanings from archives, old reports, legal precedents, the history of literary resistance during the Emergency, and philosophical meditations by its authors, the volume urges one to interrogate the past dispassionately, without moral laxity.

In their introduction to the volume, the editors cite the last poem written by the Palestinian poet, Heba Abu Nada, who was killed by a bomb a few hours after she posted it on social media. The incident reminds one of Rabindranath Tagore’s timeless plea for India to awaken to a ‘heaven of freedom,’ in his ageless poem, ‘Where the Mind is Without Fear,’ that was published in a leading Indian daily, two days after the declaration of the state of Emergency, as a mark of protest. Subsequently, the editors caution that Indians are still struggling to overcome ‘the shadows of our past,’ casting a somber shadow over the remainder of the book.

Meanwhile, this volume is made refreshing by the fact that the editors and authors alike resist quixotic conclusions. Desouza leads by example, in his seminal essay on Indira Gandhi’s psychology, where he notes that that the Emergency had its precedents in states of supposed normalcy. Millions of sterilizations were underway, even before the 1970s, and perhaps even the year 1975 could not surpass the highest annual number of sterilizations from the previous decade. Like Desouza, almost no author proclaims a simple villain. Instead, the volume stands on recurring themes—collective moral complicity, institutional failure, structural malaise, and uneven experiences of freedom. As a result, the Prime Minister of the era of the Emergency emerges not as a monstrous anomaly but a social agent of choices shaped by structure. Desouza, in particular, criticizes the surreptitious slant from scientific explanations to ideological cherry picking, when it comes to historiographies of events like the Emergency and its chief actors. Far from the caprices of one person, the Emergency is rendered visible as the outcome of the collusive catastrophe of institutions, where the state machinery itself conspired against democracy.

While the book is a fierce critique of the use of the judicial apparatus for state excesses, R. Sudarshan’s gutsy and visionary essay underscores the resistance shown to it by rule of law and judicial courage. As is well known, during the Emergency, Indian courts struggled to uphold the Constitution. However, after Parliament tried to annul judicial review with the 39th Amendment, the judiciary invoked the Kesavananda Bharati case’s ‘basic structure’ doctrine to rule key provisions of the Emergency as invalid. Sudarshan evocatively calls such moments as the reminder that as more things change, the more ‘they remain the same.’

Kalpana Kannabiran retains this thread, terming the Supreme Court’s nonconformity (especially Justice Khanna’s solitary ADM Jabalpur dissent) as a ‘carnivalesque’ resurrection of rights—citing a concept well known to students of literature and philosophy, as defined by Mikhail Bakhtin. Emphatic dissents, though in the minority, gestured that even under surveillance the judiciary could still awaken resistance by honoring its citizenship roles. But the book’s idealism is tempered by constant inspections by reality. This is evident in Deepak Sanan’s critique of India’s pursuit of transitional justice through the Shah Commission. It laments that the comission’s scope was confined, as minimal compensations were paid for forced sterilizations and dismissals—the bulk of the Emergency’s moral debt was never cleared.

One of the book’s striking features is its ethical lens on ordinary people. Writing about Tihar jail, Mahmood Farooqui transforms experiences of personal confinement into a philosophical meditation on punishment as social destiny. The essay dissolves the simplistic binary of ‘criminals versus the righteous,’ reminding that ‘everybody has broken a law … if not by commission, then at least by omission.’ Imprisonment, therefore, mirrors the human condition. While brick and iron cage shame and guilt, the outside world keeps its own ‘internal jails of ego, guilt, and unresolved grievance.’ Incarceration, which is the thematic leitmotif of experiences of the Emergency, is herein reconsidered as an opportunity for moral pedagogy rather than social stigmatization. Tridip Suhrid induces another spiritual ideal into the discourse, that of Vinoba Bhave’s moral politics of disbanding the state. Arguably, Bhave’s shift from rajniti (power-politics) to lokniti (people’s moral rule)—based on the notion that ‘power can only belong to God and can be wielded by the Satyagrahi’—was meant to reinstate civic virtues and non-violence as displacers of a formal government or an institutionalized state. However, Suhrid also makes us wonder whether, despite fearless exemplars ruling society from within, such a model might become vulnerable to eschewing accountability or replaying structural hierarchies in the backyard of purity’s rhetoric.

The book’s serious reappraisal of freedom is not afraid to take nuanced leaps into correcting received ideas of history. Gopal Guru’s essay is emblematic in this regard. For him, the Emergency compels us to reconceive freedom along ‘stratified social lines.’ Though oppressive for middle-class liberals, according to Guru, the Emergency sometimes paved the way for positive freedoms for Dalits—as spaces of public dignity and state support—that mattered to them more than abstract privileges. Guru tries to offer a novel view of freedom—at least insofar as the social sciences are concerned, although such modeling is available in natural sciences—wherein freedom is redefined as a patchwork of struggles, capable of absorbing even seemingly regressive actors and structures in its fold. The anti-authoritarian coalition of 1975, he argues, was itself a mixed coalition. Liberal outrage at censorship sat uncomfortably alongside right-wing defence of caste-power under the same slogan of freedom. Guru warns that without this complex understanding, democratic struggles can inadvertently reproduce the exclusions they profess to battle. In Guru’s words, true emancipation must be ‘a plural practice that recognizes unequal starting points.’

The volume also chronicles life under and after the Emergency through vivid snapshots of resistance. We learn how outside the power corridors, dissidents refused to go silent. Journalist Pamela Philipose recounts the arrest of over 253 journalists and the ingenious ‘underground press’ that flourished by cyclostyling pamphlets, handwritten letters, and postcards. Even an RSS pamphlet was kept alive by hand-delivered sheets. And, like political prisoners, students are given their due in this volume, as well. Ravi Arvind Palat traces campus movements from the early 1970s through today’s unrest. The Emergency’s raid on student protesters was ‘sharp and arbitrary,’ he notes, but more recent campus curbs (sedition cases and fee-hike protests) have steered ‘a more gradual erosion’ of campus autonomy. The persistence of student dissent from JNU to Jamia shows that the spirit of protest, once kindled, resurfaces even after decades.

Talking of spirits, poets, too, get their due. Rukmini Bhaya Nair surveys poems that turned slogans into subversion. A Telugu verse ‘Sab tik hai – All is well’ mocked the Emergency’s assurances of calm; a Malayali author had passengers remarking how peaceful ‘we now have everywhere … just as when the British ruled’; a Marathi poet chillingly joked in a sterilization clinic, ‘Perform vasectomy on me!’ as a throwback to the fear of forced operations. These coded ironies turned everyday speech into travesties of an authoritarianism that was first desired and then deemed too absurd. Such cultural ephemera reveal that artistic dissents endured in spite of bans and bars—in slivers of hope even in dark prisons.

While this reviewer regrets not being able to do full justice to every author in this volume, suffice it to say that it spans discourses of economics, international politics, gender, and socialist activism as well. Errol D’Souza’s counterintuitive essay argues that the Emergency was partly driven by economic crisis—inflation, drought and stagnation—and that the regime’s ‘Twenty Point Programme’ was an aggressive attempt to buy stability by ‘attacking poverty’ with state control. This is not a vindication of Gandhi’s excesses. Nor is she valorized when Varun Sahni dissects her fixation on a fabled foreign hand (mainly the CIA and the USA), concluding that no definitive foreign conspiracy was found, but that paranoia about genuinely feared American plots helped justify state-based repression. And, Gyan Prakash’s memorable essay, which, inter alia, studies the letters between India’s railway minister, Madhu Dandavate and his wife, Pramila Dabdavate—both political prisoners during the Emergency—theorizes how those who replaced the Indira-Gandhi-government were themselves susceptible to being drawn into hierarchical and compromising structures of India’s realpolitik after 1977.

These studies reinforce the volume’s central thesis, that whether the cause was economic strain, personal paranoia, ideological ruptures, or state collusion, the Emergency did not spring from a single source but from a tangled matrix of (f)actors.

50 Years of the Indian Emergency is not a ‘commemoration’—as many loosely written descriptions go—of the eponymous sociopolitical calamity. It is an autopsy, as it were, of our moral gray zones as a society, examining how saints, sinners, citizens, and ordinary people partook of—and perhaps continue to partake of—in the act of seeking a dramatic villain for regimes of oppression that we have all obliged ourselves with.

Understanding how a state of Emergency emerges and endures, and learning to recognize its deep strains through books like these, is the civic task we must all be engaged in; to awaken the Indian mind from fear; to uphold the nation’s constitutional ideals with renewed vigilance.