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Advanced Constitutional

History Project

The Darkest Hour of Democracy in India

Amana Ranjan

210109

3rd Year

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I. Introduction

Indira Gandhi, the third Prime Minister of India, ruled over India four times between the

years of 1966 and 1984. Her style of ruling was extremely notorious and peaked during the

Emergency that took place between June 26, 1975 and March 23, 1977.

Indira Gandhi contested for the position of Prime Minister in the 1971 elections under the

Allahabad High Court. In a time when India could best be describes as fragile, she raised

hopes of the country by promising to decrease poverty and bettering the lives of those living

in poverty in India and ultimately won the election. Soon after winning though, there was a

political uproar in India which claimed that she was guilty of using government machinery in

order to propel her campaign. The funds which she had been using were barely allocated

toward the caused which she claimed they were being donated toward. Her election was

declared void on the grounds of electoral malpractice, and she was ordered to be removed

from her seat and suspended from running for election for six years. Indira Gandhi opposed

the claims and denied the criticisms. Her party backed her up, as well as many other

supporters. Indira was allowed to withhold her position of Prime Minister, and those who

opposed this decision flew into a rage. Meanwhile, to protect her interests she imposed a state

of emergency under which she would rule by decree. It is then, on June 26, 1975, that India

was thrown into utter political upheaval.

II. Unreasonable Policies Implemented During the Emergency

Gandhi implemented the following over the course of the next two years: 1. She arrests any

and all who oppose her rule and throws them in jail without alerting their families of the

arrest. 2. She inflicts serious abuse and torture upon such political prisoners. 3. She uses

national television and other public means of communication for personal political

propaganda. 4. She forces sterilization, specifically vasectomies, upon people in an effort to

stifle the overpopulation. 5. She destroys the Indian slum and most other low-income

housing. 6. She implements large-scale and illegal enactment of laws.

a) Unlawful Arrests

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The Government used police forces across the country to arrest thousands ofprotestors and strike

leaders. J.P. Narayan, Morarji Desai, Charan Singh, Jivatram Kripalani, Atal Bihari Vajpayee,Lal

Krishna Advani and other protest leaders were immediately arrested. Organizations like the

Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and opposition political parties were banned. Innumerable

number of Communist leaders and masses were arrested.

Indira Gandhi attempted to re-write the nation's laws with the help of the Parliament, where the

Congress controlled over a two-thirds majority. She convinced the President to issue

"extraordinary laws" that by-passed parliament altogether, allowing her to rule by decree. She

constructed a 20-point economic program to increase agricultural and industrial production,

improve public services andfight poverty and illiteracy. She had little trouble in getting

amendments to the constitution passed that exonerated her from any culpability in her electionfraud case, declaring President's Rule in Gujarat and Tamil Nadu where anti-Indira parties ruled

(state legislatures were thereby dissolved and suspended indefinitely), and jailing thousands of

opponents. The Defence of India Act and the MISA were amended in July 1975.

b) Censorship

As a result of this censorship, for almost two years that followed, citizens did not have any

knowledge of what was happening beyond their own neighbourhoods, families had no

information about their members who disappeared (later found out to be arrested and often

killed by the security forces), the public were kept in the dark about inhuman acts like

forcible sterilization of the poor. The Indira Gandhi government enacted two laws - one

curbing the right of journalists to report proceedings in parliament, and the other imposing

restrictions on their reporting anything that might `bring into hatred or contempt or excite

disaffection towards the government' (thus effectively banning all media publicity to anti-

government criticism or public protests against government policies). Another draconian law

called MISA (Maintenance of Internal Security Act) was used to imprison Opposition leaders

and political dissenters.

Maintenance of Internal Security Act was a controversial law passed by the Indian parliament

in 1973 giving the administration of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and Indian law

enforcement agencies super powers - indefinite "preventive" detention of individuals, search

and seizure of property without warrants, and wiretapping - in the quelling of civil and

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political disorder in India, as well as countering foreign-inspired sabotage, terrorism,

subterfuge and threats to national security.

The legislation gained infamy for its disregard of legal and constitutional safeguards of civil

rights, especially when "going all the way down" on the competition, and during the period of

national emergency (1975-1977) as thousands of innocent people were believed to have been

arbitrarily arrested, tortured and in some cases, forcibly sterilized.

Censorship prevented Indian journalists from reporting the fact that when parliament met on

July 21, the Opposition members voted against the resolution approving Emergency, and

walked out. It was only from the Western media, that the world came to know about the fact

that the Opposition strength in parliament at that time was already reduced as a result of the

arrest of a large number of their members. In a list of parliamentarians in jail in 14 countries,

compiled by Amnesty International on April 6 1976, India had the highest number (59)

behind bars. The government deployed censor officers to vet reports and editorials before

their publication in newspapers. Those papers which refused to submit to such humiliation

were subjected to pressures like disconnection of electricity and withdrawal of government

advertisements. Many dissenting journalists were put behind bars.

The Supreme Court heard arguments against the Emergency but the Attorney General Sri

Niran De went to the extreme extent of justifying the Emergency. Even when a police officer

maliciously shot dead an innocent man, the court had no power to interfere even in such a

blood-thirsty outrage. Alas, except Justice (H R) Khanna, the other four judges of the Bench

upheld the Emergency with all its macabre implications. That was the darkest hour of the

Supreme Court.

c) Sterilization and Demolitions

Public disaffection broke out in demonstrations - mainly in protest against the government's

sterilization drive. The police often retaliated against such demonstrations with extreme

brutality. In two towns of the northern state of Uttar Pradesh - Muzaffarnagar and Sultanpur -

in October 1976, more than seventy people were killed by the police when they came out on

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the streets resisting forcible sterilization. Although the press was forced to black out such

incidents, news reached the people all around - often in the highly exaggerated form of

rumours turning popular mood against Mrs Gandhi and her administration. In the heart of the

capital itself, in the Turkman Gate area of Delhi, on April 18, 1976, the police opened fire on

protesters who were resisting the demolition of their homes. The demolition drive was

launched by Indira Gandhi's son Sanjay Gandhi to cleanse the city of slums and force their

poor residents to leave the capital (which was their working place) and move to distant

settlements. The residents of Turkman Gate refused to move as they would have to commute

every day paying heavy bus fares to reach the capital to earn their living. The Turkman Gate

incident - although not reported by the Indian press - was witnessed by the citizens of Delhi

who felt repulsed by such developments brought about by the Emergency.

d) Right to Strike Denied

Under the Emergency rules, workers were denied the right to strike. But the industrialists

were given a free hand to dismiss employees. They laid off about 500,000 workers within six

months after the declaration of Emergency. Anti-working class ordinances were issued

curtailing the workers' minimum bonus from 8.33 per cent of the earnings to 4 per cent. It

was not surprising therefore that the Indian industrialists at home, as well as the World Bank

abroad, applauded these Emergency measures of the Indira Gandhi government. The large

scale Indian private sector industrialists, like the Birlas and the Tatas, welcomed her

industrial policies, and the Western-dominated Aid India consortium promised her

government an aid of $ 1,600 million - a record of sorts in those days.

III. The Impact on the Indian Poor

But in reality, how did this economic package work out for the Indian poor? Land reforms

and minimum wages remained a distant dream for the rural labourers. The rich village

landlords could not be forced to part with the excess land that they held illegally for

distribution among the landless, and pay the wages officially fixed for their agricultural

labourers - since they were the main pillars of Mrs Gandhi's Congress party, her prime

constituency in rural India. Even those few, who were freed from bonded labour, came out to

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find that no means were provided to them by the government to enable them to earn a living.

They again reverted to the old practice of taking loans from landlords and money-lenders in

order to survive - and got entangled in the same bondage being unable to pay off their debts.

In the urban areas, rising prices affected the common citizens, and workers often resorted to

strikes facing the risk of loss of jobs and imprisonment. The promise of jobs for the

unemployed youth also turned out to be false. By October 1975, registered job seekers among

the educated had climbed to 4.1 million. Twenty four percent of the urban youth remained

unemployed. The twenty-point programme thus cut nowhere near deep enough to solve the

manifest problems of the country - whether in the villages or cities.

Conclusion

However the self assured Indira Gandhi Administration was in for a surprise as just a month

before the elections, several prominent leaders from her Congress party, headed by the most

senior minister in her cabinet, Jagjivan Ram, resigned and joined the Opposition. This sealed her

fate. The resignations boosted the morale of the Opposition and encouraged the common people

to shed fear and speak their minds. During the poll campaign, the hitherto-suppressed news of

police brutality, forcible sterilization and bulldozing of slums came out in public gaze. With this

exposure, the majority of the electorate turned decidedly against Indira Gandhi's Congress. In the

1977 March parliamentary election, of an electorate of 320 million, roughly 60 percent voted

Indira Gandhi's Congress out of power. She herself, along with her son Sanjay and other

important ministers, suffered defeat at the polls. The 1977 election brought for the first time a

non-Congress government in New Delhi. Ever since its independence in August 1947 , it had

been ruled by the Congress, first led by Jawaharlal Nehru, and then by his daughter.

The end of the Emergency, brought about by the 1977 election thus inaugurated a new political

era in the Indian political scene, putting an end to the hegemonic Congress domination and

opening up opportunities for alternative political forces to make their presence felt at the center of

power in New Delhi.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books

Tarlo,Emma, Unsettling memories: narratives of India's "emergency", PermanentBlack, Delhi, 2003

India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy, RamachandraGuha, HarperCollins 2007

Internet Sources

What Indira Gandhi's emergency Proved for India -http://news.rediff.com/column/2010/jun/23/inder-malhotra-on-35-years-after-the-

emergency.htm

Emergency: The Darkest Period in India Democracy -http://theviewspaper.net/emergency-the-darkest-period-in-indian-democracy/

INDIA: The Emergency: One Year Old -http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,918200,00.html

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