The blot of the internal Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi on January 25, 1975, has been borne by the Congress since – with its opponents often reminding it of the time when civil liberties were suspended, media throttled and the Opposition jailed.
The present leadership of the Congress however, has only grudgingly expressed regret for the imposition of the Emergency. With the reins of the party again firmly in the hands of the Gandhi family, Congress leaders too largely avoid the subject, lest they tread on the wrong toes. The reluctance to speak on the issue, unless prodded, is in contrast to how the party has come to terms with its role in the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, with then Congress PM Manmohan Singh apologising for it in Parliament.
After her party’s, and her own, defeat in the 1977 Lok Sabha elections held after the Emergency, Mrs Gandhi did apologise, but not for her decision to impose it. She said she was sorry for the “mistakes” and “excesses” during the period, taking “entire responsibility for the same”. Addressing a gathering at Yavatmal in Maharashtra in January 1978, she said she took responsibility even for those who were not willing to own up to their mistakes, and then went on to defend her action, saying the situation in the country was chaotic when she imposed the Emergency.
The survival of the nation was under threat, and had things continued the same way, what had transpired in Bangladesh would have seen a repeat in India, Mrs Gandhi said. In 1971, Bangladesh had become a separate country after breaking away from Pakistan – incidentally with the help of the Indira Gandhi government.
This has been the Congress line when it comes to the Emergency since then. Lately, it has tried to turn the tables by using the same word liberally against the ruling BJP, and alleging that the Narendra Modi government has pushed the country into a state of “undeclared Emergency” since 2014.
The party debate
In a conversation in 2021 with Kaushik Basu, professor at Cornell University in the US, Rahul Gandhi said the Emergency imposed by Mrs Gandhi was a “mistake” and “wrong”, but quickly added that the Congress had at no point attempted “to capture the country’s institutional framework” which, he said, was happening now.
Over two decades ago, recounting her memories of the Emergency in conversation with senior journalist Shekhar Gupta on his Walk the Talk show for NDTV 24×7, Sonia Gandhi said that Mrs Gandhi “did think (afterwards) that it was a mistake.”
“Well, my mother-in-law, after she lost the elections, she did herself say that… she had a rethink on that. And the very fact that she declared elections means that she had a rethink on the Emergency,” Sonia said on the show, telecast in May 2004.
Asked whether this meant Mrs Gandhi saw it as a mistake, Sonia said: “I think she did think that it was a mistake. Because don’t forget that at least the Indira Gandhi I knew was a democrat at heart, to the core. And I think circumstances compelled her to take that action. But she was never quite at ease with it.” Sonia repeated this, adding that while the Emergency “certainly” held a lesson that no government should go down that path again, “those were different times”.
Speaking to The Indian Express, Congress Lok Sabha MP Manish Tewari referred to the situation prevailing after the creation of Bangladesh. “A number of international forces which were inimical to India, essentially the Nixon-Kissinger duo and their outreach to China… a constellation of hostile forces were arrayed against India, because after the end of the Second World War, this was perhaps the first time that the map of a continent or a subcontinent had been changed by force.”
Tewari said the Emergency had to be seen “in this context”. Regretting that this “has never really either been properly researched or documented or gone into”, he said: “This is not a justification for the Emergency. Mrs Gandhi herself had regretted the excesses during it. But the context and circumstances have never ever been fully evaluated.”
Congress Working Committee member Tariq Anwar, who was among the party leaders who lost in the 1977 Lok Sabha elections, also talked about seeing the Emergency as part of the bigger picture. Its imposition was not unconstitutional as there was a provision for it in the statute, he underlined. “For instance, JP (Jayaprakash Narayan) was telling the Army, police and bureaucrats not to obey government orders… There was an attempt to create anarchy… Indira Gandhi had no other option.”
Talking about those times, Anwar said: “I remember Congressmen could not step out of their houses wearing the Gandhi cap. We could not put up Congress flags… Congressmen were attacked.”
He was not saying that “atrocities” were not committed during the Emergency, he added. “In 1977, there was an anti-Congress wave. Indira herself lost. I lost too…. But within 28 months, the Opposition was trounced.”
In 2011, the fifth volume of the Congress’s history brought out to commemorate 125 years of the party, mentioned the Emergency. In the preface, the group who compiled the volume – headed by the late Pranab Mukherjee and including historians – said the party wanted experts to be involved in order to generate an “objective and scholarly perspective for the period under review”, and “not necessarily have a party perspective”.
The scholarly view
In the article ‘Indira Gandhi, an Overview’ in the volume, columnist Inder Malhotra wrote: “There is no question that the Emergency was a sordid chapter in independent India’s history and a… nightmare for all those who lived through it… It took an excruciatingly long time to flush out of the body politic the Emergency had pumped into the system.”
Malhotra added: “Since all her confidants, especially her increasingly powerful son Sanjay, had ruled out her withdrawal from office ‘even for a day’ (after an Allahabad High Court order setting aside her election as MP), the hammer blow of the Emergency and Indira’s monumental mistake had become inevitable… Sanjay and his cohorts had made elaborate preparations for the Emergency in total secrecy.”
The Congress volume also carried an excerpt from the book JP Movement and the Emergency by historian Bipin Chandra, which called the 42nd amendment brought in by the Congress government during the Emergency an effort to change the basic structure of the Constitution. “… The most important changes were designed to strengthen the Executive at the cost of the Judiciary, and thus disturb the carefully crafted system of Constitutional checks and balances between the three organs of the government.”
Chandra said the Emergency centralised and concentrated unlimited state and party power in the hands of the PM, to be exercised in an “authoritarian manner” through a small coterie of politicians and bureaucrats. “Having emasculated the Congress party and having no other organisation to rely upon, (Mrs) Gandhi, the Central and state governments depended almost entirely on bureaucracy and police both for routine administration of the 20-point programme and family planning programmes.”
In his book The Dramatic Decade: The Indira Gandhi Years, Pranab Mukherjee, a long-time Congressman, described the Emergency as a misadventure. While there was no doubt that the period saw some changes like discipline in public life, a growing economy, controlled inflation, a reversed trade deficit for the first time, enhanced developmental expenditure and a crackdown on tax evasion and smuggling, Mukherjee said, the Emergency was “an avoidable event”.
“Suspension of fundamental rights and political activity (including trade union activity), large-scale arrests of political leaders and activists, press censorship, and extending the life of legislatures by not conducting elections were some instances of the Emergency adversely affecting the interests of the people. The Congress and Indira Gandhi had to pay a heavy price for this misadventure,” wrote Mukherjee.
“It is believed that Siddhartha Shankar Ray played an important role in the decision to declare the Emergency; it was his suggestion, and Indira Gandhi acted on it. In fact, Indira Gandhi told me subsequently that she was not even aware of the Constitutional provisions allowing for the declaration of a state of Emergency on grounds of internal disturbance, particularly since a state of Emergency had already been proclaimed as a consequence of the Indo-Pak conflict in 1971,” Mukherjee, who later served as the President of India, wrote, going on to note Ray’s powers as one of Mrs Gandhi’s “most influential advisors”.
Electoral impact
Given the collapse of the Janata Party government that replaced the Congress, and the Congress’s swift return to power, party leaders believe the damage caused to the Congress was limited to the post-Emergency 1977 Lok Sabha elections. The Congress’s overall vote share plunged to 34.52% in these polls, its lowest since Independence. The party won just 154 of the 542 seats, getting wiped out in the Hindi heartland, with the southern states (92 seats) accounting for 60% of its tally.
But in the 1980 polls held after the Janata Party’s fall, the Congress soared to 353 seats, with a vote share of 42.69%. Then came the 1984 elections, and the Congress, led by Rajiv Gandhi, won by a landslide, securing 404 of the 491 seats it contested in the sympathy wave in the wake of the assassination of Mrs Gandhi.
Congress leaders see this as proof of the party having come out of the Emergency shadow. “If Mrs Gandhi was a hated figure, the party would not have bounced back in 1980 and the country would not have mourned her death and given the Congress such a huge mandate in 1984, the only time a party has crossed 400 seats in Lok Sabha,” a Congress leader said.
In 1985, the Congress added 10 more seats to its 404 tally when deferred Lok Sabha elections were held in Punjab and Assam.
However, another leader, on the condition of anonymity, called the 1980 and 1984 results aberrations – reflecting the “disaster” that was the Janata government experiment and the shock the country was in due to the first-ever assassination of a sitting PM.
According to this leader, the impact of the Emergency, in both the disillusionment with the Congress and the opening of doors to the Opposition, set in after 1984. After that election, the Congress downslide in votes began, with the party governments founded in 1991, and from 2004-2014, being coalitions. In the 1989 and 1991 Lok Sabha polls, its vote share was 39.5% and 36.4%, respectively, and has since then never crossed the 30% mark.
But the damage to the party went beyond numbers. The party whose leaders were crucial to the Independence struggle, to the fight for people’s rights under British rule, would never be viewed the same way again.
