50 Years of the Indian Emergency: Lessons for Democracy
Edited by Peter Ronald deSouza and Harsh Sethi
Orient BlackSwan, 338 pages, Rs 1025

The Emergency remains the most critical event in the history of independent India. As the nation marks the fiftieth anniversary of that calamity, there have been debates and discussions about what it meant for our democracy. 

Several books have been published in recent years on this subject, in the form of memoirs as well as critical analysis. ‘50 Years of the Indian Emergency: Lessons for Democracy’, edited by Peter Ronald deSouza (former director of IIAS, Shimla,) and Harsh Sethi (long-time consulting editor of ‘Seminar’), stands out among the lot. This collection of essays examines the Emergency and its aftermath from diverse perspectives – political, historical, legal, economic, philosophical, experiential and cultural, among others. 

Bringing together leading scholars and writers, it explores how the Emergency transformed Indian polity, and shaped law enforcement and penal practices, the media, student movements, judicial responses, subaltern politics and literary expression, and examines why analysis of the Emergency is still relevant to political discourse in India today.

For example, Anand Kumar, a student leader in the seventies, writes on the controversial aspects of the Emergency Raj; Pamela Philipose, a veteran journalist and commentator, focuses on the role some newspapers and journals played in resisting the establishment; Gyan Prakash, the Princeton historian who wrote ‘Emergency Chronicles’ (2018), offers deep reading of socialist Madhu Dandawate’s prison letters; noted political scientist Gopal Guru gives a broader perspective in ‘Debating the Idea of Freedom (In the Context of 25 June 1975)’; and noted Gandhi scholar Tridip Suhrud critically evaluates Vinoba Bhave’s controversial stance in ‘Anushashan Parva: The Dictatorship of the Acharya’. Peter Ronald deSouza raises not only the oft-asked question, Why did Indira Gandhi impose the Emergency, but also the less discussed one, Why did She Lift It? (In a detailed analysis of the framework of her decision-making, he makes clear the dilemma she faced, which, as the author puts it, was reconciling the fact of being Nehru’s daughter with the fact of being Sanjay’s mother.)

In the introduction to the volume, ‘Revisiting the Emergency’, the editors first contextualize the event in the many dimensions – internal, external, political, economical – without prejudging the prime minister, before presenting five frameworks to understand the event. This leads to the lessons this period offers for democracy, and finally a comparison between then and now, in terms of the parameters of democracy.

’50 years of the Indian Emergency’, on the whole, is without doubt indispensable reading as it makes available in a single volume multiple aspects of the key event, as it grapples to make sense of not only the larger questions raise by the Emergency but also its impact on personal lives.