Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government is all set to launch a big-bang observation of the 50 years since the declaration of the Emergency, reminding people of the dark chapter in India’s democracy.
On June 25, 1975, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of the Congress party had imposed an Emergency in the country, citing a threat to internal stability. During this period, the people’s democratic and fundamental rights were trampled upon. In the words of political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot, the Emergency was “India’s first experiment with authoritarianism.”
India’s Constitution originally allowed the declaration of a national Emergency when the security of India or a part of it is threatened by war, external aggression, or internal disturbance.
Gandhi cited opposition-led protests to use the third ground — internal disturbance — to proclaim the Emergency. After her fall from power in 1977, the Janata Party government amended the Constitution to replace “internal disturbance” with “armed rebellion.”
The 21-month period of Emergency saw widespread incarceration of opposition politicians, rights activists, and journalists. Incidents like forced sterilizations and suppression of dissent through the infamous Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA), which allowed prolonged incarceration without trial, were among the horrors of that period.
However, many of the arrested politicians were released after the Emergency was lifted. In the elections that followed in March 1977, voters swept Gandhi out of power in an anti-Congress storm.
In a recent interview with The Diplomat, Srinath Raghavan, author of the 2025 book, “Indira Gandhi and the Years that Transformed India,” said that though the Janata Party government reversed “the worst aspects of the damage done to the Constitution during the Emergency,” Indian democracy “never fully recovered from the institutional and normative damage.”
Highlighting this dark chapter of Indian democracy allows the BJP to remind people of the undemocratic nature of the Congress Party, their principal rival. Gandhi’s grandson, Rahul Gandhi, is the leader of the opposition in the lower house of the Indian Parliament.
Rekindling Memories
Speaking on the issue on June 24, 2024, Modi had said that the new generation of India will never forget that “the Constitution of India was completely rejected, every part of the Constitution was torn to pieces, the country was turned into a prison, and democracy was completely suppressed.”
Last July, the Modi government announced that June 25 would be annually observed as Samvidhan Hatya Divas (Constitution murder day) in a bid to highlight the Congress Party’s lack of regard for the Constitution.
However, Modi government’s remembrance of Gandhi’s 21-month undemocratic rule comes at a time when the BJP’s opponents, including the Congress, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray), and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) have been alleging that a state of “undeclared emergency” is in place in India since Modi took charge in 2014.
Modi’s right-wing conservative, Hindu nationalist rule unleashed a form of majoritarian governance that has led to increasing hate speech and hate crimes, and marginalization of the minorities, especially Muslims and Christians.
In recent years, Rahul Gandhi has been seen carrying a pocket-sized copy of the Constitution and has repeatedly described his party’s battle against the Modi regime as one of protecting the Constitution.
On June 18, after the eastern state of West Bengal received a letter from the Union government, asking for June 25 to be celebrated as Samvidhan Hatya Divas, Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, one of India’s leading opposition leaders, objected to it. She alleged that the constitutional values and democracy were being trampled every day under Modi rule.
“Is there any democracy left in India? They can celebrate ‘Democracy Hatya Divas’ every day,” Banerjee said.
In a June 22 article in the party’s website, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), India’s largest Leftist party, said that the Modi government’s “posturing” is “an attempt to camouflage the RSS-BJP’s own most obnoxious assault on Indian democracy, as it has unfolded over the past eleven years.” The RSS or Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is the ideological-organizational parent of Modi’s BJP.
Neo-Emergency
Apart from political opponents, rights activists, journalists, and academics have also drawn parallels between Gandhi’s overt and formal Emergency and Modi’s subtle and informal authoritarianism.
According to James Manor, an emeritus professor at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, BJP leaders are creating a new kind of political order that is an example of “competitive authoritarianism” and have “mounted a broad assault on democratic institutions, norms and practices.”
Manor noted that the BJP’s drive for top-down control has targeted Parliament, the Cabinet, government, the Election Commission, the media, and many other institutions and interest groups.
“Because the new order seeks to create a one-man government, with adulation focused on a single leader, it is more a cult than a well-rooted and institutionalized system,” he opined.
If Gandhi’s Emergency saw her coterie’s takeover of all important institutions, the Modi regime has been accused of manipulating and controlling people in bureaucracy, statutory institutions, investigating agencies, and even the judiciary and the armed forces to push through the government’s agenda.
If the Gandhi government during 1975-77 suspended rights outright, the Modi era has seen a gradual weakening of rights-based laws and toughening of anti-terror laws and their use on critics.
Like Gandhi’s authoritarian stint, the Modi regime has also looked for the centralization of power.
Gandhi’s Emergency formally imposed press censorship. In the Modi era, India’s shrinking space for freedom of the press and even academia has emerged as a major point of discourse.
In 2018, when the Modi government first remembered the Emergency in a big way, Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)(Liberation), one of India’s notable Left parties, suspected that the government was trying to “counter the growing popular perception of an undeclared Emergency” and “project the BJP as a great warrior for democracy.”
“There is no formal imposition of press censorship (under Modi rule), but this is because the press is reeling under so much fear and control that a formal censorship has become redundant,” the party had alleged in 2018.
The Differences
However, there are many notable differences. Mass arrests during Gandhi’s Emergency have made way for selectively prosecuting important individuals. The Modi regime has seen investigating agencies like the Central Bureau of Investigation, the Enforcement Directorate, and the Income Tax department targeting mostly opposition leaders and parties.
In contrast to the Gandhi government’s nationalization spree, the Modi government has its privatization spree.
Journalist Prabir Purkayastha was jailed during the Emergency as a student activist for a year under the MISA. During Modi’s rule, he spent about eight months in jail under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) for his work as a journalist.
In his 2023 book, “Keeping Up the Good Fight,” which was released shortly after his arrest, Purkayastha called the Modi era a “new powerful Emergency without a name.” He highlighted two major differences: 1)The Emergency did not have a communal agenda, and 2) it did not aim for long-lasting structural changes.
“The Emergency was described as a short-period fix; whether this was the only intent or not, it was not translated into a structure within the state. We are seeing something different today. The structure of the state is apparently the same; but it is being hollowed out,” Purkayastha wrote.
He argued that under Modi’s rule, an organized force had risen to complement state power. This organized force, which forms the political mainstream at present, “takes on any resistance that comes from the people, and there is a compact between the state and this kind of intimidation politics.”
The other difference was in the nature of oppression. During the Emergency, “there was oppression; but it was secular oppression… Overall, the Emergency government was not trying to exclude minorities,” Purkayastha said. In contrast, Modi rule wants to ensure minorities live in the country only as second-class citizens. It’s a time when the country’s secular ethos, culture, education, science, and reason face “sustained and multifarious attacks.”
In 2020, academic-turned-political activist Yogendra Yadav argued that the Emergency had become a misleading prism, as it invites one to ask the wrong questions based on false equivalences.
“Under the Narendra Modi government we are not reliving the experience of 1975-77. Our times may look better, but these may actually be worse than the Emergency,” he wrote, adding, “The danger is not that we may face another Emergency, but that we are in the midst of a democracy capture.”
In his interview with The Diplomat, Raghavan called the parallels between Gandhi’s Emergency and Modi’s rule as unilluminating. The explicit authoritarianism of the Emergency is not comparable with what is happening now, he argued.
“Instead of reading history for dubious parallels, we should use it to understand in what ways the present is different from the past,” he said.
For the people, one can only hope that widespread discussions around authoritarianism, of whichever form and sort, would help develop a better understanding of the democratic space that India’s Constitution allows its citizens. This should also help one understand how authoritarianism works, including in the present context of Modi’s rule.