JUNE 2015 marked the beginning of the 40th anniversary of the Emergency. For a few days, mainstream and social media were swamped in the memories of this 21-month authoritarian interlude in the history of Indian democracy. Politicians and journalists who had felt the sharp edge of this dark episode played a useful role in rekindling public memory and shaping those of the generations that were born after those grim months. The patriarch of the BJP and a veteran of those times, L.K. Advani, stepped out of the shadows to which he had been consigned and warned that the repetition of that ghastly event was very much possible.

Advani’s circumlocutory remarks touched off a sharp discussion on the state of our public institutions and the apparent drive towards centralization in the present government. Prime Minister Narendra Modi joined the debate a bit later. Speaking on the anniversary of Jayaprakash Narayan’s birth in October, he observed that the Emergency was the ‘biggest blow to democracy’ and yet Indian democracy ‘came out stronger.’ The Emergency, he added, should be a constant reminder of our ‘commitment towards democracy and freedom of press.’

 

The notion of the Emergency as a memento mori also tinctures much of the new writing about that period. Coomi Kapoor’s memoir, published to coincide with the anniversary, captured the ease with which the top establishment and elites – many of whom remain prominent in public life – slid into complicity with this reign of oppression. The obverse of this is the slurring over of the uncomfortable questions and episodes relating to the Emergency in the memoirs of President Pranab Mukherjee. There are limitations, however, to treating the Emergency solely as a morality play. While cataloguing its atrocities and petty vendettas performs a useful function, it leaves us knowing more and more about less and less. And the larger questions about the causes and consequences of the Emergency remain mostly untouched.

To be sure, there is an older body of work that sought to tackle these questions. The Emergency in these accounts was mostly traced to personality: the authoritarian instincts of Indira Gandhi and her relentless drive for power; or as jointly scripted by Indira Gandhi and Jayaprakash Narayan (‘JP’), neither of whom cared much for the niceties of parliamentary democracy. Marxists and modernization theorists, in contrast, underlined the need for structural explanations: the former saw it as a crisis of Indian capitalism, while the latter attributed it to growing popular demands on weak public institutions. While these explanations remain useful to varying extents, they do not take an adequately long and broad view of these events.

Instead of seeing the Emergency as the coming to head of a crisis, be it personal or structural, it will be more useful to understand it as the product of a conjuncture and a point of inflection in the long 1970s – a hinge period stretching from the mid ’60s to the mid ’80s when the contemporary history of India turned. The conjuncture that framed the Emergency was characterized by the erosion of the Congress party’s dominance, significant changes in the political economy of India, and important shifts in the global order. Only by placing the Emergency in such an expansive context can we come to terms with what it meant, and continues to mean, for India.

 

Let us start with the decline of the Congress’s hold on the polity. The elections of 1967 came as a severe jolt to the party and the prime minister who was already at odds with the group of senior regional leaders known as the ‘Syndicate’. In these elections, the Congress’s vote share dropped four percentage points from 1962 and its share of seats in Parliament dipped to 283 in a house of 520. The party lost power in eight major North Indian states and the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The only consolation for Indira Gandhi was that the stalwarts of the Syndicate were trounced in their own constituencies. Sensing that the party was at its weakest, she decided to go for a complete organizational makeover. She moved against the Syndicate, split the party and took it on a leftward course.

The received wisdom is that by wrecking the old Congress party and centralizing power in her own hands, Indira Gandhi set in motion a process of rapid institutional decay. This, in turn, left her incapable of handling the mounting popular protests against her government within a democratic framework, thus leading to the imposition of an Emergency.¹ This view, however, idealizes the old Congress which had strong provincial as well as central leaderships, and which relied on regional leadership to tend and deliver ‘vote banks’ and to transmit information from local to national levels. In fact, as Indira Gandhi realized within weeks of taking over as prime minister, ‘Congress as a party is dormant and inactive.’² And this judgement was amply borne out by the party’s performance in 1967.

 

The conventional view also errs in attributing her centralizing style simply to her personal disposition. To be sure, Gandhi did take a dim view of the latitude given by her father to his senior colleagues in the states and believed that they had to be cut to size. But her drive to split the party also stemmed from an awareness that the Congress was no longer capable of being an instrument of change in, the Indian polity, economy and society. This was particularly problematic because during the Nehru years the state had inserted itself into society in unprecedented ways and to an unanticipated degree. In consequence, popular expectations of the state had ballooned during these years. As Indira Gandhi noted, ‘We are at a stage of development …where the gap between expectations and resources for meeting them is at the widest. Political awareness is also coming up sharply.’³

Whatever her intentions in splitting the party, she signally failed to consider how the enormous powers at her disposal could be used to revitalize the party along new lines. Some steps were taken to promote provincial leaders from the lower castes and to encourage the Youth Congress. But this succeeded only to a limited extent – mainly in the southern states of Karnataka and Kerala. By mouthing a radical rhetoric and projecting herself – over the heads of all local leaders – directly to the voters, she managed to secure a massive victory in the elections of 1971. The deft and decisive handling of the Bangladesh crisis that year sent her standing to stratospheric heights. But her extraordinary political standing proved to be something of a mirage. When popular unrest began to bubble up a couple of years later, it was naturally targeted against her own person. In coping with the Nav Nirman and JP movements, she fell back on the support of the government machinery, especially the bureaucracy, and on a small group of loyalists, including Sanjay Gandhi.

 

The immediate events leading to the imposition of Emergency are well known. Less understood is the point that the Emergency was also the outcome of a contest between two sets of ideas that had been brewing throughout Indira Gandhi’s tenure, if not earlier still. On the one hand, there was an uneasy coexistence between the notions of the state and democracy: between the simplicity of the elite using the power of the state to reshape society and the rough-and-tumble of democratic politics that afforded an opportunity for the society to take charge of its own destiny. Indeed, the bureaucratic elite was most enthusiastic in its reception of the Emergency. B.K. Nehru, to take but one example, advised her that the ‘Emergency should be taken advantage of while it lasts’ to install ‘a strong executive at the Centre capable of taking tough, unpleasant and unpopular decisions.’⁴

 

On the other hand, there was the struggle between the ideas of democracy and constitutionalism. The radical policies adopted by Gandhi resulted in a prolonged stand-off with the Supreme Court of India. A key point of contention was the competence of parliament to amend the fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution, especially the right to property. The serial challenges by the court on this front led her to move an even stronger set of constitutional amendments during the Emergency that aimed at an enormous concentration of power in the prime minister’s hands.

Yet, Indira Gandhi refrained from a wholesale modification of the Constitution and the political system in ways that would have made her position unassailable. Suggestions for revising the Constitution were afloat in the Congress party from early on in the Emergency. Just three days after its imposition, Karan Singh, Minister of Health and Family Planning, wrote to the prime minister that the ‘question of evolving a constitutional structure better suited to the requirements and genius of the nation has now to be squarely faced.’⁵ A committee was constituted under Swaran Singh to look into this matter. Ideas on changing the Constitution flew thick and fast. Cabinet minister Bansi Lal insisted that the committee should recommend changes that would give Indira Gandhi lifelong power.⁶ B.K. Nehru advised her to usher in a presidential system on the French model and weaken the federal structure by making the governor the ‘de facto agent of the Centre.’

The prime minister’s close political advisors developed these suggestions in a manner that dispensed with any checks and balances on the executive and that ‘twisted the constitution in an unambiguously authoritarian direction.’⁷ Ironically, it was the galloping enthusiasm of her advisors that gave Indira Gandhi pause. Standing at the cusp of almost absolute power apparently made her more sensitive to both its potential and dangers. In the event, the constitutional amendments brought in during the Emergency were subsequently repealed by the Janata government.

 

So, the Emergency failed to arrest the secular decline of the Congress party’s dominant position. Yet it had other, far-reaching consequences for Indian politics. In the first place, it pushed dynastic politics to the forefront. Through these years, Indira Gandhi not only gave Sanjay Gandhi a prominent role in the grey zone between the party and the state, but did so even at the cost of shunting aside older, trusted bureaucratic advisors. Sanjay Gandhi, in turn, promoted both in the Youth Congress and the mother party a host of young leaders. A roster of those who rose up back then owing to his patronage reads like a who’s who of the party in the last 15-20 years. It is this generation of young leaders who cemented the centrality of the Nehru-Gandhi family in the Congress.

 

Young politicians – often from a student politics background – figured prominently on the other side of the fence too. The JP movement and the Emergency were the cradle for future generations of leaders, both of the BJP and the various OBC parties in North India that came out of Lohiaite socialist politics. Even South Indian parties like the DMK saw an influx of a generation of young leaders – most prominently M.K. Stalin, son of Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi, whose opposition to the Emergency led to his removal in 1976. The induction of these new politicians also led to a dramatic shift away from the prim, bourgeois politics of the Nehru era. The hold of these norms had already been shaken by the tactics adopted by Indira Gandhi during her first term in office, but the mid-1970s witnessed the arrival of a ‘troubling’ vernacular – if not lumpen – style in Indian politics, one that persists to date.

In hindsight, the foremost beneficiary of the Emergency was the Hindu right. The RSS’s participation in the JP movement as well as the civil disobedience against the government during the Emergency gave it – notwithstanding some craven letters by its supremo to the prime minister – a legitimacy that it had hitherto lacked. The mobilization of RSS cadres during the JP movement also provided the template for the populist Hindutva mobilizations of the late ’80s and the early ’90s. In more tangible political terms, the Jana Sangh got its first taste of national power, albeit in a cacophonic coalition, following Indira Gandhi’s ouster in the elections of 1977. Looking back after the 2014 elections it is difficult not to see the Emergency as a major point of inflection in Indian politics.

The economic aspect of the conjuncture of the mid-1970s had equally lasting consequences. In the run-up to the Emergency, the Indian economy was buckling under a set of cumulative strains caused by the Bangladesh refugee crisis and war with Pakistan, the ensuing termination of aid by the United States, the recurrent failure of monsoons, and the international oil crisis following the Arab-Israeli war of 1973. The oil shock made a deep dent on the Indian economy. There was a rapid slide in balance of payments and rampant inflation from mid-1973 to September 1974. At its peak during this period, inflation touched 33 per cent.

 

This period also witnessed the beginnings of important changes in India’s political economy. Following the poor showing of her party in the 1967 elections, Gandhi began to recast various aspects of the Nehruvian model of state-led economic development. Faced with recurrent monsoon failures and the looming threat of famine, she had already given the go ahead for the adoption of the ‘Green Revolution’ technology to boost agricultural output. The approach called for the use of imported high yielding strains of staple crops and chemical fertilizers, the availability of assured water supply and mechanized harvesting equipment: all of which depended on the provision of government subsidies and support.⁸ The adoption of the new agriculture strategy paid rich dividends, though unequally distributed. Between 1965-66 and 1971-72, the production of wheat doubled. However, the yield and output of paddy – India’s largest food grain crop – did not rise as significantly. The green revolution thus largely benefited the wheat growing states of Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh. Yet, India’s GDP also rose, growing at six per cent a year from 1967-68 to 1970-71; although industrial performance remained sluggish.

 

Regional disparities apart, there were important social consequences. In areas where it succeeded, the green revolution enhanced the power of the rich and middle peasantry. These were the only groups that possessed the requisite economic muscle to take advantage of the agricultural strategy promoted by the government. The disparity between them and the poor peasants and agricultural labourers increased dramatically. The rise of the middle peasantry, most of whom belonged to the so-called backward castes, had major political implications as well. Since the 1950s, they had been unhappy with the Congress party for its excessive reliance on the landed elites who also hailed from the upper castes as well as the Nehruvian state’s focus on industrialization as opposed to agriculture. The reverses suffered by the Congress in the 1967 elections were to a large extent owing to the defection of these middle peasant groups from the party’s fold. The green revolution enhanced their political as well as economic clout, thereby ensuring that agricultural subsidies became an entrenched feature of the Indian economy.

As part of her political turn to the left at this time, Indira Gandhi also adopted more ‘radical’ economic policies such as nationalizing banks, insurance companies and the coal industry; passing the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Act to closely regulate businesses and the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act to comprehensively control foreign investment in India. She also introduced a slew of central government schemes to assist landless labourers, and small and marginal farmers to increase their income and consumption. These policies promised economic redemption for targeted groups. And in so doing, they transformed these and other groups’ expectations of the Indian state. They also left a deep imprint on the Indian state’s approach to welfare and poverty alleviation schemes. This ‘socialist’ phase in economic policy continued until 1973, when the mounting economic crisis forced Indira Gandhi to adopt a more pragmatic stance.

 

From mid-1973, the government began pruning its expenditure and tightening monetary policy. In July 1974, Gandhi introduced a rather tough package of anti-inflationary policies – fiscal, monetary and income policy measures – by means of a supplementary budget and by ordinances. Many of her senior colleagues and left-leaning advisors warned her that these measures would be politically costly. Yet she chose to back her team of liberal economic advisors and officials, including a certain Manmohan Singh. By the end of 1974, inflation was reined in.

To stabilize the current account of balance of payments, Gandhi also sought assistance from the IMF. Perhaps the clearest indication of the end of ‘socialist’ phase was the brutal crackdown on the railway strike of May 1974. In the road leading to the Emergency, then, Gandhi was turning to the right in economics as well as politics. She now lent her ear to advisors like B.K. Nehru, who urged her to abandon ‘garibi hatao’ for ‘utpadan barhao’ or increased production, and called for more business friendly policies.

After the Emergency was imposed, Indira Gandhi announced a Twenty Point Programme of economic and social change. Her left-leaning advisors as well as the CPI (which remained allied with her through this period) had initially wanted this programme to include the nationalization of textile industry. The idea was detested by other advisors led by P.N. Dhar. In the event, Indira Gandhi cleverly asked the Communist leaders to discuss this with P.N. Haksar, the architect of her ‘socialist’ policies. Haksar had by this time fallen out with Gandhi owing to her support for her son. Meeting the CPI leadership, he criticized the plan as adding ‘economic adventurism to the political adventurism which the Emergency was.’⁹

 

In fact, the components of the Twenty Point Programme relating to industry slotted in smoothly with the ideas suggested by the likes of B.K. Nehru. Facilitating and accelerating private sector activity was a key part of the government’s economic agenda during the Emergency. Big businesses were naturally pleased with this turn in policy. Only weeks before the Emergency was revoked, J.R.D. Tata lauded the ‘refreshingly pragmatic and result oriented approach’ that had led to ‘conditions of discipline, productivity, industrial peace, price stability and widespread involvement necessary to achieve rapid economic growth.’

Economic data bear this out. If we control for the year 1979, when Indian GDP fell by five per cent owing to the second oil shock following the Iranian revolution, India’s economic growth in the second half of the 1970s averaged a healthy six per cent – a figure that is comparable to the ‘boom’ of the 1980s. In other words, India’s economy entered a high growth trajectory in the mid-1970s, not early 1980s or later still. The increase in per capita GDP was accompanied by an increase in productivity owing to higher capital investment. In particular, there was a spectacular rise in private investment since the mid-1970s. Clearly the ‘animal spirits’ of Indian capital bean to rise from around this time. The pro-business tilt inaugurated in the mid-1970s was continued and intensified during Gandhi’s last term in office between 1980 and 1984. The relaxation of the industrial licensing regime and focus on export promotion in the mid-1970s presaged the larger changes that would come about in the early 1990s.

 

The international dimensions of the mid-1970s conjuncture also foreshadowed the later shifts in India’s engagement with the world. The international context to the Emergency was provided, in the first place, by the changing character of the Cold War. The American opening to China and exit from Vietnam as well as the détente between the superpowers and arms controls treaties changed the complexion of the Cold War. The Bangladesh crisis of 1971 had already pushed India closer to the USSR leading to a serious breakdown in ties with the US, including the suspension of economic aid. These developments and the impairing of India’s non-aligned credentials meant that India could no longer rely on the competitive aid policies of the superpowers in supporting its own economic development.

Although the Soviet Union stood by Indira Gandhi through the Emergency, she was uncomfortable about India’s increased dependence on Moscow. This coupled with the need to assuage public opinion in Europe and America led her to deal with the Soviet Union more at arm’s length. Interestingly, during these years she also sought to revive diplomatic relations with China. Following the Sino-Soviet clashes in 1969, Mao Zedong had sought to reach out to India, in a bid to prevent an Indo-Soviet entente against China. Gandhi reciprocated by offering to explore ways of achieving a diplomatic thaw. The onset of the Bangladesh crisis put these efforts on ice, as the two countries found themselves ranged on opposite sides. Thereafter, until 1974, China used its veto – at the behest of Pakistan – to block the entry of Bangladesh into the UN. Things began to look up thereafter, and by 1976 Indira Gandhi was ready to resume the exchange of ambassadors (which had not happened since 1961) and sent K.R. Narayanan as the envoy to China. This paved the way for the subsequent improvement in ties between the two countries.

 

The second aspect of the international context was incipient globalization. The oil shock of 1973 that sent inflation rampaging through large parts of the world underscored the extent to which the world economy was getting interconnected. This spiralling inflation played a significant role in triggering popular protests against the government – protests that metamorphosed into the JP movement and subsequently led to the imposition of the Emergency.

The oil shock of 1973 created a fresh set of challenges in the domain of international economics. It was around this time that the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) began to play an active role on the global stage. Like her father, Indira Gandhi did not much care for the NAM. But the movement’s increasing prominence in demanding a New International Economic Order (NIEO) and in economic negotiations between the First and Third Worlds made it imperative for India to engage with it more deeply. It was a measure of Indira’s political realism that while supporting the calls for NIEO she also realized that India’s own interests may not be best served by unconditionally supporting the NAM. She believed that the rigid stance adopted by the NAM on international economic issues was hurting India’s interests.

 

As a policy planning document noted in June 1975, ‘It is not clear what, if anything, we have gained from going along with the consensus in the non-aligned and developing countries forum.’¹⁰ Accordingly India’s economic diplomacy was geared more to securing its interests. Espousal of Third World causes, a conspicuous feature of Indira Gandhi’s early foreign policy, quietly gave way to a more pragmatic pursuit of interests vis-à-vis both the developed and developing countries.

The Emergency was clearly the product of several political, economic and international trends and forces that converged in the mid-1970s. In each of these domains it also proved to be a significant point of inflection. Nevertheless, its consequences played out only over the remainder of the long 1970s. And, in many ways, they remain with us today. In particular, it continues to linger in public memory as a warning against the temptation of authoritarian modes of governance in the face of messy democratic politics. Yet the real import of the Emergency can only be grasped when we treat it as what it is – history.

 

Footnotes:

1. Stanley Kochanek, ‘Mrs. Gandhi’s Pyramid: The New Congress’ in Henry C. Hart (ed.), Indira Gandhi’s India. Westview, Boulder, 1976; James Manor, ‘Parties and the Party System’ in Partha Chatterjee (ed.), State and Politics in India. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1997; Myron Weiner, The Indian Paradox: Essays in Indian Politics. Sage, New Delhi, 1989, pp. 220-21, 226-27; Lloyd Rudolph and Susanne Rudolph, In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of the Indian State. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1987.

2. Indira Gandhi to Haksar, n.d. (c. late February 1966), Correspondence with Indira Gandhi, Haksar Papers (I & II Installments), Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.

3. ‘Indira Gandhi on the Role of the Public Sector: Interview with P.N. Dhar’, Citizen and Weekend Review 1(22), 1970, reproduced in P.N. Dhar, The Evolution of Economic Policy in India: Selected Essays. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2003, p. 205.

4. B.K. Nehru to Indira Gandhi, 9 September 1975, Correspondence with Indira Gandhi, B.K. Nehru Papers, NMML.

5. Note for Indira Gandhi, 28 June 1975, Jawaid Alam (ed.), Kashmir and Beyond 1966-84: Select Correspondence Between Indira Gandhi and Karan Singh. New Delhi, Penguin, 2011, p. 279.

6. Vasant Sathe, Memoirs of a Rationalist. Stellar Publishers, New Delhi, 2006, p. 126.

7. P.N. Dhar, Indira Gandhi, The ‘Emergency’, and Indian Democracy. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2000, pp. 336-37.

8. On the implementation of the Green Revolution, see, C. Subramaniam, The New Strategy in Indian Agriculture: The First Decade and After. Vikas Publishing House, New Delhi, 1979.

9. Mohit Sen, A Traveller and the Road: The Journey of an Indian Communist. Rupa, New Delhi, 2013, p. 349.

10. Ministry of External Affairs, Policy Planning Papers No. 31/75 on international negotiations on questions relating to oil, petro-dollars and raw materials, 28 June 1975, Subject File 84, Haskar Papers (I & II Installments), NMML.