Advanced Constitutional History Project

The Darkest Hour of Democracy in India

Amana Ranjan 210109 3rd Year

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

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 election fraud 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 antigovernment 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

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

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

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.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books
Tarlo,Emma, Unsettling memories: narratives of India's "emergency", Permanent Black, Delhi, 2003 India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy, Ramachandra Guha, 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-theemergency.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