At midnight on 25 June 1975, India - a young democracy and the world's largest - froze.
Then prime minister Indira Gandhi had just declared a nationwide Emergency. Civil liberties were suspended, opposition leaders jailed, the press gagged, and the constitution turned into a tool of absolute executive power. For the next 21 months, India was technically still a democracy but functioned like anything but.
The trigger? A bombshell verdict by the Allahabad High Court had found Gandhi guilty of electoral malpractice and invalidated her 1971 election win. Facing political disqualification and a rising wave of street protests led by veteran socialist leader Jayaprakash Narayan, Gandhi chose to declare an "internal emergency" under Article 352 of the constitution, citing threats to national stability.
As historian Srinath Raghavan notes in his new book on Indira Gandhi, the constitution did allow wide-ranging powers during an Emergency. But what followed was "extraordinary and unprecedented strengthening of executive power... untrammelled by judicial scrutiny".
Over 110,000 people were arrested, including major opposition political figures such as Morarji Desai, Jyoti Basu and LK Advani. Bans were slapped on groups from the right-wing to the far-left. Prisons were overcrowded and torture was routine.
The courts, stripped of independence, offered little resistance. In Uttar Pradesh, which jailed the highest number of detainees, not a single detention order was overturned. "No citizen could move the courts for enforcement of their fundamental rights," writes Raghavan.
During a controversial family planning campaign, an estimated 11 million Indians were sterilised - many by coercion. Though officially state-run, the programme was widely believed to be orchestrated by Sanjay Gandhi, the unelected son of Indira Gandhi. Many believe a shadowy second government, led by Sanjay, wielded unchecked power behind the scenes.
The poor were hit hardest. Cash incentives for surgery often equalled a month's income or more. In one Delhi neighbourhood near the Uttar Pradesh border - derisively dubbed "Castration Colony" (places where forced sterilisation programmes took place) - women reportedly said they'd been made bewas (widows) by the state as "our men are no longer men". Police in Uttar Pradesh alone recorded over 240 violent incidents tied to the programme.
I first read about The Emergency in Salmon Rushdie's novel, Midnight Children. (Although, since the style is magic realism and I knew little Indian history, at the time, I didn't know how much was...
I first read about The Emergency in Salmon Rushdie's novel, Midnight Children. (Although, since the style is magic realism and I knew little Indian history, at the time, I didn't know how much was true.)
Here's a bit from Wikipedia about it:
Saleem later becomes involved with the Indira Gandhi-proclaimed Emergency and her son Sanjay's "cleansing" of the Jama Masjid slum. For a time Saleem is held as a political prisoner; these passages contain scathing criticisms of Indira Gandhi's over-reach during the Emergency as well as a personal lust for power bordering on godhood.
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In 1984 Prime Minister Indira Gandhi brought an action against the book in the British courts, claiming to have been defamed by a single sentence in the penultimate paragraph of chapter 28, in which her son Sanjay Gandhi was said to have had a hold over his mother by his accusing her of contributing to his father Feroze Gandhi's death through her neglect. The case was settled out of court when Salman Rushdie agreed to remove the offending sentence.
This article describes the connection to other countries:
This article describes the connection to other countries:
In fact, Indira Gandhi was pressed by Western democracies to implement a crash sterilization program to control India’s population. The Western countries’ lobby backed the sterilization program after the Emergency was imposed, even when her own advisers were unwilling to support it. The international push was so extreme that in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson refused to provide food aid to India—at the time threatened by famine—until it agreed to incentivize sterilization. Thus, steps taken by the Indian government, such as promoting IUDs and sterilizations, can be seen as a response to the pressure from organizations like the World Bank, International Planned Parenthood Federation, United Nation Fund for Population Activities, and USAID. Instead of helping people with family planning, such programs forced the contraceptive methods on the reluctant populace for cash incentives.
It is crucial to note that mass sterilization was not introduced during the Emergency, but was used as a method of contraception for a long time even before this event. Similarly, various initiatives that would be part of the policy, such as vasectomy camps, positive and negative incentives, and compulsory sterilization, were also practiced and perfected in different states before the Emergency. What made mass sterilization during the Emergency unique was the aggressiveness with which it was enforced. None of the previous family planning programs were even close to the numbers, reach, and magnitude achieved by Emergency-era mass sterilization programs. Thus, the political rationale for the compulsory sterilization policy was much stronger than its demographic objectives.
Here's the beginning of the article:
I first read about The Emergency in Salmon Rushdie's novel, Midnight Children. (Although, since the style is magic realism and I knew little Indian history, at the time, I didn't know how much was true.)
Here's a bit from Wikipedia about it:
...
I read about the emergency in the book A Fine balance by Mistry. It's an excellent novel with sad content and very human likeable characters.
This article describes the connection to other countries: