DARK SHADOWS OF EMERGENCY!
Subhash Gatade
25th June 2025 happened to be the fiftieth year of the internal emergency imposed by the then Indira Gandhi regime. Much has changed during all these years but till date we are still far away from a balanced review of that period.
What really prompted Indira Gandhi to declare emergency , whether drive for personal power was the key factor, as has been reiterated multiple times, if that was the case then why did she announce elections in the year 1977, when she had credible reports that the this ’suspension of democracy’ had not witnessed the resistance which was expected
On the other hand, whether it could be said that she correctly perceived how sinister forces in the subcontinent were hell bent on sabotaging the democratic experiment at the behest of imperialist powers , who were even found to be provoking police and security forces to pursue their dubious agenda.
No doubt such a holistic review is a need of the hour but one thing cannot be denied that the biggest beneficiary of this whole exercise has been the Hindutva rightwing forces who are keen to transform India into a Hindu Rashtra]
Every democratic experiment has its dark spots, detours and about-turns.
India, the “biggest democracy in the world”, is no exception. The bold experiment it began more than seventy eight years ago was unique for the sheer number of poor and underprivileged it affected and the entrenched social divides they inherited.
The Internal Emergency declared on 25 June 1975—within a few short decades of this experiment—could be called the first dark spot on free India. It is popularly said that the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi regime wanted to save itself from the crisis brought on by decisions of the Supreme Court that were not in its favour, amid growing mass discontent over its policies.
This ’dark chapter’ completed fifty years this month.
For the present ruling dispensation – which has been accused time and again of attacking the Constitution, and which had even announced that it will change the Constitution, once it crosses ’400 seats’ while preparing for the 2024 elections – commemorated the day as ’Samvidhan Hatya Diwas’ presenting itself as the great saviour of the Constitution.
It is a different matter that within the broad opposition spectrum there is now growing realisation that shadows of that period have refused to get washed away and in fact they have now become darker. What we are witnessing that across this broad spectrum there is an increasing talk of an undeclared emegency. Right from journalists, activists, cultural workers to public intellectuals such voices are increasingly being heard.
Underlining routine demonisation of government critics, propoagation of hate and bigotry by people in power, vilification of protests – like branding protesting farmers as “Khalistanis” and supporters of caste census as “urban naxals -, disproportionate targetting of marginalised groups as dalits and minorities the main opposition party namely Congress , explained how Indian democracy has been under a systematic and dangerous attack since last 11 years which can best be described as Undeclared Emergency @11.
A leading party of the opposition namely CPM which also faced repression during emergency days was categorical enough to emphasise that the country is currently going through an undeclared Emergency. A leading light of the formation correctly differentiated between emergency then and political situation now. ’If Indira Gandhi abused the Constitution, then today the Sangh Parivar government is trying to do away with it’ quipped Pinarayi Vijayan, Chief Minister of Kerala.
II
Today it would not be suffice to restrict our attention to the prime movers of the Emergency phase, their supposed hunger for power and their alleged psychological insecurities? Definitely not. The Emergency is when power began to be centralised in the hands of the chief executive of the country and when institutional procedures were violated and a close coterie of advisers ruled the roost. It became a template for future authoritarian incursions into the democratic project, which seems to have reached fruition here since more than a decade.
Surprisingly, anniversaries come and go but some aspects of this period never receive the attention they deserve. A key observation has been that after three decades of post-Independence democracy, there was a blatant assault on democracy, but it did not face mass resistance.
It is worth contemplating about this trajectory. Elections took place periodically, education and employment spread, and multiple nation-building projects were taken up after Independence, and still, the Emergency was imposed. Does it mean democracy and its consciousness were merely formal in India, and there was a long way to go before it could become substantial and vigorous?
We fail to note that the same infirmities of democracy remain unresolved and unaddressed then and now.
For example, the fact that the Hindutva Right exposed its cowardice when its activists were put behind bars is also not discussed or challenged today.
Tapan Basu, Pradip Datta, Sumit Sarkar and other writers, in their 1993 collection, Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags: A Critique of the Hindu Right, explain how top RSS leaders reacted during the Emergency. The monograph notes, “RSS attitudes under the Emergency revealed a curious duality, reminiscent of the 1948-49 days.” While the RSS was banned and Sangh supremo Balasahab Deoras was put behind bars, he, like Golwalkar in 1948-49, “…quickly opened channels of communication with the Emergency regime, writing fairly ingratiating letters to Indira Gandhi in August and November 1975 that promised cooperation for lifting a ban (on RSS). He tried to persuade Vinoba Bhave to mediate between the RSS and the government and sought also the good offices of Sanjay Gandhi.”
Bapurao Moghe, in an article in the 24 July 1977 edition of the Sangh mouthpiece, Panchajanya, acknowledged that such letters had been written by the Sangh supremo. Lawyer and political commentator AG Noorani in his 2000 book, The RSS and the BJP, also tells us that these letters were “placed on the table of the Maharashtra Assembly on 18 October 1977”. He adds, “He wrote to the prime minister, first, on August 22, congratulating her on her speech on Independence day” and begged her to lift the ban on the RSS. He next congratulated her “as five judges of the Supreme Court have upheld the validity of your election.”
Though Indira Gandhi had won the case, it was not based on merit but a constitutional amendment with retrospective effect. In these letters, Deoras underlined that the RSS “has no connection with the movements” in Bihar and Gujarat. He ends by offering the services of “lakhs of RSS volunteers….for the national upliftment.” So, Deoras was concerned with the RSS alone in these letters, and to save his organisation from an autocratic regime, he was ready to declare that if the ban is lifted his men would be at its service. He does not ask for the release of all detenues nor to lift the Emergency, as Noorani has noted. It seems the only problem the RSS supremo had was that his organisation was banned.
When Indira Gandhi refused to budge, the Sangh supremo shot off another letter dated 16 July 1976, in which he congratulated her for her “efforts to improve relations with Pakistan and China” and declared that she has been given some wrong information about his organisation. There is no proof that Deoras and Indira Gandhi reached an agreement, but one thing is clear: RSS workers were instructed from the top to give an undertaking for their release from jail. The undertaking went like this:
“[Detenue so-and-so] agrees on affidavit that in case of my release I shall not do anything detrimental to internal security and public peace…I shall not do anything prejudicial to the present Emergency.”
This is recorded in Sanghachi Dhongbaji, written in 1977 by socialist activist Baba Adhav.
According to Adhav, Deoras acknowledged at a press conference in Delhi that he wrote twice to Indira Gandhi. Madhu Limaye, a towering figure of the socialist movement, spent 19 months in three jails that were in RSS areas and also said he knew of the RSS detainees’ letters.
Understandably, the Hindutva brigade would like to forget this past episode, which is symptomatic of the deeper malaise faced by it, where all its leading stalwarts and veterancs failed to show courage during crucial moments of struggle – first against the colonial government and later against the newly independent government.
For all its bold claims of bravery and display of courage under adverse circumstances, ( as already described) Hindutva Brigade’s behaviour during emergency was qualitatively different, when instead of demonstrating uncompromising defiance its members cringed. Still, the organisation had no qualms in projecting itself as a valiant fighter against this dark period, a trend which continues unabated.
Newspapers from Maharashtra – in the immediate aftermath of the lifting of emergency and Janata Party’s ascension to power at the Centre – were agog with news of public meetings being held under auspices of the RSS – where Deoras used to boldy claim that ’Jitam Maya’ ( We won), conveniently forgetting his letters to Indira Gandhi and his instruction to the RSS cadres – who were in jail – to write petitions for release.
As already mentioned the “dark chapter” has proved a bonanza for the Hindutva Right, as it not only hid its “curious duality” of opening channels of communication with Indira Gandhi later while also projecting itself as a leader of the “second freedom struggle”.
It also helped the Sangh Parivar gain the legitimacy it sorely lacked because of its behaviour during the anti-colonial struggle and the role of its ideology in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. At the time of Emergency, people had not yet forgotten that the Hindutva Right had stayed aloof from the anti-colonial struggle. Nor that they did not have any qualms in sharing power with the Muslim League during the Quit India Movement, when the Congress had resigned from state Assemblies.
Quite like the infirmities of democracy that can facilitate an authoritarian turn, this curious behaviour of the Hindutva Right has not got the attention it deserves.
III
No doubt, this brief period helped RSS and its affiliated organisations gain legitimacy in the eyes of the Indian people and there has been no looking back for it since then, seeds of which were laid ironically during the mass movement against corruption especially in Bihar – called as ’Bihar ( or JP) movement when Jai Prakash Narayan, a veteran of the independence struggle and once a close associate of Jawaharlal Nehru as well [https://caravanmagazine.in/essay/dangling-conversation], in his misjudgement facilitated RSS’s gaining control over the movement.
In a perceptive article veteran journalist Harish Khare brings it out very vividly where he tells us how JP’s misjudgement, wherein he glossed over the real nature of RSS, helped it establish effective organisational control over the mass upsurge and how there has been no looking back for RSS since then.
He poses a simple question:
‘[h]ow could a man like JP, so learned and so well steeped in an understanding of global forces and ideas battling it out on the boulevards in Europe, fail to foresee how his ‘total revolution’ cookie would crumble? He had no foot-soldiers, no cavalry, no artillery of his own, no tank divisions; he mistook a motley crowd of various ‘vahinis’ that had staged tableaus of streets protests and chaos in Patna and Ahmedabad as the vanguard of a revolution. The only outfit that had disciplined cadres was the RSS, and, inevitably, it acquired an operational stranglehold on the “movement.”
He further adds:
“Not only did Jayaprakash Narayan choose to be oblivious of history abroad, he even jettisoned his own understanding of the Indian realities and the nature of the RSS’s spots. He insisted that he had tried to “decommunalise them by allowing them to join our movement for total revolution. Any impartial observer would agree that this has been a significant contribution of this movement to the ideal of religious tolerance or secularism as it is called. I have thus tried to strengthen the foundation of secularism by bringing Jana Sangh and the RSS into the secular fold of total revolution.”
He further discusses how RSS, has continued to build on this JP induced respectability and how the ‘Hindutva’ crowd has covered a distance since then and how history will deal an ‘[e]qually rough, ..hand to Jayaprakash Narayan for rehabilitating the RSS as a normal political force…’
Perhaps any close student of Indian politics will have a similar question about JP’s giving a clean chit to RSS who had famously said – when the issue of RSS’s being fascist was raked up – ‘If RSS is fascist, I am also fascist’.
Interestingly Prof Apoorvanand had raised a similar question in his earlier article titled ‘In 1974, Jayaprakash Narayan included the RSS in his movement. India is still paying the price’
‘JP was as opposed to the RSS as Indira Gandhi. So why did he, a seasoned politician and someone who could have been a statesman, fail to resist the temptation of making a Faustian pact with the RSS in 1974? Had the situation in country become so precarious that there was no option but to overthrow the Congress government – and to go to any extent to achieve this?’
He continued:
‘An honest history of the JP agitation is yet to be written…
What led JP to tell India that the Congress party during its 27-year rule had failed the people and country completely? Why did he repudiate the actions of his friend Jawaharlal Nehru? Why did he announce a movement that he ambitiously called “the second freedom struggle”? Why did he copy the methods adopted during the freedom struggle such as asking the students to boycott universities and colleges for a year, calling upon people to not cooperate with the government, even going to the extent of asking the police and security forces to not obey the government?’
No doubt JP’s formal leadership of the Student -youth movement supposedly for – what he termed ’Total Revolution’ – proved a big launching pad for the RSS and its affiliated organisations, which also benefitted from his call of ’establishing Janata Sarkars and start replacing the government in many areas’, a dangerous move which further facilitated RSS’s gaining control over the grassroots of the movement.
Apart from immaturity of JP and his strategic folly – which was on public display during the Bihar movement – Prof Apoorvanand does not shy away from underlining the ’desperation of leaders like Lohia’ who were somehow keen to ’end the Congress rule’ and had no qualms in shaking ’hands with the devil.’
Like a sincere post mortem of JP’s follies, one would also require a similar scanning of the whole idea of ’anti Congressism’ presented and peddled by Lohia which had led to the formation of the Samyukta Vidhayak Dal governments in several northern states after the 1967 assembly elections and had also created a favourable space for the exclusivist politics of the RSS, when Jan Sangh – a predecessor of BJP had become part of the ruling coalition alongwith Socialists and other regional formations.
What had proved more disturbing that not only Socialists of various shades joined hands with the RSS to unseat the Congress, a section of the left also did not mind joining these experiments. Could not it foresee the long term harm such an alliance – may be a tactical one – to the cause of secularism?
While JP’s ’hasty shortcut’ in the mainstreaming of RSS or Lohia’s ’desperation to end the Congress rule’ and his rather suicidal move to ’shake hands with the devil’ and the tremendous harm all this has done to the cause of secularism, need to be debated. discussed further, perhaps it is also high time that left should also go in for serious introspection it failed to comprehend the unfolding danger before the secular fabric of the country – with such a motley combination – where it was also a marginal player.
Why is it that despite its claim of upholders of a revolutionary ideology and a legacy of revolutions in 20 th Century, its deep understanding of the danger of Fascism and Nazism and despite knowing very well how politics of Hindutva Supremacism takes inspiration from these experiments, when the moment came to take decision it showed lack of foresight and political wisdom in choosing its allies. It had no qualms in similarly prioritising democracy over secularism.
What is problematic that this is a folly which it seems to have been repeating since then.
May it be JP movement or VP singh led anti corruption movement (late 80s) or the much controversial since its inception, the Anna movement, three big movements which redefined or reconfigured the Indian politics, a significant section of the parliamentary as well as the radical left, have had no qualms in joining hands in these popular mobilisations and till date it has not deemed it necessary to revisit this trajectory and review its stand critically.
IV
Question arises how could someone like Jawahar Lal Nehru understood the danger of Communalism and envisaged strategic plans to fight it and even led a decisive fight against it till he was alive, whereas left remained largely oblivious of the Hindutva danger. In fact this ’blindness’ towards danger of Hindutva – within the left camp – is visible since late 40 s or early 50s as you rarely find much brainstorming within the left circles about how to fight the menace of rightwing – politically as well as socially.
It would be a repetition of sorts but it is worth recalling how Nehru understood the danger of communalism and compared it with the challenge of Communism.
A famous anecdote from the autobiography of Mr Y D Gundevia titled ‘Outside the Archives’ who was the Indian foreign Secreaty in the last years of Nehru, is worth sharing, where there is conversation around danger of communism and communalism. And these were Nehru’s words “
‘The danger to India, mark you is not communism. It is Hindu right-wing communalism.’
Gundevia writes further:
“..Call it obiter dicta, call it famous last words.“I have always looked upon what Jawaharlal said at this officers’ meeting that day as not only his famous last words, but one of the most prophetic pronouncements that he ever made. This was a little before the All-India Congress Conference at Bhubaneshwar, therefore December, 1963….”
Perhaps left will have to deliberate how could a Gandhi – definitely not a Marxist – understood the gravity of the challenge of Communalism and gave his life for it, how could a Nehru – a fabian Socialist – could perceive that danger , despite being in minority within the Congress at times did not lose his focus on this danger but why the left, the Communists – the bearer of the ideology of Marx – failed to do it.
In this context, there is a sincere need to mull over, what Marxist scholar and activist Ravi Sinha had underlined in a private communication :,
The poor track record of the left in the Indian mainstream politics has resulted from a combination of its own version of populism and its dogmatic aversion to Congress in all or most situations.
The fact that the left could not assess properly the mortal danger in the form of Hindutva and the traction of right-wing populism also came about because of the tendency of ignoring the political role of identities, religious sectarianism and other such cultural values. It thinks that these are shallow superstructural factors that will practically evaporate once class struggle intensifies.
This in turn can also be understood as the left not considering Modernity in the social and cultural arena as a key and desirable goal. It is part of the traditional left understanding that Modernity is an accomplice and a strategy of the western imperialism and it is conjoined with capitalism at birth.
V
‘The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk,’
This was Hegel, the great early nineteenth-century philosopher in his preface to ’Philosophy of Right’. Minerva is the goddess of wisdom in Roman mythology, accompanied or represented by an owl, but that apart, what Hegel said—philosophy can comprehend a historical situation only when the moment has passed— should inspire us to revisit the trajectory of the rightwing from margins to the centre of Indian polity with a special focus on how progressive forces in the country – especially the left – behaved.
Whether left realises the need to do undertake it is still an open question but one can continue the conversation to achieve further clarity.
While one need to wait for the left’s further response about it, it need be mentioned that a section of the liberal intellectuals / activists have been candid enough to admit how their participation in the Anna movement against corruption paved the way for the rise of the Hindu right.
Few years back the founder of the political party Swaraj Abhiyan, Yogendra Yadav, said those who participated in the Anna Hazare movement against corruption must accept they paved the way for the rise of the Hindu Right. Yadav asked in his column, “So, should the leaders and supporters of the Anna movement share the responsibility for the rise of [Prime Minister Narendra] Modi?” He admitted, “Yes, in politics you do not limit your responsibility to things you do knowingly…people like me must take part in the responsibility.”
Earlier, Prashant Bhushan, a leading lawyer and civil rights activist, had admitted that the movement misled him. He said in a TV interview that the BJP-RSS propped up the Anna movement, and had he known earlier, he would have dissociated from it. These late realisations will not immediately impact the situation. As Prof Zoya Hasan said in a lecture, in the hey-day of that movement, we were experiencing a “reshaping of democracy by majoritarian politics” led by the Indian Right.
It needs to be understood, why did some educated Indians, who are all for justice and inclusive politics and whose commitment to the Constitution is beyond doubt, get mesmerised by the “Anna Is India, India is Anna” slogan and join a movement Hindutva forces supported? Why did they refuse to listen to saner voices, cautioning them about the implicit problems in it?
How were they so taken up by the media-promoted “Anna revolution” that they neither considered the “second Mahatma’s” antecedents in Marathi chauvinism nor his silence after the 2002 communal mayhem, nor that key members of Team Anna were associated with Youth for Equality, an anti-reservation forum?
Leading journalist Rajesh Ramachandran had then cautioned that the idea of civil society having primacy over Parliament, which the Anna Movement propagated, essentially fulfilled the Sangh Parivar’s plan to rewrite the Constitution.
Prof Prabhat Patnaik, too, observed the seeds of messianism in the movement. He said it sought to substitute the collective subject—the people—by an individual. The result is reducing the role of people “merely to being supporters and cheerleaders for one man’s actions”, which is “antithetical to democracy”. Referring to Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar’s approach and comparing it with Hazare’s politics, Prof Sukhdeo Thorat had clearly warned of the dangers of hero-worshipping. “Bhakti or hero-worship in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul, but in politics, bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship,” he wrote.
There were many such cautionary signals, but none compelled the movement’s protagonists to raise questions over the agenda of the campaign. In fact, despite singing paeans to the Constitution, the overall tone of the movement was that “people’s supremacy over Parliament entails, ipso facto, Anna’s supremacy over Parliament”. This was evident, for example, when it came to adopting their version of the Lokpal Bill.
It is essential to draw the necessary lessons from these ignored warnings so that tomorrow, we do not face a similar predicament when another refurbished mahatma appears whom citizens follow again, supposedly to clear the Augean stable of Indian politics.
As we already discussed the Anna movement was not the first in independent India that arose to “eliminate corruption from public life”. In the mid-seventies in Bihar, students and the youth joined the famous movement under the leadership of freedom fighter Jayaprakash Narayan in massive numbers, along with a motley combination of non-Congress formations with the RSS and its affiliated organisations, including the Bharatiya Jana Sangh.
The movement ultimately triggered the imposition of internal emergency and later the formation of the first non-Congress government at the Centre, in which the RSS/Jana Sangh had a key role. In the later part of the eighties, a movement led by former prime minister VP Singh, who was earlier with the Congress, also targeted the alleged acts of omission and commission in the Bofors deal. Non-Congress formations, including the BJP and its parent RSS, supported it.
These anti-corruption movements focused on key individuals or the alleged irregularities under their watch. They always glossed over the structural reasons for corruption, which is illegal loot in the eyes of citizens. They never tried to see how corruption is systemic and flows from the economic policies of governments.
But the commonality between these anti-corruption movements does not end here. In retrospect, we have seen these movements helped sanitise the Hindutva Right in Indian politics; make it more acceptable. Participating in the JP-led Bihar movement helped the RSS gain legitimacy for the first time in post-independence national politics. Until then, it was widely critiqued for its members never participating in the anti-colonial struggle. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the then Home Minister of India, denounced the RSS for creating an ambience that led to the assassination of Gandhi.
The proactive support and participation of the Sangh-BJP in the VP Singh-led movement ‘against corruption in defence deals’ was another milestone that led to the broader acceptance of Hindutva formations as political players in the country. During the Anna movement as well, a plethora of Hindutva supremacist formations felt rejuvenated. They were defensive until the alleged (and often proven) role of their ‘activists’ in violence and communal strife and much worse was being investigated. These investigations into the so-called Hindutva cases were reaching those higher up in such outfits. Then the anti-corruption movement came along, helping lift the morale of these outfits and the BJP, which had faced defeat in the 2009 Lok Sabha election.
Importantly, the movement further discredited the Congress party and created an ambience more suitable to “redefine” democracy. In other words, many elements of majoritarian politics, which gained further currency post-2014, started getting legitimacy during those days of the Anna movement.
Take the idea of ‘democracy as people’s will’, widespread among the movement’s supporters. The concept looks attractive but is problematic. It can effectively get reduced to what the majority wants. It can create situations where the majority can crush the minority, turning the country towards a majoritarian democracy.
The phenomenon of anti-corruption movements facilitating the path of the Right, legitimising them, is not India-specific. Brazil under Bolsonaro is another contemporary example. The Workers’ Party in Brazil, which backed social justice policies, was cornered when the Federal Police of Brazil undertook investigations into “Operation Car Wash”. Led by the upper-middle class, with the connivance of the corporate media, this movement was unleashed for “clean politics” but enthroned rabid Right politician Jair Bolsonaro. At the same time, Luiz Inacio Lula, the popular former president who formed the Workers’ Party, ended in jail.
The nightmare through which Brazil had to pass is already over, but it is difficult to predict when the twilight of democracy in India will end.