The Indian Emergency of 25 June 1975 – 21 March 1977 was a 21-month period, when President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, upon advice by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, declared a state of emergency under Article 352 of the Constitution of India, effectively bestowing on her the power to rule by decree, suspending elections and civil liberties. It is one of the most controversial periods in the history of independent India

President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed declared a State of Emergency upon the advice of the Prime Minister on 26 June 1975. In her own words, Indira brought democracy “to a grinding halt”.

As the constitution requires, Indira advised and President Ahmed approved the continuation of Emergency over every six-month period until her decision to hold elections in 1977.

Elections for the Parliament and state governments were postponed. Invoking article 352 of the Indian Constitution, Indira granted herself extraordinary powers and launched a massive crackdown on civil liberties and political opposition. The Government cited threats to national security, as a recent war with Pakistan had just been concluded. It claimed that the strikes and protests had paralyzed the government and hurt the economy of the country greatly. In face of massive political opposition, desertion and disorder across the country and the party, Indira stuck to the advice of a few close party loyalists and her younger son Sanjay Gandhi, who had become a close political advisor.

The Government used police forces across the country to arrest thousands of protestors and strike leaders. J.P. Narayan, Raj Narain, 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. Numerous Communist leaders were arrested along with many others involved with the party.

Indira attempted to re-write the nation’s laws with the help of the Parliament, where the Congress controlled over a two-thirds majority. She felt her powers were not amassing quickly enough, so she utilized the President to issue “extraordinary laws” that bypassed parliament altogether, allowing her to rule by decree. She constructed a 20-point economic program to increase agricultural and industrial production, improve public services and fight poverty and illiteracy. Also, she had little trouble in making amendments to the constitution 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.

One of the consequences of the Emergency era was that the Supreme Court of India ordered that, although the Constitution is subject to amendment (as used by Indira), changes that areultra vires to its basic structure cannot be made by the Parliament of India.

Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh which was seen close to opposition leaders, and with its large organizational base was seen potential of organizing protests against the Government, was also banned.Police clamped down on the organization and thousands of its workers were imprisoned.

The bulk of the Indian media controlled by industrial houses close to the ruling Congress Party, did not highlight this infamous day. If for nothing else they could have emphasized that India’s democracy should never be allowed to be subverted by self-seeking politicians.

Against such a background, the only redeeming feature that strikes the mind is that the people of India did no hesitate to strike back in 1977 against Congress Party Prime Minister Indira Gandhi for her subversion of democracy and the Emergency excesses. They unseated her from power. Though she came back to power again, not because of any new found political popularity but because of the internal squabbles of the Janata Party, politically the things were never the same again for her. Her image took a dive.

In this lie many lessons for the India of today stretching from attempts to put into Rashtrapati Bhavan once again a pliant political non-entity as President by the Congress Party President, to the questioning of Supreme Court judgments on unconstitutional legislation passed by the Parliament by political leaders and contriving dubious legislative measures to perpetuate in office those unseated as happened in the Office of Profit controversy.

India’s middle class in1977 was small and yet they along with the rest of India unseated Indira Gandhi for her political transgressions and subversion of democracy. Today India’s burgeoning middle class is over 300 million strong and they must politically empower themselves not only to correct the distorted electoral arithmetic imposed by casteist political leaders and custodians of minority vote banks, but also to act forcefully as sentinels of Indian democracy.

Never again should the people of India ever allow another Internal Emergency to be imposed on India by self-seeking Indian politicians, however charismatic. It is well said that “Eternal Vigilance is the Price of Liberty” and every Indian citizen should be alive to it.

When Indian soldiers were fighting Pakistani marauders in 1947, they didn’t have enough jeeps. So orders were placed with its British company and supply demanded immediately. Our High Commissioner Krishna Menon, a blue-eyed boy of Pt. Nehru messed it up. Jeeps reached a year late and with a taint of hot money exchanging hands.

That was the first scandal of Independent India.

We lost Gilgit, Baltistan and Skardu. We lost Aksai Chin, because the government at Delhi didn’t know the exact boundaries and no patrolling was taking place.

In total, we have lost one lakh twenty-five thousand square kms to the Pakistanis and Chinese during Congress rule.

And we had a bad dream called 1962.

At that time our ordnance factories were making coffee machines as Pt. Nehru had openly opined against having well-equipped large army for defence. Who is going to attack us, he asked.

Still we say that Pt. Nehru was the ‘architect’ of modern India.

And people remember the mysterious ‘murder’ of Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee in Srinagar, who simply wanted Kashmir to be a part of India like Bihar or Bengal and permit system to enter the Valley be abolished. There were two rulers in Kashmir; the Chief Minister was called Sadr-e-Riyasat or ‘head of the state’. Two flags and two laws for the Valley. Mookerjee’s martyrdom compelled the Nehru government to remove the permit system and two heads for the state. Post-jeep scandal, we saw Mundhra scandal, Nagarwala case, L N Mishra murder. The Jan Sangh’s fast emerging leader Deen Dayal Upadhyaya was murdered. All the cases were suspected Congress conspiracies.

When the portrait of Dr. Mookerjee was unveiled in Parliament, with utter disregard to parliamentary propriety and civility, Congress leaders, including Dr. Manmohan Singh boycotted the function, though Vajpayee and Advani had been attending programmes to mark the birth and death anniversaries of Pt. Nehru and Rajiv Gandhi.

The only Prime Minister they had running a government for full five years successfully was insulted even in his death and his body-in-state was not allowed to enter the Congress headquarters in New Delhi and an airport in his home state was opposed to be named after him by Congressmen though the proposal was put forth by an Opposition leader. This is how they treat their party leaders not belonging to the Family.

They amended, abused and twisted the Constitution, put the entire Opposition behind bars for an undisclosed period and revenged harshly on the unyielding masses.

Yet, they are the democrats and secular lighthouses of freedom of expression and liberty.

They kept India backward in such a planned manner that even after sixty-two years of Independence we are yet to have a spacious functional airport in the national capital, seventy thousand farmers committed suicides in one year, brave decorated soldiers returned their medals in protest and a movie on our poverty-stricken ’slumdogs’ fetches a British Oscar in 2009. And they love the illegal Muslim infiltrators just for the sake of their votes – and still they say they are the inheritors of a freedom struggle that demanded ouster of the aliens.

More than anything else they tried to wreck the morale of the assertive Hindus who have been facing the onslaught of the invaders for the last twelve centuries with unparalleled brevity showing an invincible spirit to protect their culture and the fragrance of the land. They deserved to be comforted most after a fractured independence and a massacre that was thrust upon them by a weak Congress leadership. Yet a large section of the Hindus today feel cheated and anguished.

Pandit Nehru was not in mood to encourage Industry. They have stopped Tata to produce war weapons like War Tanks which Tata was providing to Britishers in second world war. But Nehru was ready to pay lots of money to foriegn companies for providing weapons like “Boforce”. So domestic industries were not to allowed to make profit while on other hand international companies were given order for trains,tanks bus etc.

The partition of the Indian Subcontinent in 1947 created two independent countries: India and Pakistan. India, which became independent on 15 August 1947, stood for a secular, equitable polity based on the universally accepted idea that all men are created equal and should be treated as such. Pakistan, which officially came into existence a day earlier, was based on the premise that Hindus and Muslims of the Subcontinent constitute two different nationalities and cannot co-exist. The Partition created two different countries with most Muslim majority areas of undivided India going to the newly created nation, Pakistan (Land of the Pure). Pakistan was originally made up of two distinct and geographically unconnected parts termed West and East Pakistan. West Pakistan was made up of a number of races including the Punjabis (the most numerous), Sindhis, Pathans, Balochis, Mohajirs (Muslim refugees from India) and others. East Pakistan, on the other hand, was much more homogeneous and had an overwhelming Bengali-speaking population.

Although the Eastern wing of Pakistan was more populous than than the Western one, political power since independence rested with the Western elite. This caused considerable resentment in East Pakistan and a charismatic Bengali leader called, Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, most forcefully articulated that resentment by forming an opposition political party called the Awami League and demanding more autonomy for East Pakistan within the Pakistani Federation. In the Pakistani general elections held in 1970, the Sheikh’s party won the majority of seats, securing a complete majority in East Pakistan. In all fairness, the Sheikh should have been Prime Minister of Pakistan, or at least the ruler of his province. But West Pakistan’s ruling elite were so dismayed by the turn of events and by the Sheikh’s demands for autonomy that instead of allowing him to rule East Pakistan, they put him in jail.

The Pakistani Army conducted several crackdowns in different parts of Bangladesh, leading to massive loss of civilian life. The details of those horrific massacres, in which defenceless people were trapped and machine-gunned, is part of Bangladeshi history. Survivors compare it to the Nazi extermination of Jews. At the same time, the Pakistani Administration in Dhaka thought it could pacify the Bengali peasantry by appropriating the land of the Hindu population and gifting it to Muslims. While this did not impress the peasantry, it led to the exodus of more than 8 million refugees (more than half of them Hindus) to neighbouring India. West Bengal was the worst affected by the refugee problem and the Indian government was left holding the enormous burden. Repeated appeals by the Indian government failed to elicit any response from the international community and by April 1971, the then Indian Prime Minister, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, decided that the only solution lay in helping Bengali freedom fighters, especially the Mukti Bahini, to liberate East Pakistan, which had already been re-christened Bangladesh by its people.

Pakistan felt it could dissuade India from helping the Mukti Bahini by being provocative. The Pakistan Air Force (PAF) in East Pakistan took to attacking suspected Mukti Bahini camps located inside Indian territory in the state of West Bengal. In the Western and Northern sectors too occasional clashes, some of them quite bloody, took place. Pakistan was suggesting that should India continue with its plans it should expect total war as in 1965. Only this time, the Pakistanis would concentrate their forces in the West and thereby aim at capturing as much as Indian territory as possible. The Indians, on the other hand, would be fighting a war on two fronts (while at the same time keeping a fearful eye on the Chinese borders). Given this scenario, the Pakistanis felt that India at best would be able to capture some territory in East Pakistan and lose quite a bit in the West. In the end, the Pakistanis knew that the Western powers would intervene to stop the war and what would matter is who had the most of the other’s territory.

The Indo-Pakistani conflict was sparked by the Bangladesh Liberation war, a conflict between the traditionally dominant West Pakistanis and the majority East Pakistanis. The Bangladesh Liberation war ignited after the 1970 Pakistani election, in which the East Pakistani Awami League won 167 of 169 seats in East Pakistan and secured a simple majority in the 313-seat lower house of the Majlis-e-Shoora (Parliament of Pakistan). Awami League leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, presented the Six Points to the President of Pakistan and claimed the right to form the government. After the leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, refused to yield the premiership of Pakistan to Mujibur, President Yahya Khan called out the military, which was made up largely of West Pakistanis.

Mass arrests of dissidents began, and attempts were made to disarm East Pakistani soldiers and police. After several days of strikes and non-cooperation movements, the Pakistani military cracked down on Dhaka on the night of March 25, 1971. The Awami League was banished, and many members fled into exile in India. Mujib was arrested and taken to West Pakistan.

On 27 March 1971, Ziaur Rahman, a rebellious major in the Pakistani army, declared the independence of Bangladesh on behalf of Mujibur. In April, exiled Awami League leaders formed a government-in-exile in Baidyanathtala of Meherpur. The East Pakistan Rifles, an elite paramilitary force, defected to the rebellion. A guerrilla troop of civilians, the Mukti Bahini, was formed to help the Bangladesh Army.