When democracy was put on pause in India

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.

In their book on Delhi under Emergency, civil-rights activist John Dayal and journalist Ajoy Bose wrote that officials were under intense pressure to meet sterilisation quotas. Junior officers enforced the order ruthlessly – contract labourers were told, “No advances, no jobs, unless you get vasectomies.”

Parallel to this, a massive urban “clean-up” demolished nearly 120,000 slums, displacing some 700,000 people in Delhi alone, as part of a gentrification campaign described by critics as social cleansing. These people were dumped into new “resettlement colonies” far away from their workplaces.

One of the worst episodes of slum demolitions occurred in Delhi’s Turkman Gate, a Muslim-majority neighbourhood, where police fired on protesters resisting demolition, killing at least six and displacing thousands.

The press was silenced overnight. On the eve of the Emergency, power to newspaper presses in Delhi was cut. By morning, censorship was law.

When The Indian Express newspaper finally published its 28 June edition – delayed by a power outage – it left a blank space where its editorial should have been. The Statesman followed suit, printing blank columns to signal censorship. Even The National Herald, founded by India’s first prime minister and Indira Gandhi’s father Jawaharlal Nehru, quietly dropped its masthead slogan: “Freedom is in peril, defend it with all your might.” Shankar’s Weekly, a satirical magazine known for its cartoons, shut down entirely.

In her book – a personal history of the Emergency – journalist Coomi Kapoor reveals the extent of media censorship through detailed examples of blackout orders.

These included bans on reporting or photographing slum demolitions in Delhi, conditions in a maximum-security Tihar Jail, and developments in opposition-ruled states like Tamil Nadu. Coverage of the family planning drive was tightly controlled – no “adverse comments or editorials” were permitted. Even stories deemed trivial or embarrassing were scrubbed: no “sensational” reporting on a notorious bandit and no mention of a Bollywood actress caught shoplifting in London.

Kapoor also notes that BBC’s Mark Tully, along with journalists from The Times, Newsweek and The Daily Telegraph, were given 24 hours to leave India for refusing to sign a “censorship agreement”. (Years after the Emergency, when Gandhi was back in power, Tully introduced her to the BBC’s chief. He asked how it felt to lose public support. She smiled and said, “I never lost the support of the people, only the people were misled by rumours, many of which were spread by the BBC.”)

Some judges pushed back. The Bombay and Gujarat high courts warned that censorship couldn’t be used to “brainwash the public”. But that resistance was quickly drowned out.

That wasn’t all. In July 1976, Sanjay Gandhi pushed the Youth Congress – the governing Congress party’s youth wing – to adopt his personal five-point programme, including family planning, tree plantation, refusal of dowry, promotion of adult literacy and abolition of caste.

Congress president DK Barooah instructed all state and local committees to implement Sanjay’s five points alongside the government’s official 20-point programme, effectively merging state policy with Sanjay’s personal crusade.

Anthropologist Emma Tarlo, author of a richly detailed ethnographic work of the period, wrote that during the Emergency, the poor were subjected to “forced choices”. It was also a turning point for industrial relations.

“The last vestiges of working-class politics were imperiously wiped out,” wrote Christophe Jaffrelot and Pratinav Anil in their book on the period they call “India’s first dictatorship”. Around 2,000 trade union leaders and members were jailed, strikes were banned and worker benefits were slashed.

The number of man-days lost to stoppages plunged – from 33.6 million in 1974 to just 2.8 million in 1976. Strikers dropped from 2.7 million to half a million. The government also loosened its grip on the private sector, helping the economy rebound after years of stagnation. Industrialist JRD Tata praised the regime’s “refreshingly pragmatic and result-oriented approach”.

Despite its heavy-handedness, the Emergency was seen by some as a period of order and efficiency. Inder Malhotra, a journalist, wrote that in “its initial months at least, the Emergency restored to India a kind of calm it had not known for years”.

Trains ran on time, strikes vanished, production rose, crime fell, and prices dropped after a good 1975 monsoon – bringing much-needed stability. “One fact is conclusive proof of the quiescence of the middle class – that hardly any officials resigned in protest against the Emergency,” writes historian Ramachandra Guha in his book India After Gandhi.

Scholars believe the Emergency’s harshest measures were largely confined to northern India because southern states had stronger regional parties and more resilient civil societies that limited central overreach. Gandhi’s Congress party, which ruled federally, had weaker control in the south, giving regional leaders greater autonomy to resist or moderate draconian policies.

The Emergency formally ended in March 1977 after Gandhi called elections – and lost. The new Janata government – a rag-tag coalition of parties – rolled back many of the laws she’d passed. But the deeper damage was done. As many historians have written, the Emergency revealed how easily democratic structures could be hollowed out from within – even legally.

“It is no wonder that the Emergency is remembered emotively in India… Indira’s suspension of constitutional rights appears as an abrupt disavowal of the liberal-democratic spirit that animated Nehru and other nationalist leaders who founded India as a constitutional republic in 1950,” historian Gyan Prakash wrote in his book on the Emergency.

Today, the Emergency is remembered in India as a brief authoritarian interlude – an aberration. But that framing, warns Prakash, breeds “a smug confidence in the present”.

“It tells us that the past is really past, it is over, it is history. The present is free from its burdens. India’s democracy, we are told, heroically recovered from Indira’s brief misadventure with no lasting damage and with no enduring, unaddressed problems in its functioning,” Prakash writes.

“Underlying it is an impoverished conception of democracy, one that regards it only in terms of certain forms and procedures.”

In other words, this perception ignores how fragile democracy can be when institutions fail to hold power to account.

The Emergency was also a stark warning against the perils of hero worship – something embodied in the towering political persona of Indira Gandhi.

Back in 1949, BR Ambedkar, architect of the constitution, cautioned Indians against surrendering their freedoms to a “great leader”.

Bhakti (devotion), he said, was acceptable in religion – but in politics, it was “a sure road to degradation and eventual dictatorship”.