Dissent for a brighter future

India's Undeclared Emergency: Constitutionalism and the Politics of Resistance

Author: Arvind Narrain

Publisher: Context 

Pages: 340

Price: Rs 699

The Indian state today is more damaging than the national Emergency of 1975. Then an authoritarian state, India now is becoming a totalitarian one. This is the case Arvind Narrain, a jurist, makes in his book India’s Undeclared Emergency: Constitutionalism and the Politics of Resistance.

This comparison might have been obvious to many public intellectuals who gave early warning signals when the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government cemented its feet in Parliament. Yet, bringing out this comparison is hard. The horrors of the Emergency are a distant story for half of India’s population who are younger than 30 years. But for the other half, memories hold tales of sorrow and state cruelty. Convincing the reader that we are living through worse needs facts and evidence, and the book provides plenty of them. 

The book compares the strategies of state overreach used during the Emergency with those of the current government. The coercion starts with preventive detention, imprisoning dissenters and voices of reason. Institutions are attacked next. The judiciary captured and the media censored. Atrocities become rampant and citizens have no remedy. This narrative is crafted with stories of victims, profiling their courage from the past and present.

Before launching into the analysis of the present government, there is a brilliant prelude exposing the roots of preventive detention. The author traces its origin to Article 22 of the Constitution and the debates in the Constituent Assembly. For the founders, it was a grey area and their troubled relationship with preventive detention was somehow compromised into words by B R Ambedkar. The Emergency years made rampant use of this provision and diluted whatever safeguards there were with the Maintenance of Internal Security Act of 1971. Another instrument, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act of 1967, was kept on the boil all along, weakening procedures established by law after a series of amendments that followed the 2008 terror attack in Mumbai.   

The similarity between the two time periods helps the author set the context. The present power dispensation is different in motives and the ends it wishes to achieve. The BJP today is more consistent and ideological in the manner in which it wields its power. It has a firm base of civil organisations and mass support. Indira Gandhi’s Congress had neither. The book’s strong suit is its narration of the contemporary. The story of BK-16, a group of activists and scholars detained after the Bhima Koregaon violence, serves to remind the reader that the stories of the state brutality are from the present. The press does not write about them much, and the courts are choosing silence. Many among those detained are India’s youth who protested against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, and are considered enemies of the state.

Every reader has their perspective, and to demonstrate the beginning of totalitarianism, the book attributes four details. One, the regime has a strong and wide support base of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and other Hindutva groups that are aggressive in their desire to transform society. Two, mobs are above the rule of law, free to enforce their norms encouraged by the silence of the regime. Three, fake news and hate speech are becoming powerful and popular. Four, there is a push for transforming the law to internalise Hindutva tenets. The picture stitched together is not abstract. It is credible.

The book is not all despair. To build hope, the author borrows the idea of a dual state from the political scientist, Ernst Fraenkel. At any point of time, the two states, prerogative and normative, coexist. A prerogative state is extra-legal, arbitrary, and ruled from above. A normative state is bound by the rule of law, procedures and formal institutions. The book makes a case to defend the normative state against the prerogative state. 

For this resistance, constitutional values of liberty, equality, dignity and fraternity must be cultivated. Only when these values take root can society prosper. Dissent must also be in regional languages and come from religion to make sure no singular group claims the ownership of defining Indian culture. To resist the state, society will have to become plural, uniting India’s lonely and dispirited youth to build an inclusive front.   

This is a timely book. In the author's words, “those in the middle of the furious flow of events are sometimes blind to the contours of the emerging beast. If the present were to be solely analysed through the lens of the immediate past, it would fail to account for the birth of something unprecedented. It is not easy to recognise the nature of totalitarianism, and it is very difficult for even those who face an existential threat to come together till it is too late”. To this end, the book is a reliable lighthouse. Although the light is familiar, its range is far-reaching. 

The reviewer is a policy researcher, studying institutions, economics and law