The Emergency is not history - it is a warning

On the 40^th anniversary of the Emergency, a few things worry me.

First, and foremost, it is worth noting that the Emergency was primarily the fault of two people: Indira and Sanjay Gandhi. In fact, given the fact that Sanjay wasn’t elected, it was almost entirely Indira’s fault. Given the Emergency, it is easy with hindsight to discern the signs of incipient authoritarianism through much of her career, especially in the years after 1969. To Indira Gandhi goes the blame for the biggest blemish on India’s democratic record.

It is ridiculous that the Gandhi Congress, supposedly India’s liberal centrist party, that it cannot acknowledge this. I am generally bored with criticism of dynastic politics (which usually comes from people who can neither win an election nor would dream of trying). But dynastism has one very pernicious aspect: it means that parties like the Gandhi Congress cannot even admit to their own vast errors, even 40 years on. Sonia Gandhi’s personal affection for her mother-in-law means that her party will not be able to say the Emergency was a scandal and a shame; just as with Indira’s bank nationalisation, the party has been backed into a illiberal corner because of family affection that has no place in politics.

This is also why Rahul Gandhi has to hem and haw when asked about the 1984 riots, the irredeemable stain on his father’s reputation; and this inability to condemn everything about 1984, including the governance failure it entailed, means the party’s attack on Narendra Modi for 2002 was never quite sharp enough. And this is why Rahul Gandhi cannot, even today, say what he may very well want to – that his mother’s handling of her coalition enabled the corruption and cronyism of the sort he professes to despise. Regular political parties can turn on and rework their own pasts. The Gandhi Congress never can.

 
But there is a second, additional thing that worries me about the stories we tell of the Emergency, 40 years on. Yes, Indira was responsible. But Indira may not have been the only reason, the only historical push. History is about more than individual failings. And unless we understand what else moves history, we will we live in a world of false confidence. We imagine that those three years were the product of irreproducible circumstances – a majority in Parliament, a paranoid prime minister, a thuggish crown prince. But other things mattered, too. As Srinath Raghavan argues on NDTV.com, the economic circumstances were crucial.

High inflation – and then the crackdown on growth and prosperity that accompanied monetary tightening – was what brought people out on the streets, angrily protesting the corruption of Indira’s government. India’s capitalists were loudly demanding “governance” that would help them create wealth, and a short interlude in which Indians could all pull together. The “population explosion” was being sold in the 1970s as a global time bomb. Things looked to be falling apart. Dissenters supported by foreign governments were suspected of undermining pro-growth policy. An establishment hostile to the PM’s desired changes was believed to be undermining it.
 

Indira did not act in a vacuum. She acted with the support and encouragement of a class of people. She did declare emergency because it was the quickest and best way of achieving the control she felt she needed. If that clause had not been there, she would have used something else. It is scary to read, in Coomi Kapoor’s new book on the Emergency, of how tax and foreign-exchange laws were used against dissenters such as The Indian Express. We have laws on preventive detention and “unlawful activities” on the books today that can be used to replicate MISA (and have done so, with supposed Naxalite sympathisers).

In other words, this is the problem: a powerful government that believes its anger is right and justified does not need the emergency clause to replicate the Emergency.
 
The real lesson from the Emergency is not: Indira was a bad prime minister. This is true, and she was – there is enough evidence of this fact. But the real lesson is this: when a government’s opposition begins to believe that everything is corrupt, and only street agitation is “real”; and when a government’s supporters believe that dissenters have no place in public discourse; and when business begins to mutter that a few years of firmness are a small price to pay for economic recovery; and when inflation and the wages of the poor seem to be in tremendous conflict – then any powerful government led by a charismatic, angry leader could once again wound India’s democracy.

 
Forty years on, don’t think the Emergency is just history. It’s a warning, and always will be.

mihir.sharma@bsmail.in

Twitter: @mihirssharma