The Conscience Network: Fighting the emergency and the US battlefront

The element of equivalence between then and now is probed delicately but bravely by this book which revisits the Emergency and the resistance to it from a new angle

The Conscience Network: A Chronicle of Resistance to a Dictatorship

By Sugata Srinivasaraju

Published by Penguin

553 pages ₹1,299

 

There can be no debate on the Emergency in India. It was a dark time in Indian democracy and politics for which even the Congress has offered an explanation and a qualified apology. But 50 years after the event, the mystifying demand of top Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) functionary Dattatreya Hosabale that the words “socialist” and “secular” be removed from India’s preamble does make you wonder. The 42nd Amendment that introduced the words during the Emergency didn’t just amend the Preamble which is non-justiciable