While India today is vastly different from the India of 1975, the need for vigilance against authoritarianism remains the same, asserts Utkarsh Mishra.
On its 50th anniversary, the Emergency proclaimed by then prime minister Indira Gandhi at midnight on June 25, 1975, is widely remembered as a dark episode imposed by an authoritarian regime.
However, on paper, the Emergency was a Constitutional act -- proclaimed under Article 352, with procedures followed and Presidential assent obtained.
The commonly accepted view is that Indira Gandhi imposed the Emergency for reasons of political self-preservation, following the Allahabad high court's verdict invalidating her election. This view is not entirely unfounded, but the picture is more layered.
For starters, the verdict in question was stayed by the Supreme Court, and Indira Gandhi was yet to exhaust her legal options.
Her government, meanwhile, cited more systemic reasons for the exercise of extreme power: The 1971 War with Pakistan, economic dislocation, food shortages, and, above all, an Opposition movement led by Jayaprakash Narayan, popularly known as JP, which it claimed had paralysed administration.
In her address to the nation informing about the Emergency, Indira Gandhi cited JP's appeal to government employees, including police officers, to disobey 'unjust' or 'unconstitutional' orders from the government.
Faced with JP's 'Sampoorna Kranti' or 'Total Revolution', Indira Gandhi turned to a tight circle of loyalists and her son Sanjay, whose rise as an extra-constitutional authority would come to define the period. However, the suggestion to impose an 'internal Emergency' came from Siddhartha Shankar Ray, the then chief minister of West Bengal. He suggested it could be done on the grounds of threats to national security from within.
As per the procedure, the proclamation was presented to then President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, who signed it just minutes before midnight on June 25, 1975.
So, the Emergency was technically legal. However, what followed in its aftermath was a chilling demonstration of how democracy can be hollowed out while staying within the bounds of Constitutional procedure.
More unsettling was the fact that the system didn't just comply -- it cooperated.
This cooperation became strikingly apparent in the judgment of the 1976 ADM Jabalpur case, where a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court ruled, by a 4:1 majority, that the right to challenge unlawful detention could be suspended during the Emergency.
Justice P N Bhagwati, who was part of this bench and who later became Chief Justice of India, had praised Indira Gandhi during the Emergency. (He criticised her after her 1977 defeat, and once again supported her upon her return to power in 1980).
Thus, judges -- with few exceptions like Justice H R Khanna -- chose deference over dissent. The media largely self-censored, prompting opposition leader L K Advani to famously remark that 'they crawled when asked to bend.' Bureaucrats followed orders unquestioningly.
And large sections of the public adjusted to, or even endorsed, the repression brought about in the name of restoring order.
Fifty years later, it is easier to paint those 21 months of the Emergency in black and white, to call it a fight between authoritarianism and resistance, between tyranny and truth. But the Emergency did not entirely rest on mass terror. It also relied on widespread compliance.
A British journalist noted that the Emergency 'was widely welcomed by the middle class' because it ended years of protests and brought a sense of calm to daily life.
A government official told a visiting American journalist that 'only foreigners cared for such things as the freedom of expression.' The journalist also found the business community especially pleased with the Emergency.
To those perplexed by these facts, political theorist Hannah Arendt's idea of the 'banality of evil' offers an insight. Not just into how and why it happened, but also why it is most likely to still be happening.
Arendt coined the phrase 'banality of evil' in 1961 while covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann, who was one of the chief architects of the Holocaust. He was held responsible for the mass deportation of millions of Jews to concentration camps in Nazi Germany.
Eichmann's 1961 trial differed from the Nuremberg proceedings, held immediately after the fall of the Third Reich, in a manner that the then Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, saw it as an opportunity to educate the Israeli public -- especially the youth -- about the horrors of the Holocaust. He also hoped it would serve as a global reminder of the need to prevent such atrocities in the future.
But what struck Arendt wasn't just the nature of Eichmann's crimes -- it was the nature of the man himself. She noticed that he wasn't a sadist or an ideological zealot, but rather came across as a dull, bureaucratic functionary, who claimed he was merely following orders.
Arendt argues that evil isn't always fanatical or monstrous -- it can be disturbingly mundane, often carried out by people who perform horrific tasks not out of hatred, but out of obedience, conformity, or lack of thought.
The 'banality' in Arendt's thesis doesn't mean the crimes were trivial. Rather, it reflects the fact that these crimes were committed by individuals who seem as unremarkable as one's next-door neighbour.
She wrote: 'The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him... that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal... This new type of criminal... commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.'
In other words, people Fyodor Dostoevsky describes as 'ordinary,' who 'live in a state of obedience... who cannot help obeying because it is their destiny, and such an act has nothing humiliating for them.'
Perhaps JP's call to 'disobey unjust orders' was aimed precisely at awakening the conscience of such individuals.
For while the Emergency was no Holocaust, its enforcement -- and its endurance -- rested on a similar phenomenon: ordinary people doing abnormal things, simply by refusing to ask moral questions.
Although Indira Gandhi apparently acted out of political self-preservation, what followed was not just a one-woman show. The State machinery didn't resist her stranglehold. The police arrested thousands without charge. Civil servants carried out orders they knew were illegal. And, as already discussed, even the judiciary rationalised the suspension of fundamental rights.
Much of the media -- barring a few courageous voices who paid the price for their defiance -- either stayed silent or cheered on.
Many Indians -- especially from the urban middle class -- welcomed the 'discipline' the Emergency brought. It was famously said that, for the first time, trains ran on time -- ironically echoing what was once claimed about Benito Mussolini's dictatorship in Italy. Protests vanished, and the rhetoric of national efficiency appealed to those fatigued by chaos and coalition politics.
And that, Arendt would argue, is what should alarm us most. Because this too is banality. It is not cruelty, but comfort, that normalises repression.
More than mass surveillance or executions, a repressive government needs people to look the other way. And many do -- not because they are evil, but because they rationalise the moment: 'This is temporary'; 'Some tough decisions ought to made', or, 'Who are these farmers to block the roads?'
This moral disengagement is what makes democracies fragile -- because when democratic norms are broken, they are not defended, but explained away.
The Emergency also revealed how institutions can be hollowed out not by open assault, but by inner decay.
It was a test for our institutions, our public conscience, and our democratic habits. And while the people did secure passing marks by voting Indira Gandhi out in 1977, such tests are not one-time events in a democracy. They return -- again and again.
And to pass them with flying colours, the public must never lose the capacity to reflect, to question the powerful and hold them accountable, to see through the propaganda, and to identify a clear and present danger and act against it.
While India today is vastly different from the India of 1975, this need for vigilance remains the same.
Because, as Arendt warns, the road to the Holocaust is not just paved by the actions of a few authoritarian leaders, but by the participation of countless ordinary individuals who fail to think critically about the implications of their actions.
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