Why did Mrs. Gandhi impose the Emergency, and why did she lift it? Revisiting the Indian Emergency of 1975

media release: UW Havens-Wright Center and Center for South Asia event. 

2025 is the 50th anniversary of perhaps a dark (if not the darkest) period of India’s democratic journey. On June 25 1975 Mrs Gandhi imposed an internal Emergency when civil liberties and democratic rights were suspended and when even the writ of Habeas Corpus was unavailable. The Supreme Court of India endorsed this suspension. 50 years on, in addition to seeing the Emergency as a historical event, I suggest that we must also see it as an important diagnostic moment which tells us a great deal about the resilience and fragility of democracy in a young Republic that was only 25 years old, about state building, and most of all about the ability to the ‘checks and balances’ institutions to stand up to a plebiscitary leader intent on undermining them. The Indian Emergency is an illustration of what happens when political leaders want to reshape the polity in their preferred direction. The talk will explore the reasons why Mrs Gandhi imposed the Emergency and will attempt to expand the menu of explanations so far on offer.

Peter Ronald deSouza was the director, Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS), Rashtrapati Nivas, Shimla, for two terms (2007- 2013) during which period he set up the Tagore Centre and the International Centre for Human Development. Prior to that he was a senior fellow and co-director of the Lokniti Programme of Comparative Democracy, at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi (2003-2007) and even earlier was professor and head, Department of Political Science at Goa University (1996-2003). He is currently senior research associate, African Centre for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science (ACEPS), University of Johannesburg. He has served as a consultant to UNESCO, International IDEA, Stockholm, UNDP, The World Bank, Inter Parliamentary Union (IPU), Ford Foundation and Social Science Research Council (SSRC), New York (2001). His recent publications are, with Mohd Sanjeer Alam and Hilal Ahmed Companion to Indian Democracy: Resilience Fragility, Ambivalence, Routledge, 2022; and with Rukmini Bhaya Nair Keywords for India: A Conceptual Lexicon for the 21^st Century, Bloomsbury, 2020. He writes for The India Forum, The Indian Express and Frontline.