The Siege of India's Constitution: Emergency Turns 50

The year 2024 saw the government notify June 25 as Samvidhaan Hatya Divas. The decision for many did not come as a surprise, as the day rings a bell with everyone who remembers the siege of the Constitution. And so does the memory to stay alive in the minds of generations to come. This decision was made. 

Illustration by The Geostrata

Emergency provisions as enshrined in part 18 of the constitution were taken from the German Weimar constitution, with three typologies being internal disturbance, armed rebellion and external aggression (Article 352), breakdown of law and order in a state (Article 356), and financial emergency (Article 360). 

The emergency had been declared previously during the 1962 Sino-India war, followed by another one in 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. The latter finally gave a strong, reinforced mandate to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who had battled inner party debacles post the 1969 Syndicate Split. 

However, the 1971 election saw Prime Minister Gandhi make tall promises of Garibi Hatao, with psephologists believing this to be the first election fought on a strong national security mandate. But no sooner was the election season over, uneasy lay the head that wore the crown. The 1973 Gulf crisis, followed by the rupee devaluation, with multiple crises of balance of payments, inflation, amongst others. 

As the government dragged on this, the first chink in the armour came,  with the 1974 All India Railwaymen Federation strike led by trade union giant and later union minister George Fernandes that lasted for 19 days, bringing the entire Indian railway apparatus to a grinding halt. The trivia lies that it is to date the world's largest organised labour strike.

The second nail in the coffin came with the June 12 order of the Allahabad High Court where an election petition was being argued before Justice Jagmohan Lal Sinha, invalidating the election of PM Gandhi from Rae Bareli parliamentary constituency. 

While the conditional stay was being carried out on the election, PM Gandhi, on recommendations from her son Sanjay Gandhi, and her coterie of kitchen congressmen, including N.D. Tiwari and Siddharth Shankar Ray decided to impose an emergency on the intervening night of 25-26th June, 1975. An astonishing trivia from this episode is that the President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed was woken up from his sleep to sign the emergency orders. 

The Navnirman Aandolan of Gujarat and the Bihar students' protests under the banner of Sampoorna Kranti (total revolution), held a rally in Delhi, which is said to have exacerbated the decision of PM Gandhi to go ahead with the emergency.

Both these movements, absolutely driven by the students, talked about the on-ground deteriorating situation of the economy and inflation, which was displayed through protests against the hostel fees hike in Gujarat.

In Bihar, student union leaders of the Patna University led a gherao (circular blockade) of the Bihar Legislative Assembly, leading to the resignation of the Chief Minister Abdul Ghafoor after police firing on peaceful youth protests. It was this incident which brought the Gandhian leader Jayprakash Narayan (JP),  back into active politics when he took the leadership of the movement. 

This constitutional siege was also cascaded by a constant tussle between judiciary and the political executive over a conflict between the privacy of fundamental rights over the implementation of the government's socio-economic agenda. The same has been highlighted by the landmark opinions of the Supreme Court in Keshavanand Bharati and before that in the Sajjan Singh and  Shankari Prasad Deo cases. 

It was post the imposition of emergency that the government went into a legislative overdrive, first bringing the 39th constitutional amendment (1975) , which made retrospective changes to the ability to challenge the election of the Prime Minister and President, amongst others.

This was followed by the bulky and cumbersome 42nd  constitutional amendment Act (1976), which was hailed as the mini constitution, but was not at all debated in the parliament. It was under very strained circumstances that words like secularism and socialist were added to the preamble of the constitution without taking the opinion of the opposition, which consisted mostly of socialist, secular and nationalist leaders.

This was followed by 21 months of haphazard government behaviour, with suspension of political and fundamental rights, and the normalisation of use of draconian laws like Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA) and the Conservation of Foreign Exchange and Prevention of Smuggling Activities Act (COFEPOSA), which led to state sanctioned preventive detention.

Such was the atrocity of the MISA that jailed student union leader and future Bihar chief minister Lalu Prasad Yadav in protest, named his daughter Misa, who was born while he was incarcerated.

It is a well-established fact that the entire political opposition, starting from Atal Bihari Vajpayee to LK Advani, Jayprakash Narayan, Chandra Sekhar, Morarji Desai, among others were put behind bars. This sake treatment was meted out to young student leaders like Sitaram Yechury, MK Stalin, Lalu Prasad Yadav, Nitish Kumar and Ram Vilas Paswan, among others. 

With every institution doing the bidding of the Government of the day, the ruling party went about subverting every institution created to establish checks and balances during the 21 month period of emergency. The same was evident from the ADM Jabalpur v. Shivkant Shukla (1976) case which gave a legal sanction to the emergency, not being overturned until Justice (retd.) K.S Puttaswamy vs. Union of India case (2017),  when Justice (later Chief Justice of India) D.Y Chandrachud, overturned his father Justice (later Chief Justice of India) Y.V Chandrachud's judgement. 

With the midnight siege of the constitution being enforced from 25th June 1975 onwards, Parwal practical processes the entire country was converted into one big prison. Opposition politicians of diverging political ideas to common citizens, artists, musicians, civil society and even non-political organisations like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Jamaat-e-Islami were banned.

All India Radio, the primary state owned media machinery, became a political mouthpiece propagating the 20 point programme of Indira Gandhi, designed by Sanjay Gandhi. 

Kishore Kumar,  the star Bollywood singer, having criticised the emergency led to his songs being banned from the All India Radio while the popular theatre artist and actress Snehalatha Reddy died from a cardiac arrest caused by police excess. 

Until this very day, there is no exact record of how many people were either interned, arrested, or had to die, due to police brutality. More shocking is the apathy that sterilisation drives were conducted in ambulances and without proper sanitation, with individual targets being set for many political leaders. 

The emergency led to many national leaders suffering from long-term health impacts, with Loknayak Jaiprakash Narayan losing his kidneys, future Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, developing gallbladder issues and future Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh Mulayam Singh Yadav, developing permanent damage to his legs. Some like Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, were left with emotional trauma, who was denied parole to perform the last rites of his mother. But what surely the emergency did was create a generation of leaders who are even today leading forward the remnants of social justice, people's movement and a trace of this blot. 

These 21 months of darkness finally ended on 21st March, 1977 when fresh elections were called and most political leaders were released with cases impending.

The entire opposition irrespective of multiplicity of ideologies came under the singular banner of Janata party, using the poem of Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, “Sinhasan Khali Karo ke, Janta aati hai” (Empty the chair, the people are here to rule). In the ensuing elections, the Janata party won 295 seats, forming the first non- Congress government in the history of independent India, with Morarji Desai as the Prime Minister.

Though the Janata party government tried to fix the accountability of the emergency by setting up the Justice J.C. Shah commission of inquiry. It's a different fact that when the Shah Commission tried to get Indira Gandhi arrested, Congress workers on 20th December, 1978, hijacked the Indian Airlines 410 plane from Calcutta to Palam to secure the former Prime Minister's release.

Finally Janata Party had to bring about the 44th constitutional amendment Act (1978), to undo some of the draconian changes of the previous amendments act, which included scrapping the 39th constitutional amendment Act (1975) and making it compulsory for the Union Cabinet to give its assent to any proposal of national emergency. Drawing a string from this, the Supreme Court in the Minerva Mills case (1980), too, stated that there had to be due reasons for imposing a national emergency upholding the 44th constitutional amendment Act (1978). 

Many leaders like George Fernandes won the election in absentia, while still being in prison, their posters and cutouts being used to campaign.

Socialist leader Ram Vilas Paswan, in these elections, entered into the Guinness World Book of Records by winning his parliamentary seat with a margin of 4.24 lakh votes.

And although the Janata experiment lasted for a mere 24 months, it was a testament to people's strong will and ability to uphold constitutional morality and the values of democracy cherished by all. This may even have been a political deterrent for future generations to not experiment with people's will, as till date no National emergency of any kind has been declared or imposed.

The immortalization of this period's dark blot, by declaring Samvidhan Hatya Diwas, is setting up in stone the fact that when absolute power corrupts absolutely it was the people that stood up to tyranny even though institutions crumbled against political strain.

More than the legal and constitutional ramifications of the emergency it was the morality and intent of its imposition that was questioned by every well-meaning citizen. This period, though always remembered for its overall gloom, is today remembered through movies like Indu Sarkar (2017) and Emergency (2025). And in times to come it is this period that would be remembered as one where masses at large stood up to defend the Constitution and protect what we know as India, that is Bharat.

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BY KAUSHAL SINGH

TEAM GEOSTRATA

info@thegeostrata.com