The past is prelude

RECENT commemorations of the Emergency Indira Gandhi imposed on India in 1975 are frequently fraught with warnings about how the Congress might behave if it is returned to power, amid far more egregious violations of the secular-democratic spirit that India's founding fathers sought to inculcate from above.

- BY MAHIR ALI

The 1950 constitution, hammered out by freedom fighters who saw no further need, in what became the world's largest democracy, for the kind of popular agitations deployed against colonial rule, incorporated within it the seeds for the authoritarianism 25 years later. Indira wasn't the obvious choice after her father's successor died during the Tashkent negotiations, following the 1965 war. But the so-called Syndicate that had already sullied the Congress party's democratic credentials saw her as a potential puppet.

The Syndicate was rapidly disillusioned, and elections in 1971 — before the war that created Bangladesh — were a fraught affair. Four years later, the Allahabad High Court found the prime minister guilty of electoral malpractices and debarred her from holding office for six years. She appealed, and imposed the Emergency almost as soon as the supreme court stayed the order on June 24, but debarred the PM from voting in parliament. That leeway led Mrs Gandhi to impose the Emergency by midnight.