Politics, economics, social contracts: Why rerun of anger of '75 is unlikely

"History does nothing, it possesses no immense wealth, it wages no battles. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; history is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims," Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote in their seminal 1845 book, The Holy Family.

- Roshan Kishore

NEW DELHI: "History does nothing, it possesses no immense wealth, it wages no battles. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; history is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims," Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote in their seminal 1845 book, The Holy Family.

This is actually a good framework to look at the Emergency, 50 years after its imposition. The prelude, duration and aftermath of the Emergency have a lot of historical events across different realms that are worthy of being remembered and discussed in detail even today. However, it is useful to ask a simple, perhaps counter-intuitive, question to provoke a discussion on the issue: what led to the Emergency when it happened and can a similar thing happen today?

If one were to give a simplistic account of what led to the Emergency, it can be done as follows: There was a surge of popular and militant protests against the Indira Gandhi government and her party's governments in various states. The reasons were primarily economic. When the Allahabad high court annulled Gandhi's election citing impropriety, which threatened the possibility of her continuing in office, she decided to put democracy in suspended animation.

Ironic as it may sound, Parliament continued to function and the government pushed through whatever legislation it wanted, as the Congress had an overwhelming majority, not just in Parliament, but even in many state legislatures. The latter had to sign off on the flurry of constitutional amendments during this period to make them kosher.