India's 21-Month Nightmare of Democratic Asphyxiation

The Emergency was an authoritarian crackdown, censoring press, jailing opposition, violating rights.

- SAVIO RODRIGUES

You can shut the press, jail the opposition, gag the courts, and turn India into a dictatorship in disguise. But there's one thing you can't suppress—India's memory.

It was past midnight on June 25, 1975, when India, the world's largest democracy, slipped into a deep coma called The Emergency. Without warning, without consultation, without conscience. It wasn't declared by the people, nor their elected Parliament. It was declared by a Prime Minister who mistook herself for a monarch—Indira Gandhi. The Constitution was twisted into a tool of tyranny. The ink of democracy ran dry, and for 21 long months, the soul of India gasped for breath.

Let's rewind. In June 1975, the Allahabad High Court found Indira Gandhi guilty of electoral malpractices and invalidated her 1971 Lok Sabha win. Instead of resigning with grace and facing the people again, she chose to face them with batons, censorship, and coercion. She blamed a "threat to national security." But the only real threat was to her own throne. What followed was not emergency governance—it was emergency paranoia.

She sought advice not from statesmen but from her son, Sanjay Gandhi, who turned into a miniature dictator with delusions of grandeur. An unelected, unaccountable young man wielding raw power with reckless arrogance.

The Constitution's Article 352 became a loaded gun. The first bullet hit the press—newspapers were censored, editors harassed, printing presses raided. Even cartoons weren't spared. The Indian Express famously left its editorial column blank—an act of resistance louder than a thousand words.