June 28, 2026:
51 years after the Emergency, India must not forget
At the stroke of midnight on June 25, 1975, while most of India slept, the constitutional republic that Ambedkar and his colleagues had laboured to construct was placed under executive siege. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi proclaimed a state of internal Emergency under Article 352, citing a threat from “internal disturbance”—a phrase stretched beyond all legal recognition to serve one purpose: the perpetuation of a government whose Prime Minister had just been found guilty of electoral malpractice by the Allahabad High Court.
The Emergency lasted 21 months. In those months, fundamental rights were suspended, the press was gagged, Parliament was reduced to an instrument of acclamation, courts were defanged, opposition leaders were jailed by the tens of thousands, the bodies of the poor were violated through forced sterilisation drives, and entire neighbourhoods were razed. When it ended in March 1977, India had survived—not because its institutions held firm, but despite the fact that they had largely failed.
Fifty-one years later, that midnight proclamation demands renewed attention—not as a partisan cudgel, but as a constitutional mirror. In a season when the Indian National Congress has taken to wrapping itself in the language of constitutional defence, invoking Ambedkar’s image at every rally, it is both legitimate and necessary to ask: what does the party’s own historical record say about its fidelity to constitutional morality?
The Emergency was not merely an abuse of executive power. It was a systematic, legally engineered assault on the constitutional order. As H.M. Seervai argued, the proclamation under Article 352 was of doubtful constitutional validity—the cabinet was not consulted before it was transmitted to the President; it was informed after the fact. Articles 358 and 359 were then weaponised to render citizens legally defenceless. The Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA) was deployed against political opponents with no judicial oversight and no meaningful recourse. Tens of thousands were imprisoned without charge.
The judiciary, for the most part, complied. In ADM Jabalpur v. Shivkant Shukla (1976)—a judgment that will live in constitutional infamy—the Supreme Court held that during an Emergency, no person could seek habeas corpus. The state’s counsel argued openly that the government could shoot citizens dead and courts could do nothing. Only Justice H.R. Khanna dissented, writing: “The Constitution and the laws of India do not permit life and liberty to be at the mercy of the executive.” He paid for it with his supersession. Four decades later, the nine-judge bench in Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017) unanimously overruled ADM Jabalpur, describing it as an “aberration in the constitutional order.”
The constitutional amendments of the Emergency period completed the architecture of authoritarian governance. The 39th Amendment placed the Prime Minister’s election beyond judicial review—a nakedly self-serving provision to nullify the Allahabad verdict. The 42nd Amendment of 1976 attempted to make Parliament’s amending power absolute, diminished the Supreme Court’s powers, and inserted “socialist” and “secular” into the Preamble by executive fiat in a Parliament already purged of effective opposition. Dr. Ambedkar had foreseen this danger precisely: “However good a Constitution may be, it is sure to turn out bad because those who are called to work it happen to be a bad lot.” The Emergency was Ambedkar’s nightmare made flesh.
THE ANATOMY OF REPRESSION
The Shah Commission’s three volumes remain the most authoritative record of the period’s excesses. Jayaprakash Narayan- Gandhi’s political heir -was arrested from his own home in the early hours of June 26, despite suffering from kidney disease. Vajpayee, Advani, Morarji Desai, George Fernandes, and thousands more were imprisoned.
Power to newspaper offices in Delhi was cut on the night of June 25-26. Most editors complied with a servility that Advani accurately characterised as journalists crawling when they had only been asked to bend.
The most visceral violence was concentrated in the programmes driven by Sanjay Gandhi, who wielded enormous and constitutionally unaccountable power. Mass vasectomy camps -enforced upon the poor with coercive targets at every administrative level -became a synonym for state terror. Hundreds died. The demolitions around Turkman Gate displaced hundreds of thousands with no legal authority and no compensation.
THE RESISTANCE THAT SAVED DEMOCRACY
History’s moral accounting must be precise. The Bharatiya Jana Sangh and the RSS bore a disproportionate share of repression and a disproportionate share of resistance. RSS workers, practiced in organisational discipline, constituted the underground infrastructure of anti-Emergency activity across India—maintaining communication networks, producing underground literature, sheltering activists. Nanaji Deshmukh played a crucial coordinating role. Vajpayee and Advani, both imprisoned for extended periods, emerged with moral authority that transcended their political formations.
The resistance was ideologically plural but constitutionally unified. George Fernandes, a socialist who went underground; the Akali Dal; CPI(M) cadres; Gandhian organisations; civil society lawyers- all contributed. But it is historically dishonest to minimise the contributions of Jan Sangh and RSS workers, as a certain strand of political memory has sought to do. They were among the most numerous, the most targeted, and the most organised of the Emergency’s resisters. The Shah Commission’s records confirm this.
CONGRESS AND THE CONTRADICTION OF CONSTITUTIONAL MORALITY
Constitutionalism is a culture of restraint-the commitment to exercise power within constitutional limits, to protect the rights of dissenters, and to submit to judicial scrutiny even when inconvenient. By every one of these measures, the Congress’s conduct during the Emergency represented a fundamental betrayal of constitutional morality.
The Puttaswamy judgment did not merely overrule ADM Jabalpur on technical grounds; it repudiated the entire constitutional philosophy that Emergency-era governance had embodied. The 44th Amendment of 1978, passed by the Janata government, partially corrected the damage. The credibility of constitutional advocacy requires constitutional consistency.
AMBEDKAR AND THE POLITICS OF SELECTIVE MEMORY
The Congress’s current appropriation of Ambedkar’s legacy requires scrutiny, because it involves a far more troubled historical relationship than the party’s iconography acknowledges. Ambedkar’s disagreements with Nehru and the Congress leadership were substantive and persistent. When Congress failed to support the Hindu Code Bill in its comprehensive form, he resigned from the cabinet in 1951 in one of the most principled acts of independent India’s governance. The following year, he contested and lost the Bombay seat in elections widely believed to have been engineered against him by Congress machinery. The foremost constitutional mind of independent India was kept out of Parliament by a party that later claimed to be his greatest champion.
Christophe Jaffrelot has documented how Congress’s relationship with Dalit voters was mediated through patronage-a system Ambedkar himself identified and condemned. The Bharat Ratna was awarded to Ambedkar in 1990- thirty-four years after his death-not by a Congress government, but by V.P. Singh’s Janata Dal administration. To invoke Ambedkar’s image while glossing over this history is not commemoration. It is appropriation.
BABU JAGJIVAN RAM: THE GIANT CONGRESS CHOSE NOT TO CROWN
No account of the Emergency is complete without Babu Jagjivan Ram- a man of incomparable political stature who spent a lifetime within the Congress only to find, at decisive moments, that the party’s commitment to Dalit leadership was circumscribed by upper-caste political calculations. He served as a cabinet minister for nearly an unbroken stretch from 1946 to 1977, holding every significant portfolio including Defence during the Bangladesh war. Yet the Congress High Command never seriously considered him for Prime Ministership-for reasons never formally stated but widely understood.
His departure from Congress in February 1977, weeks before the elections, was an act of moral and political courage. His defection shifted the electoral calculus decisively. The Janata Party’s victory-the first-ever defeat of Congress in a general election- owed much to the constituencies he brought with him. His life’s trajectory-brilliant service, systematic marginalisation, courageous break- is a parable for Dalit political history that cannot be reduced to Congress’s self-serving narrative of inclusion.
THE LESSON THAT HAS NOT EXPIRED
The Emergency ended not because institutions held—most of them did not. It ended because ordinary people refused to surrender. J.P. Narayan gave the resistance its moral grammar. Jan Sangh workers gave it its organisational sinew. Justice Khanna gave it its juridical conscience. Jagjivan Ram gave it the electoral mass to prevail.
The lesson of the Emergency is not that any single party is uniquely dangerous. Authoritarian temptation is a permanent feature of political life, available to whoever exercises power without adequate accountability. When citizens stop paying attention, when the press becomes a vehicle for power rather than its critic, when courts defer to executive convenience, the conditions that produced the Emergency can reassemble themselves under any ideological banner.
Ambedkar’s warning has not expired. The Constitution remains only as good as those who work it. Fifty-one years after the midnight that silenced the presses and filled the jails, that insistence remains the most important thing India has to teach itself.
