That night of June 25, 1975, while the rest of India slept in ignorance, a serene yet potent tempest was brewing. In a country that had won the world's admiration for upholding a democracy despite everything against it, poverty, partition, and post-colonial vulnerability, democratic institutions were about to be stifled beneath the heel of authoritarian rule. At midnight, the President of India, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, on the advice of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, signed a declaration of national Emergency under Article 352 of the Constitution. The grounds given were imprecise, "internal disturbances", but the effects were sudden and sweeping. Indians woke up the following morning in a very different nation. Democracy was no longer assured. It was replaced by silence, fear, and untrammelled power.
Today, in retrospect, June 25 is one of India's darkest constitutional days. It wasn't the declaration of Emergency alone that hurt the republic; it was how the constitutional machinery was deployed to dismember the very protections that were established to secure citizens from tyranny. It was an act of law, sure, but one that acted in moral opposition to the very ideals of a democratic country. Rights were suspended, dissent was criminalised, and institutions that were designed to challenge authority were compelled to bend the knee. This wasn't a temporary aberration; it was a systemic suffocation of freedom in the name of national security.
To appreciate why the Emergency was proclaimed, it is necessary to look back at the political situation in the early 1970s. Indira Gandhi had won a stunning victory in the 1971 general election, and the Bangladesh Liberation War in December that year had lifted her to legendary status. But behind the veneer of political power, trouble was simmering. Inflation was rising through the roof. Unemployment had reached crisis levels. There were mass protests by opposition leaders, trade unions, and students. Gujarat's Nav Nirman Andolan and Bihar Movement under Jayaprakash Narayan were gaining momentum, demanding not only a change in politics but a fundamental transformation of the system. The government was accused by the opposition of incompetence, nepotism, and corruption. The Prime Minister, once hailed as a champion of the people, was fast emerging as intolerant.
The breaking point was on June 12, 1975, when the Allahabad High Court invalidated Indira Gandhi's election to the Lok Sabha on charges of electoral malpractices. The judgment deposed her and prohibited her from contesting any elected office for six years. It was a crushing shock. Rather than resign, Indira Gandhi decided to retaliate, not merely by appeal, but by complete domination. The Emergency was her reaction to the danger to her political existence. Not merely a political vendetta followed, but the suspension of democracy.
The Emergency formally came into effect on June 26, 1975. In one night, opposition leaders by the hundreds were arrested without trial. Jayaprakash Narayan, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, L.K. Advani, Morarji Desai, and thousands of workers and students were imprisoned. The press was gagged. Censorship officials were posted in all major publishing houses. Articles needed to be sanctioned before they could be published. Most newspapers sent blank editorial pages as silent protests, while the others yielded to pressure and were turned into the truth-telling organs of the government.
With the Parliament rendered ineffectual and the judiciary undermined by coercion or complicity, the executive functioned with unbridled authority. The government tweaked the Constitution to insulate itself against legal challenges. The most notorious was the 42nd Amendment, which was enacted in 1976, it suspended the jurisdiction of the courts, sought to render the proclamation of Emergency immune from judicial challenge, and even altered the Preamble to add such words as "socialist" and "secular" and to shift the balance of power irretrievably in favor of the central government. The amendment attempted to reshape India not through democratic consensus but through the brute force of executive command.
But what made this period truly terrifying was not just the absence of democracy; it was the presence of cruelty disguised as reform. Indira Gandhi’s younger son, Sanjay Gandhi, who held no official position in the government, began to wield enormous influence. His policies, particularly the infamous population control campaign through sterilisation, involved mass human rights abuses. Men in slums and villages were rounded up and subjected to coercion or misinformation and sterilised. There were quotas. There were rewards for cooperation and penalties for refusal. The poor were most affected by this coercive policy, with thousands of families fractured and traumatised.
Urban slums were knocked down in Delhi as part of a beautification drive. Whole neighbourhoods were destroyed without resettlement. The worst hit, the daily wage earners, migrants, and lower-caste families, had no voice, no recourse. The Emergency was not merely about silence in Parliament or the press; it was about the systematic suppression of the weakest voices within Indian society. Those who could be stamped on without punishment were stamped on.
For most, particularly the youth of today, the Emergency is a page in history books. But for those who experienced it, it was an era of quiet terror, of sitting in jail cells without trial, of dailies landing each morning with headlines vetted by the government, of liberty being a battened-down privilege conferred by power and not a right secured by the Constitution. There was no social media, no citizen journalism, no instant global communication. When rights were withdrawn, they vanished into thin air. Nobody knew if, or when, they would ever come back.
The Emergency ended in March 1977. Confronted with rising resentment and perhaps overestimating her popularity, Indira Gandhi proclaimed general elections. In a stunning upset, the opposition joined to create the Janata Party and secured a historic mandate. For the first time, the Congress party lost power at the national level. The victory was not only a political change; it was a moral accounting. India had spoken, and it had spoken loud and clear that democracy was important. People had punished the government not only for misgovernance, but for having the temerity to take away their dignity and rights.
Even after the Emergency had passed, its wounds still showed. Institutional trust had been lost. The judiciary, accused of failing to speak out during the Emergency, slowly regained its independence in the decades that followed. Civil society grew more confident, more wary. Acts such as the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA), permitting detention without trial, were later repealed. But the Emergency left lessons that went beyond law or politics, and were very personal. They were about what occurs when apathy lets power become unchecked. About how democracies do not die in one day but are undermined gradually when fear overshadows freedom, and silence takes the place of dissent.
Today, as we commemorate June 25, we need to do more than reminisce. We need to introspect. The Emergency did not occur in isolation. It occurred because power was allowed to become larger than the people. Because institutions that were designed to safeguard democracy were not able to do so. Because too many were ready to exchange their freedom for the mirage of order and discipline. It was because the Constitution, while powerful, can't guard itself; it requires human beings who care enough to stand up for it.
It is not an overstatement to refer to June 25 as a black day. It is a recognition of a bitter truth, that in the very core of the world's largest democracy, there was once when democracy did not exist. And it is a warning, not only from the past but for the times to come. The Indian Constitution is a living document. It is not stone, it is made of people's will. And it will only endure so long as we stay awake, loud, and not afraid to talk truth to power.
The Emergency serves as a reminder that freedom is never granted, but always won, always fought for, and always one step away from being lost. So today, we don't merely commemorate a date. We recall a fight. We recall those who wouldn't shut up. We recall what was taken away and what was regained. And more than anything else, we recall that democracy is more than elections and legislatures. It is about the quotidian decisions we make to uphold freedom, to resist authority, and to hold the conviction that power, however great, is never beyond the people.