Emergency in India of 1975: A BREACH TO INDIAN DEMOCRACY

The constitution of India declares India as a democratic country which means the government of the country should always be people centric and all the citizens of India enjoy their individual rights. In addition to this, the provision of EMERGENCY (Article 352) was also included in the constitution which enables the government to take control of the whole situation in the case of External aggression (or) armed rebellion disturbing the internal peace.

During Emergency in India period, the citizens will lose all their fundamental rights and can be put into jail without showing any reason. The emergency in India was introduced only once in our country in 1975 during the rule of Congress Government, with Indira Gandhi as the Prime Minister and lasted till 1977.

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The factors led to the proclamation of Emergency and the after consequences are as follows:

Factors that led to the Proclamation:

There were many incidents happened during the period 1973-75 which led to the imposition of Emergency in India. But, the root cause was the dictatorial behaviour of Indira Gandhi as a Prime Minister which received the wide range of criticism even from some of her own party members.

Even from her first election as a prime minister in 1966, Indira Gandhi always followed radical and oppressive methods to control the opposition parties and rebels of own party. Some important steps such as Nationalisation of Banks in 1969, employment programmes for poor people and so on gained her huge following in the masses and she was once again elected as the prime minister with the great majority in 1971 general elections.

In 1971, India waged a war with Pakistan and helped Bangladesh to secure its independence from Pakistan. After this, Indira Gandhi began to control the judiciary by challenging the power of Judiciary over the laws made by the parliament. She even appointed the persons of her own choice as the Judges of the Supreme Court and high courts. This behaviour earned severe criticism and many movements began to rise against the government.

On 12^th June 1975, Allahabad High court gave the judgement that the election of Indira Gandhi as an MP is not valid as she was found guilty of doing malpractices during the election. After this Judgement, protestors led by JAYA PRAKASH NARAYAN, the famous socialist leader of JANATHA party flooded the streets of Delhi raising slogans against Indira Gandhi. This situation continued to prevail all over India for the next few days.

Finally, Indira made the president, FAKHRUDDIN ALI AHMED to proclaim emergency on the night of 25^th June 1975 on the grounds of armed rebellion disturbing the internal peace of the country. This proclamation is regarded as the sole decision taken by Indira Gandhi to secure her own political interests.

Also Read: National Movement of India: 1920 to 1940

Period of Emergency in India

The emergency in India period was characterised by following incidents.

ABOLITION OF FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS: The people of the country lost their fundamental rights and they can be put in jail showing no reason.

ARREST OF POLITICAL OPPONENTS: Prominent leaders like JAYAPRAKASH NARAYAN, MORARJI DESAI, L K ADVANI and so on were arrested.

POSTPONEMENT OF ELECTIONS: All the state and parliamentary elections were postponed.

BAN ON PRESS: The government imposed the ban on press and print media suppressing the right of expression.

LAW MAKING BY ORDINANCES: Indira Gandhi enacted all the laws through president by making him to issue ordinances.

Like this, Emergency in India was prolonged till January 1977 and elections were called where people voted against the Congress party giving power to the JANATA PARTY at the centre. Thus, the 21 months period of Emergency came to an end.

Have a Look at: Civil Disobedience Movement

Conclusion

The period of emergency in India is considered as the darkest phase of independent India. The provision of showing internal rebellion as the reason for imposing emergency was also removed afterwards.

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As democratic India celebrates ‘Babasaheb’ Ambedkar’s 125^th birth anniversary, he stands taller than he ever did before. His role in the struggle for a modern, democratic and socially just India greatly increased at the cost of various other outstanding national personalities, who were contemporary and opponents during the Freedom Movement era. Ambedkar’s legacy is going through a revival as political parties, across India’s ideological canvass, are fighting to use it.

And now when inequality, as a rising concern, is creating turmoil in Western countries, Ambedkar’s appeal has stretched to Western shores as well: ‘the UN is going to celebrate Bhim Rao Babasaheb Ambedkar’s 125^th birth anniversary today’. The event is set to showcase the universal appeal of the chief architect of India’s Constitution, who struggled against caste injustice.

The present phenomenon of re-imagination of Ambedkar mirrors as much on his enormous contributions in defining the Indian Republic as it does on the contemporary relevance of the themes; he has become a symbol of equality, social justice and rule of law. However, it has become crystal clear that those who claim to shoulder his legacy have failed.

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Ambedkar and the Caste System

Ambedkar, born Bhimrao on April 14, 1891, at Mhow in Madhya Pradesh in an austere and religious Mahar family, was a crusader against untouchability and Caste system that eventually compelled him to embrace Buddhism in 1956.

By the time he finished his formal studies in early 1920s Ambedkar had attained qualifications that transcended the M.A., Ph.D, M.Sc. (Econ.), D.Sc. (Econ) and Barrister-at-law. By the time he got to the age of 30, he had been through a real-life education that most people do not acquire in a lifetime.

Ambedkar’s four decades of public life began with the brilliant paper he had done on “The caste in India, their Mechanism Genesis and Development” for Alexander Goldenwaiser’s anthropology seminar in New York on May 1916.

Ambedkar believed that caste hierarchies were an intrinsic part of Hinduism. He disagreed with Mahatma Gandhi’s vision of self-governing village as India’s foundation. Instead he viewed them as dense of inequality in the name of caste.

In the current national situation his uncompromising analysis of the caste system, of chaturvarnya and sanatana dharma, of notions of pollution, of rigid or unalterable social hierarchy and of the hegemony of the Shastras must be made a part of national debate.

In “Annihilation of Caste’ Ambedkar imagined the destruction of a religion that continued the fixity of offensive relations in society. In this work he laid stress on the anti-social, anti-progress character of an unjust social order as well as its vital connection with political power that was created through network of force and ideology.

The cast system, in Ambedkar’s opinion and analysis, militated against fraternity. When challenged by the critics to come up with his model of “ideal society” in lieu of a caste- based order, he replied “My ideal would be a society based on liberty, equality and fraternity”. He specified that in his ideal society there would be fraternity, which was only another name for democracy, and democracy was primarily a method of associated living, of linking communicated experience and promoting an attitude of respect and reverence towards fellow human beings.

Ambedkar as a rebel

Ambedkar, as an oppressed intellectual and social rebel had warned, “Chaturvanaya must fail for the very reason for which Plato’s Republic must fail.” He stressed that “the lower classes of Hindus” were “completely disabled for direct action on account of a wretched system”. He emphatically said, “There cannot be a more degrading system of social organization ……… It is the system which deadens, paralyses and cripples people from helpful activity”.

Ambedkar tried to follow through the implication of this system in the political domain. In Ambedakar’s opinion, the real remedy was “to destroy the belief in the sanctity of the Shastras and their caste-borne tyranny.

In this context, it was no wonder that Gandhiji, who was a notable compromiser in such matters, declared more than half a century ago. “Dr. Ambedkar is a challenge to Hinduism”.

Also Read: Ambedkar’s World : The Making of Babasaheb and the Dalit Movement (Eleanor Zelliot)

Ambedkar’s final battle against Social orthodoxy

Ambedkar, one of the leading authors of the Constitution, led the effort to institute a reasonably forward-looking Hindu Code Bill but it was sabotaged by orthodox elements. This battle was the instructive fight over the Hindu Code Bill in the late 1940s, and the early 1950s in which social orthodoxy and opportunist politics joined hands to defeat social progress. The defeal of this forward-looking legislative measure meant the betrayal of Ambedkar’s vision on such critical issues.

On March 18, 1956 at Ramlila Ground, Agra, Ambedkar said with a heavy heart, “The educated people have betrayed me. I was thinking that after education they would serve their society. But I find that a crowd of clerks has gathered around me, who are engaged in filling their belly”.

Conclusion

Ambedkar was a transparent, honest, challenging, and eclectic liberal thinker. He found inspiration from the ideals of the French Revolution and also from the society forward-looking and humanistic elements and values in the Indian culture and civilization over the millennia. He was above all a modern thinker, a practitioner of pragmatic polities. He could not be silenced by any particular ideology or religion. Leaders who are toppling over one another to invoke him/appropriate him would do well to learn from that legacy.

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Causes for the failure of 1857 Revolt :

By July 1858, the revolt was completely suppressed. Following factors may be the reason for the failure of revolt:

• Lack of coordination and central leadership. The revolt was supposed to have started on May 31, 1857 as decided by Nana Saheb and his colleagues. But the Meerut incident led to early breaking of the revolt
• Lack of forward-looking program.
• Indian leaders lacked resources and experience as compared to British.
• Lack of support and martial races of the North
• British power have remained intact in the eastern, western and southern parts of India from where the forces were sent to suppress the revolt
• Tacit support of certain sections of the Indian public.
• Limited territorial and base.
• Many native Indian states, influenced by the example of powerful Hyderabad, did not join the revolt.
• Sikh soldiers of the Punjab area remained loyal to the British throughout.
• The aging Bahadur Shah was neither a brave general not an astute leader of people.

Read Also: The Revolt 1857: the First War of Independence

Impacts of the 1857 Revolt :

The impacts of the 1857 revolt may be summarised as

• In August 1850, the British Parliament passed an act for Better Government of India, 1858, which put an end to the rule of the Company. The control of the British government in India was transferred to the British Crown.
• A minister of the British government, called the Secretary of State, was made responsible for the Government of India.
• The British Governor-general of India was now also given the title of Viceroy, who was also the representative of the Monarch.
• Marked the end of British imperialism and Princely states were assured against annexation.The Doctrine of Lapse was withdrawn.
• Marked the end of Peshwaship and the Mughal rule.
• After the revolt, the British pursued the policy of divide and rule.
• Far-reaching changes were made in the administration and increase of white soldiers in the army.
• The total expense of the suppression of the Revolt was borne by the Indians.

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Western View Point

What has been the impact of British rule over India? It must be clearly stated that sharp differences have always existed, and continue to persist, among the Indian nationalists and the Western Scholars in their evaluation of the impact of British colonial rule over the economy, society and polity of India.
According to many western writers, the British rule provided political unity and stability of governance to India. It has been maintained by the Western scholars that the British rescued India from chaos and provided political stability. As Morris D. Morris, an American Scholar observes:

“Despite a Hindu tradition of imperial expansion, at no time in Indian history over any large region did a stable political unit survive for more than a century or a century-and-a half. There was nothing that compares with the imperial chronologies of Rome, Egypt, or China. A crucial consequence is that no tradition of continuous administrative institutions and no persistent bureaucracy ever developed”.

Indian political unity was a myth, an abstract concept which was concretized into a reality by the British rulers. In the absence of political unity, the eighteenth century India had very low levels of “commerce and capital accumulation” and its implication was that the British rule in India had to deal with a very low level of an economy. This argument of the western writers challenges the nationalist argument that India was economically very attractive and profitable for the British.

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Second, the western writers have suggested that the history of India revealed a very low level of agricultural productivity because it was based on a ‘non-animal powered agriculture’. According to many western historians, the absence of any worthwhile technology kept a large portion of India as a ‘virgin land as late as 1800’. Tobacco, potato and peanut cultivation was introduced by the British in India.

Third, according to them, India could not claim any great achievements in manufacturing because it lacked technology. Although India had some excellent craftsmen and produced textiles and a few other manufactured goods but they were the result of hard work and not of any developed technology. The evidence for this view-point is gathered from the seventeenth-century records of the English which point out the inelasticity of textile productivity in India. W.H. Moreland and many other scholars have used the evidence of early European travelers to prove that Indian technology was poor. On the basis of such evidence, Morris D. Morris observes that:

“…. The Indian subcontinent was a region in which per capita income was relatively low in the centuries before 1800. Given the lack of political stability, low agricultural and non-agricultural productivity, and insignificant commerce no other conclusion is supportable”.

If the opinions of Morris D. Morris, W.H. Moreland, or European travelers or British factory records are accepted that India was underdeveloped when the British gradually conquered it, then the implication is that the British conquest of India was beneficial for the economy, society and polity of this country. In history whenever two societies interact, the advanced and well-organized society succeeds in establishing its control over the less advanced society and at the same time the less advanced society gains from the technology and organization of the advanced society. This is the basic premise of the western writers who view the British colonial rule as a rule of advanced society over an underdeveloped society. In the process, the underdeveloped society like India achieved benefits from the British rule and they are enumerated by the Western scholars:

• The British provided political unity and stability to India.
• The British developed a system of roads and rail transport which had a positive impact on the economic development of India.
• The British developed irrigation and other public works which facilitated the growth of agriculture, commerce and manufacturing activities in India.

To sum up, the Western writers have made two points regarding the impact of British rule over India. First, on the eve of colonial expansion, the British found a highly underdeveloped India with low productivity in agriculture, very low per capita income and absence of any developed technology or tools for manufacturing. Second, the benevolent policies of the British helped in the establishment of political unity, a system of governance and it laid the foundations of economic development in India.

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Indian view point

As against this, the Indian nationalist scholars put forward a different hypothesis. Dadabhai Naoroji, Romesh Chandra Dutt in the 19th century and Rajni Palme Dutt in the 20th century represented the Indian nationalist perspective. The question
they raised was that why did the British East India Company gradually get involved in local wars of conquest? Why did the British Queen in 1858 take up the direct responsibility of ruling over India till 1947? How was it that the East India Company which came to India with a trading capital of £ 68,000, went on to make fortunes? If the Indian economy was really stagnant, how did it sustain the East India Company and its expenditure?
Two important aspects of British colonial rule over India highlighted by the nationalists were the ‘drain theory’ and the theory of ‘de-industrialisation’.

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