Mrs. Gandhi And The 1974 Emergency

[Guest]

<b>Indian democracy imperiled </b><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The first year of the emergency was, in hindsight, not that harmful for Indira Gandhi or the country. Poorer Indians still trusted the premier and intellectuals noted that they were under an authoritarian, not totalitarian, government. Arun Shourie, the famous journalist, called it "the mildest possible dictatorship" compared to China, the USSR or some of the banana republics. By mid-1976, though, the glow had begun to fade both among the masses and the intellectuals. Denial of civil liberties began to pinch common people and Gandhi herself admitted ex post facto, "The emergency did get a little bit out of hand because people started misusing power at different levels." <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd--><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Chandra concludes that both the JP Movement and the emergency threatened Indian democracy. New Delhi in 1976 may not have been Berlin under Hitler, but the emergency was obviously "flirting with totalitarianism". The JP Movement, especially its RSS component, was positively hostile to parliamentary democracy  <!--emo&--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/rolleyes.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='rolleyes.gif' /><!--endemo--> . Its vanguard in the petit-bourgeoisie contained the "classic base of potential fascism". (p 274) Chandra warns of the consequences of an "unthinking mass movement" like JP's as well as the perils of strong-state ideologies and Rasputins like Sanjay Gandhi. The lessons learnt for India from 1974-1977 are that violent or coercive protests pose threats to the functioning of democracy, just as insensitive suppression of normal political agitation is undemocratic<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->