46 Years Since the Emergency
“The President has proclaimed Emergency. There is nothing to panic about,” declared Indira Gandhi on All India Radio.
The following are some of the things that took place during the Emergency, testaments to the fact that contrary to Indira Gandhi’s statement, there was indeed much to panic about.
Changes to the Constitution: the 42nd Amendment
- The Preamble was changed from “sovereign democratic republic” to “sovereign, socialist secular* democratic republic”.
*Not that the constitution wasn’t secular. Back in 1948, Ambedkar had opposed including the word secular since the entire Constitution embodied the idea of a secular state.
- Restricted the power of the Supreme Court and the High Court in pronouncing judgments complying with constitutional validity.
Crackdown on opposition
Those seen as a threat to the government were jailed.
This included Jayaprakash Narayan, Morarji Desai, Biju Patnaik, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, L K Advani, Arun Jaitley, Chandra Shekhar, Charan Singh, Nanaji Deshmukh, Balasaheb Deoras, H D Deve Gowda, Ram Vilas Paswan and Nitish Kumar.
Thousands of protestors and strike leaders were placed under preventive detention.
Press censorship
After the emergency was announced, electricity to all major newspaper offices was disconnected and was restored only 2-3 days later after a censorship apparatus was set up.
The Indian Express and the Statesman were the first newspapers to protest through their editions – by leaving their editorial pages empty.
According to the Home Ministry, in May of 1976, almost 7,000 journalists and media personnel were arrested.
Family planning gone wrong
In September 1976, Sanjay Gandhi initiated a compulsory sterilisation programme to limit population growth.
This was mainly done through vasectomies, many of which were forced. Some government officials even had quotas of how many people they needed to convince to get sterilised.
2000 died from failed operations.
Between 1976 and 1977, the programme led to 8.3 million sterilisations, up from 2.7 million the previous year.
Western press under flak
According to the Indian Express, journalists from the Times of London, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times were expelled. The Guardian and the Economist’s correspondents flew back to the United Kingdom after receiving threats.
In August 1975, a statement signed by 41 Congress MPs accused the BBC of broadcasting “notoriously anti-India stories” and asked the government “not to allow the BBC to report again from Indian soil”.
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