Book Review: 50 Years of Indian Emergency – Lessons for Democracy
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Team Kitaab reviews 50 Years of Indian Emergency- Lessons for Democracy, edited by Peter Ronald deSouza and Harsh Sethi (Orient Blackswan, 2025), observing how it is a reckoning.
Half a century has passed since India’s Emergency, a 21-month suspension of democracy between June 1975 and March 1977, yet the word still bristles with unease. Declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi under Article 352, ostensibly to preserve national security, the Emergency became shorthand for the state’s most systematic encroachment on civil liberties: mass arrests, press censorship, forced sterilisation campaigns, and the subjugation of dissent under the rhetoric of discipline and order. The Emergency was not only a political rupture but a psychic one. It revealed how fragile the democratic experiment could be, how easily institutions could bend to the will of power.
It is against this background that 50 Years of the Indian Emergency: Lessons for Democracy, edited by Peter Ronald deSouza and Harsh Sethi, arrives as both commemoration and interrogation. This is not a nostalgic volume, nor a simple act of historical retrospection. It is a reckoning, an attempt to think through what the Emergency means, half a century later, for India’s democracy, its institutions, and its imagination.
