The state of fear and fearlessness
ing the heartily disliked Congress’ ‘Chimanbhai regime’. A nationwide railway strike threatened to clog the country’s arteries Then came the denouement : The Allahabad High Court unseated Indira Gandhi on an election petition charging electoral malpractice and the S C upheld the high court ruling.
The 21-month-long night of the national Emergency that followed saw, among other horrors, the Constitution’s draconian 42nd Amendment which made any amendment by Parliament immune from judicial review.
The Emergency is hateful, is hated and will always be.
And yet, today, 42 years on, may one harbour a contrarian view about it? We are not under an Emergency, and so why not?
The national Emergency of 1975-1977 is the poison that tells us that its antidote exists, right in our grasp – courage. And that knowledge is a gift that it has given us.
Thanks to the misuse of the Constitution’s emergency powers, the country was awakened to removing those powers by the 44th Amendment Act. “Recent experience has shown”, the bill’s sage objects explained, “that the fundamental rights, including those of life and liberty, granted to citizens by the Constitution are capable of being taken away by a transient majority. It is, therefore, necessary to provide adequate safeguards against the recurrence of such a contingency in the future and to ensure to the people themselves an effective voice in determining the form of government under which they are to live.”
“In the future”, it says far-sightedly.
That “future” where “the people themselves” must guard their civil and democratic rights from being “taken away by a transient majority”, in a democratic republic is the present moment. It is now.
A state of Emergency is, at its core, a state of fear. That ‘state’ does not have to be proclaimed. It can just come to be.