The Emergency: 21 months of suspended democracy

What happened

On the night of 25 June 1975, President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, on the advice of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, declared a state of internal emergency under Article 352 of the Constitution. The proclamation followed the Allahabad High Court’s judgment of 12 June 1975 finding the Prime Minister guilty of electoral malpractice and invalidating her election.

For the next 21 months, fundamental rights stood suspended. Press censorship was imposed; newspapers were required to submit content for approval before publication. Opposition leaders — including Jayaprakash Narayan, Morarji Desai, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and L.K. Advani — were arrested, and preventive-detention laws such as MISA were used to jail tens of thousands of citizens without trial. Parliamentary elections due in 1976 were postponed.

What the official record found

The Shah Commission of Inquiry, constituted in 1977, documented widespread abuses: arbitrary detentions far beyond any security justification, torture in custody, forced evictions and demolitions in Delhi, and a coercive mass-sterilisation campaign in which millions of sterilisations were performed in 1976, many under duress or in exchange for basic entitlements.

Where it stands

The Emergency ended in March 1977 when elections were called and the Congress government was voted out. It remains the most extensively documented suspension of democratic rights in the history of the Republic, and the 44th Amendment (1978) was passed specifically to make any repetition harder.