New Delhi: On the 50th anniversary of the Emergency declaration, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge said that Indira Gandhi had admitted the imposition of the Emergency was a “mistake” for which she had apologised to the people.
“They (BJP) put her in the dock over the Emergency, but she acknowledged it was a mistake and also apologised,” Kharge said Wednesday, noting that the former prime minister even voted in favour of the 44th Amendment, which reversed many constitutional changes introduced during the Emergency.
“When elections were held (in 1980), she returned to power. People were in no mood to rake up the past. The Congress came back with a nearly two-thirds majority,” Kharge told a press conference, echoing a line many party leaders have taken over the years when confronted with the Emergency’s uncomfortable legacy.
However, flipping through the pages of history reveals a more nuanced picture. Until Rahul Gandhi’s unequivocal admission in 2021 that the Emergency was a mistake, no Congress leader had explicitly apologised for its imposition without qualifiers.
Kharge’s claim that Indira Gandhi had called it a mistake appears to be a reference to her January 1978 “apology”—which addressed the “excesses” committed during the 21-month period, but not the act of imposing it itself.
In a 1978 interview to Jonathan Dimbleby of UK-based Thames Television, Indira had, in fact, defended her decision, saying it was needed as her political rivals “were destroying democracy.”
“Because they felt they could not win an election, they said we must take the battle to the streets. Morarji Desai is on record in an interview having said ‘we are going to surround the PM house, the parliament, and we will see that no business is done’. … Another member of the opposition, now a minister, said if we cannot win by the ballot we will win by the bullet…India would not have survived. It was as serious as a war period,” Indira said.
Her son Rajiv Gandhi, who took over as the prime minister following her assassination in 1984, also employed similar arguments in defending her move when the issue came up in the Lok Sabha on 23 July, 1985.
That day, Rajiv, who had a brute majority of 414 seats in the Lok Sabha, found himself cornered in Parliament, with opposition leaders pressing for an adjournment motion to discuss the “possibility of a proclamation” of a fresh Emergency in the country.
Despite Speaker Balram Jakhar rejecting the demand, stating there was no basis for it, socialist leader Madhu Dandavate, along with CPI leader Indrajit Gupta and a few other opposition MPs, compelled Rajiv to intervene.
Dandavate argued that certain remarks made by the Prime Minister at a press conference earlier that month had “created apprehensions about the possibility of a proclamation of Emergency in the country.” With Jakhar struggling to restore order in the House, Rajiv stood up.
“I will answer that,” he said. His subsequent remarks—recorded in the official Parliament proceedings—are telling.
“I was asked a very specific question. One, whether I thought the Emergency when it was proclaimed in 1975 was correct? I said ‘yes’, I think it is correct and I stand by that statement,” Rajiv said.
“The second part of the question I was asked was ‘if conditions similar to those in 1975 were to repeat themselves would I do the same thing?’ My answer was that it was highly unlikely that any given set of conditions can repeat themselves. I said that ‘if conditions do occur that require an emergency to be proclaimed, I will not hesitate to proclaim an Emergency’,” he said.
He argued that there was no bigger danger in any country than a “vacillating government”.
“And that was the type of government we had when you were sitting on this side. That is why you are afraid to talk about the Emergency. There is nothing wrong with an emergency if it is applied when it is required. The Constitution tells us when it is required,” Rajiv said, invoking Indira’s return to power in 1980.
“The ultimate people whom the Prime Minister is responsible to are the people of India. And the people of India will decide what they want, irrespective of what the honourable member might feel. And in 1980, they realised their mistake!”
Months later, addressing a session of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) in Mumbai (then Bombay), Rajiv once again justified the imposition of Emergency, stating that it was imposed to “meet an unprecedented threat to the nation’s stability”. The move, he said, boosted India’s socio-economic development.
“The process of socio-economic change gathered momentum with the promulgation of the bold and dynamic 20 Point Programme. A democrat to the core of her being, Indiraji called elections in 1977. She accepted the verdict of the people who defeated her and the Congress. She knew it was an angry reaction to some mistakes that had been committed, but that the people were still with her and with the Congress…,” he said.
In 2004, in an interview to ThePrint founder and editor-in-chief Shekhar Gupta, who was then the editor of The Indian Express, Sonia Gandhi said that the very fact that Indira called elections in 1977 was a sign that she had a rethink on the Emergency.
“I think she did think that it was a mistake. Because don’t forget that at least the Indira Gandhi I knew was a democrat at heart, to the core. And I think circumstances compelled her to take that action but she was never quite at ease with it,” she said, adding that it was a lesson that no future government should repeat any such measure. However, that statement came with the caveat: “Those were different times.”
Also Read: Rajnath, Shivraj & Javadekar. How jail term during Emergency shaped leaders of today’s BJP
What Pranab, Manmohan & Rahul said
In his 2014 book, ‘The Dramatic Decade: The Indira Gandhi Years’, former president and the late Congress stalwart, Pranab Mukherjee, claimed that Emergency brought “discipline in public life”, a growing economy, controlled inflation, a reversed trade deficit for the first time, enhanced developmental expenditure and a crackdown on tax evasion and smuggling but “it was perhaps an avoidable event”.
“Suspension of fundamental rights and political activity, including trade union activity, large scale arrests of political leaders and activists, press censorship, and extending the life of legislatures by not conducting elections were some instances of Emergency adversely affecting the interests of the people. The Congress and Indira Gandhi had to pay a heavy price for this misadventure,” wrote Mukherjee.
Former prime minister Manmohan Singh, who died in December 2024, is also quoted in his daughter Daman Singh’s book ‘Strictly Personal: Manmohan and Gursharan’ that “some good things happened” during the Emergency but “the atmosphere in the whole country was one of fear. There were arbitrary arrests and detentions.”
It was only in March 2021 that Rahul Gandhi, in an interaction at Cornell University in the US, said that what happened during that period was “wrong” and that his grandmother’s decision was a mistake.
“I think that was a mistake. Absolutely, that was a mistake. And my grandmother said as much,” Rahul said, when asked about his thoughts. But, he promptly added that there was a fundamental difference between what happened during the Emergency and the prevailing situation in the country.
“The Congress party at no point attempted to capture India’s institutional framework and frankly, the Congress party does not even have that capability. Our design does not allow us that and even if we want, we cannot do it,” Rahul said.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
Also Read: 50 years since Emergency: How judges, lawyers enabled & resisted Indira Gandhi’s crackdown
