Wednesday is the 50th anniversary of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. Her most authoritative and profound biographer, Srinath Raghavan, whose book Indira Gandhi and the Years That Transformed India is published this month, believes the Emergency was “the single most traumatic experience in independent India’s political history”. Today let’s remind ourselves of how terrible it was.

The cold facts of the Emergency are chilling; 34,988 people were detained under the Maintenance of Internal Security Act whilst 75,818 were arrested under the Defence of India rules; practically the entire Opposition was jailed; the press was censored; the Constitution brutally amended; and even the judiciary accepted that the right to life had been suspended.

At the height of the Emergency, LK Advani wrote in his diary that Indian democracy was over and done with. At the time, most people would have agreed with him.

There can be little doubt that the Emergency was declared to protect Gandhi’s political career after the Allahabad High........

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