The Emergency, 1975–77: The Verdict, the Midnight Knock, the Morcha and the Vote That Ended It

Allahabad, Thursday, 12 June 1975. At 9:25 in the morning Justice Jagmohanlal Sinha walked into Court No 24 of the Allahabad High Court. At ten o’clock he sat down to read out a judgment of 258 pages.

While he wrote it, he barely left his house; visitors were told he was in Indore. His secretary, Manna Lal, was warned not to let a word slip, not even to his own wife. When a request to put off the verdict reached him through the Chief Justice, he turned it down.

The case had been brought by Raj Narain, a rumpled, rowdy socialist who had lost to Indira Gandhi in Rae Bareli in 1971 and then taken her to court. That March his lawyer, Shanti Bhushan, had cross-examined her in this very court. No Indian prime minister had ever stood in a witness box before.

The judge threw out the bribery charges. But he held her guilty of a corrupt practice under the election law: she had taken the help of government officers in her campaign, among them Yashpal Kapoor, an officer on her own staff. Her election was void. For six years she could not hold elected office.

In London, The Times thought the whole thing absurd, rather like firing a prime minister over a traffic ticket. In Delhi, the woman who had won a landslide and a war in 1971 had thirteen days left as a normal democratic leader.

What came next was the Emergency: 21 months of suspended rights, censored newspapers, more than a lakh of people jailed without trial and millions of men sterilised. Then, astonishingly, she called an election and lost it. Here is the government’s case in its own words, the record of what was done, and the Punjab that fought it longer than anyone.

Go back a year. In 1974 India was angry. Prices had jumped by around a quarter in a year, jobs were scarce, and the glow of the 1971 victory had worn off.

In Gujarat, students’ protests grew into the Navnirman movement and brought down the state’s Congress government in early 1974. In Bihar, students rose too, and asked an old man to lead them.

Jayaprakash Narayan, a hero of the 1942 Quit India movement, had turned down power ever since. On 5 June 1974, in Patna, he called for sampoorna kranti, total revolution.

That May, about 1.7 million railway workers led by the trade unionist George Fernandes had walked out for 20 days. The government broke the strike, and thousands were jailed and sacked.

To Indira Gandhi’s camp, all this was a plot to topple an elected government from the street. To JP’s followers it was the conscience of the country waking up. Both sides would soon be tested.

The evening of 25 June was hot and loud. Reports put the crowd at Ramlila Maidan at more than a lakh. JP, 72, frail and white-haired, borrowed a line from the poet Ramdhari Singh Dinkar.

Singhasan khali karo ki janata aati hai. (Vacate the throne, the people are coming.)Ramdhari Singh Dinkar’s verse, recited by Jayaprakash Narayan, 25 June 1975

He called for daily protests until she resigned. Then he said the words that the government would quote for the next fifty years: soldiers and policemen, he said, should not obey orders that were illegal or immoral.

JP called it conscience. The government called it an invitation to mutiny.

While the crowd went home, a short proclamation was being typed at the Prime Minister’s house. Under Article 352 of the Constitution it declared that the security of India was threatened by ‘internal disturbance’. President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed signed it minutes before midnight.

The Cabinet was not asked. Its members were called to a meeting early the next morning and told.

Before dawn, the lights went out along Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, Delhi’s Fleet Street, where most of the big papers were printed. The power had been cut. Most of them could not print the next day.

And the police went knocking. JP was picked up before dawn. So were Morarji Desai, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, L.K. Advani, Raj Narain, George Fernandes and, from inside Indira Gandhi’s own Congress, Chandra Shekhar and Mohan Dharia. Within days there were thousands more.

At about 8 o’clock the Prime Minister’s voice came over All India Radio.

The President has proclaimed Emergency. There is nothing to panic about.Indira Gandhi, broadcast on All India Radio, 26 June 1975

She spoke of a deep and widespread conspiracy against her government and its work for the common people. Fundamental rights were suspended. The courts would soon be told they could not hear a detained citizen’s plea.

Many Indians welcomed the Emergency, at least at first. Its defenders made a real argument, and it deserves to be heard.

On 1 July 1975 the Prime Minister announced a 20-point programme: land for the landless, the end of bonded labour, relief from moneylenders, lower prices. Strikes stopped. Hoarders were raided. Wholesale prices, which had soared by about a quarter in 1974–75, actually fell in 1975–76. Clerks turned up to work on time, and people swore the trains did too.

The Gandhian saint Vinoba Bhave called it anushasan parv, a season of discipline. The industrialist J.R.D. Tata backed it. So did the writer Khushwant Singh, though he hated the censorship. The Communist Party of India stood with the government. Decades later, Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut said Bal Thackeray had openly supported it too.

When the Indian Express got its power back and came out again, readers found a strange thing. Where the lead editorial should have been, there was nothing. The Statesman did the same. The blank space said what the censor would not allow.

Ramnath Goenka, who owned the Express, decided to fight. The government cut his advertising, sent tax notices and inspectors, and at one point put its own nominees on his board. He said he had listened to his heart, not his purse.

Under pre-censorship, officials had to clear stories before they ran. The historian Ramachandra Guha records a small act of defiance in the classified columns of the Times of India: a death notice for D.E.M. O’Cracy, mourned by his wife, T. Ruth.

Most of the press, though, fell in line. When the Emergency was over, L.K. Advani, the new information minister, told editors what he thought of them.

You were asked only to bend, but you crawled.L.K. Advani to the press, 1977, as widely quoted

The Maintenance of Internal Security Act, MISA, allowed the state to lock people up without trial. During the Emergency it was changed so that the government did not even have to tell a detainee why he was held.

How many were jailed? The Shah Commission later counted 34,988 people detained under MISA and 75,818 arrested under the Defence and Internal Security of India Rules, a total of 110,806; those figures include some ordinary criminals. Amnesty International put the number held without trial at 140,000.

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was banned, and thousands of its workers went to jail or ran the underground resistance. Its chief, Balasaheb Deoras, also wrote to Indira Gandhi from jail in August 1975, assuring her that the RSS had never been against her government. Both things are true.

In jail, JP kept a diary.

My world lies in a shambles all around me.Jayaprakash Narayan, Prison Diary, 21 July 1975

He was held at the PGI hospital in Chandigarh from 1 July. In October his kidneys failed. He was released in November and spent the rest of his life on dialysis.

Some never came out. On 1 March 1976 Kerala police picked up P. Rajan, an engineering student at Calicut, and took him to a camp at Kakkayam. He was tortured there and died in custody. His body was never found. His father, T.V. Eachara Warrier, went to the Kerala High Court; the case, after the Emergency, forced K. Karunakaran, the state’s Emergency home minister and by then Chief Minister, to resign.

And one young MISA prisoner in Bihar, a student leader called Lalu Prasad, named his daughter, born in 1976, Misa.

Amritsar, 29 June 1975. Three days into the Emergency, Punjab’s Congress Chief Minister, Giani Zail Singh, sat down with the Akali leader Parkash Singh Badal at Indira Gandhi’s request. No Sikh leader had been arrested, he said; why pick a fight? According to Tarlochan Singh, who says he was in the room, he offered ‘several sops’. The Akalis said no.

Soon after, Badal, Gurcharan Singh Tohra and other senior leaders walked out of the Golden Temple complex shouting slogans against the Emergency, and were arrested. In early July (accounts give the 7th or the 9th) the Akali Dal launched its Save Democracy morcha from the Akal Takht.

It ran like the morchas of the 1920s, when Akali jathas had marched to free their gurdwaras from British-backed mahants. Every day a jatha did ardas at the Akal Takht, walked out into the street, raised its slogans and was taken away. Sant Harchand Singh Longowal led it. It did not stop until January 1977.

How many went to jail? The historian J.S. Grewal puts it at nearly 40,000 Akalis and supporters. Tarlochan Singh, later a BJP MP, has written that it was more than 50,000. Either way, a community of about two in every hundred Indians supplied a very large share of those arrested.

the only sustained agitational movement against the Emergency regimePolitical scientist Paul R. Brass, on the Akali Dal (1988)

The Akalis said they were defending democracy for everyone, not just Punjab. Many Sikhs believe Delhi never forgot who had defied it, and that the bitterness of the next decade began here. That is an argument, not a finding. What is on the record is that Punjab, more than any other state, kept going to jail.

Detainees went to the High Courts with the oldest remedy in the law: habeas corpus, produce the body. Several High Courts agreed to hear them. The government appealed.

In the Supreme Court, Justice H.R. Khanna put a question to the Attorney General, Niren De. Suppose a policeman, out of personal spite, killed a man. Would there be a remedy? Consistent with his argument, De answered, there would be none while the Emergency lasted.

On 28 April 1976, in the case known as ADM Jabalpur v Shivkant Shukla, four judges agreed with the government: Chief Justice A.N. Ray and Justices M.H. Beg, Y.V. Chandrachud and P.N. Bhagwati. A detained citizen could not go to court. One judge disagreed.

Detention without trial is an anathema to all those who love personal liberty.Justice H.R. Khanna, dissenting, 28 April 1976

Khanna knew the price. Before delivering it he told his sister that the judgment would cost him the post of Chief Justice. The New York Times wrote that if India ever found its way back to freedom, someone would surely erect a monument to him. On 28 January 1977 he heard on the radio that Justice Beg, junior to him, had been made Chief Justice. He resigned.

History came round. In 2011 Justice Bhagwati said publicly that the majority had been wrong, and apologised. In 2017 a nine-judge bench overruled ADM Jabalpur; the lead opinion was written by Justice D.Y. Chandrachud, whose father had been in the majority. And in November 2024 Khanna’s nephew, Sanjiv Khanna, became Chief Justice of India.

With the opposition in jail, Parliament went to work on the Constitution. In August 1975 the 39th Amendment put the Prime Minister’s election beyond the courts’ reach. That November the Supreme Court struck the clause down, but upheld her election under an election law Parliament had meanwhile changed.

Then came the biggest rewrite in the Constitution’s history. The 42nd Amendment passed the Lok Sabha on 2 November 1976 by 366 votes to 4. Lawyers called it the mini-Constitution.

• It added the words socialist and secular to the Preamble, and changed ‘unity of the nation’ to ‘unity and integrity of the nation’.
• It added a list of fundamental duties for citizens.
• It stretched the life of the Lok Sabha and state assemblies from five years to six.
• It tried to put constitutional amendments beyond challenge in any court and cut the courts’ power to grant stays.

Parliament also extended its own life, so the election due in early 1976 never happened. When the Lok Sabha was finally dissolved in January 1977, it had sat for five years and ten months.

Sanjay Gandhi held no post. He did not need one. Through the Youth Congress and officials eager to please him, he pushed a five-point programme. Two of its points, family planning and slum clearance, would be remembered with fear.

In Delhi, the bulldozers came. By figures later reported from the official record, 150,105 structures were razed in the capital between June 1975 and March 1977, and about seven lakh people moved out.

At Turkman Gate in Old Delhi, demolitions began on 13 April 1976. Nearby, at Dujana House, a family planning camp had been set up. On 19 April residents protested, and police opened fire. The police admitted six dead and 146 injured. Residents and later writers say the toll was far higher. The Shah Commission named Sanjay Gandhi, the Delhi Development Authority’s vice-chairman Jagmohan, and police officers, including Deputy Inspector General P.S. Bhinder, among those it held responsible for the excesses there. No one was ever punished.

Then the numbers. In 1976 alone, India sterilised 6.2 million men. Officials, teachers and police were given quotas. Ticketless train passengers could escape a fine by agreeing to a vasectomy; the Shah Commission found that auto-rickshaw drivers needed a sterilisation certificate to renew their licences. About 2,000 men are estimated to have died after botched operations.

In the Meo village of Uttawar, about 90 km from Delhi, police surrounded the houses on a cold November night in 1976. Men fled into the Aravalli hills or hid in wells. Mohammad Deenu, who was in his late nineties when he spoke to Al Jazeera in 2025, was one of those taken. He was held for eight days and operated on at a camp in Palwal.

We saved this village by our sacrifice.Mohammad Deenu of Uttawar, to Al Jazeera, 2025

On 18 October 1976, at Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh, police fired on a crowd protesting the drive. Accounts put the dead at 25 to 30 or more. Under censorship, much of India heard about such killings only by word of mouth or on the BBC.

The World Bank had lent India 66 million dollars for sterilisation. Whether Sanjay personally ordered particular cruelties is still disputed. That the machine he drove ran over the poorest Indians is not.

A note on numbers. The 6.2 million men sterilised in 1976 is the figure most often cited; for the full year 1976–77, counting women too, it is about 8.3 million. Death tolls at Turkman Gate and Muzaffarnagar were never officially settled; we give the official figures and say where others put them higher.

On 18 January 1977, to almost everyone’s surprise, Indira Gandhi announced an election. Why she did it is still argued. Her own intelligence, some say, told her she would win. Others believe she wanted the legitimacy of a vote. Prisoners were let out, and the opposition, from socialists to the Jan Sangh, merged into the Janata Party.

Polling ran from 16 to 20 March. When the counting was done, the Congress had 154 seats, down by 198. The Janata Party, fighting on one symbol, had 295. India had its first government not led by the Congress.

In Rae Bareli, Raj Narain, the man who had taken her to court, beat Indira Gandhi by more than 55,000 votes. Sanjay lost Amethi. The Congress won not one seat in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Haryana, Delhi or Punjab. In Punjab the Akali Dal took 9 of the 13 seats, and by June Parkash Singh Badal was Chief Minister of an Akali-Janata government.

The Emergency was formally ended on 21 March 1977. Three days later, Morarji Desai, 81, who had spent the Emergency in detention, was sworn in as Prime Minister.

In May 1977 the new government asked a former Chief Justice, J.C. Shah, to find out what had been done. His commission’s reports, in 1978, found that Indira Gandhi had decided on the Emergency alone, that there had been no crisis of law and order to justify it, and that detention laws had been used against political opponents. It was scathing about civil servants who obeyed improper orders without a murmur.

Indira Gandhi disputed the commission’s legality and refused to give evidence on oath. The Janata government arrested her in October 1977; a magistrate freed her the next day. Many voters, watching the new rulers squabble, began to feel sorry for her.

In January 1980 she was back as Prime Minister with a huge majority. Copies of the Shah Commission report were recalled where they could be found; years later the parliamentarian Era Sezhiyan republished his. Sanjay died in a plane crash that June.

The Janata government’s lasting gift was the 44th Amendment. It allowed an Emergency only for ‘armed rebellion’, not vague ‘internal disturbance’, required the Cabinet’s advice in writing, restored the five-year term, and said the rights in Articles 20 and 21, including the right to life and personal liberty, could not be suspended even in an Emergency.

For Punjab, the promises soon wore thin. In 1980 Indira Gandhi’s new government dismissed nine state governments, Punjab’s among them. In 1982 the Akalis were back at the Akal Takht with the Dharam Yudh Morcha, on the road to 1984 (see Punjab 1984). And in 1988 Parliament passed the 59th Amendment, which allowed an Emergency in Punjab alone and, Human Rights Watch noted, let the right to life and liberty be suspended there. It was repealed within two years.

The Emergency never really ended as an argument. Every 25 June, it is fought again.

In March 2021 Rahul Gandhi, Indira Gandhi’s grandson, told the economist Kaushik Basu that the Emergency was ‘absolutely’ a mistake, and that his grandmother had said as much. The BJP called his remarks laughable.

On 12 July 2024 the Modi government declared 25 June Samvidhaan Hatya Diwas, Constitution Murder Day, to honour those who suffered. The Congress called it a headline-grabbing exercise, and its president, Mallikarjun Kharge, said India had been living through a Samvidhaan Hatya Diwas for the past ten years.

In November 2024 the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Sanjiv Khanna, threw out petitions to strike ‘socialist’ and ‘secular’ from the Preamble, saying Parliament could amend it. In June 2025, at an event marking fifty years since the Emergency, RSS general secretary Dattatreya Hosabale asked whether those two words, added during the Emergency, should stay. The Congress called it an attack on the Constitution.

The record is plain. A prime minister whose election a court had set aside suspended every citizen’s rights, jailed her opponents without trial, gagged the press, bent the Constitution and let her son’s men sterilise and bulldoze the poor. India’s own inquiry found no emergency to justify it.

It is also true that she had real grievances, that many ordinary Indians liked the order at first, and that she ended it herself by calling a free election, which few rulers who seize such power ever do.

The heroes were an awkward crowd: a frail old Gandhian, a stubborn newspaper owner, a judge who gave up the top job, RSS workers and socialists who would not crawl, and Akali jathas walking out of the Akal Takht every day. Above all, the voters of 1977, many poor and unlettered, who were told what was good for them and answered at the ballot box.

That is the lesson worth keeping, whoever is in power: rights suspended ‘for a while’ are only ever given back when people insist.