The Emergency (1975-77)
The 1975-77 Emergency: the legal machinery of Article 352, the road from Allahabad to the 42nd Amendment, civil-liberties suspension, and the 44th Amendment correctives.
The Constitutional Trigger
On 25 June 1975 President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, on the advice of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's Cabinet, proclaimed a state of internal Emergency under Article 352(1) of the Constitution, citing a threat to the security of India by 'internal disturbance'. This was the third such proclamation (the first two, in 1962 and 1971, arose from external aggression by China and Pakistan), but the first invoked on internal grounds. The proclamation was issued before the Cabinet met; the Union Cabinet ratified it only the following morning on 26 June 1975, a procedural irregularity later criticised.
The Allahabad Verdict
The immediate precipitant was the judgment of Justice Jagmohanlal Sinha of the Allahabad High Court on 12 June 1975 in Indira Nehru Gandhi v. Raj Narain. The court found Gandhi guilty of corrupt electoral practices under the Representation of the People Act, 1951 (misuse of government machinery and the services of Yashpal Kapoor), set aside her 1971 Rae Bareli election, and barred her from elective office for six years. On 24 June 1975 Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer of the Supreme Court granted only a conditional stay, permitting her to remain Prime Minister but not to vote in Parliament.
The Political Backdrop
The verdict came amid mounting agitation: the Navnirman movement in Gujarat (1974), the railway strike led by George Fernandes (May 1974), and the JP Movement—Jayaprakash Narayan's call for 'Total Revolution' (Sampoorna Kranti) and his appeal to the police and army not to obey 'illegal' orders. On 25 June 1975 an opposition rally at the Ramlila Maidan demanded Gandhi's resignation. Within hours, mass arrests of opposition leaders—Morarji Desai, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, L.K. Advani, JP himself—were ordered under the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA), 1971.
Concentration of Power
Under Article 359, the President suspended the right to move any court for enforcement of fundamental rights under Articles 14, 21 and 22. Press censorship was imposed under the Defence of India Rules; electricity to Delhi's newspaper presses was cut on the night of 25–26 June. Parliament's term was extended, elections postponed, and the locus of executive power shifted to an extra-constitutional 'Kitchen Cabinet' in which Sanjay Gandhi wielded enormous unaccountable authority—driving the forced-sterilisation drive and the Turkman Gate demolitions in Delhi (April 1976).
