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The Emergency in India: some reflections on the legibility of the political

Abstract This paper reflects on existing writing about the National Emergency in India that took place between 1975 and 1977. The birth of many social movements during the 1970s, including the women's movement, has been marked by certain default notions of the political that hail from that time, especially given the nature of the repressive power of those years. This paper seeks to reopen the all-too-legible understanding of power and politics that has become prominent and does so by reviewing some of the major writing on the National Emergency. Far from being a suppressed or silenced topic, what is noteworthy, when we look at the wide array of approaches among scholars concerned with the Emergency, is the extraordinary divergence in interpretations that have been put forward but which have hardly been discussed. Some have viewed the Emergency years as having been a relatively insignificant moment in post-independence history, others see it as an illustration of the specific nature of “Caesarist” power, while others have characterized it as being a “critical event,” a “watershed” or even a time when progressive change could be initiated. Taken together, these views demand a rethinking of politics on the part of social movements that goes beyond a repressive notion of power.