The Painful Ordeal of India’s Democracy. The Indira Gandhi’s Emergency Period (1975-77) and its Influence for the Indian Political System

The Indira’s Emergency has been a much evoked but little studied episode, mainly by political science. The most part of the literature which deals directly and indirectly with emergency have been mainly concerned with its explanation, focusing on its causes. However rarely scholars chose to focus on the opposite trend, namely the examination of the effects of Emergency on subsequent political system and democratic regime. Inspired and guided by two Philip Oldenburg’s (2010) insights, I have the intention of testing if the Emergency (1975-77) and its immediate aftermath can be considered as a case of re-equilibration (à la Juan J. Linz, 1978), whereby the India’s democratic institutions continued their existence at the same or higher levels of democratic legitimacy, efficacy or effectiveness. Furthermore, I have the intention of testing if the emergency has influenced the context for and favored the arising of some transformations - and socio-political phenomena- ( e.g. the rise of new actors in politics – mainly the “plebeians”, to wit the disadvantaged-social-groups-based parties ) that on turn – and on the long run - have favored and “boosted” the deepening and consolidation of democratic regime. The aim of this explorative paper is the empirical understanding of Indira’s Emergency effects and consequences on the Indian political system and democratic regime. This paper is an exploratory work in order to develop a larger working progress research project aimed to two-fold goals. The first aim is the empirical understanding of Indira’s Emergency effects and consequences on the Indian democratic regime. Moreover the importance of this research problem goes beyond the strict domain of the Indian political studies, trying to shed the light on issues and processes connected with the survival, consolidation and deepening of democratic regime after a crisis and breakdown. This is important because within the democratization literature there have been little efforts to study the factors and processes that enabled democracy to re-equilibrate and deepening after a crisis and /or breakdown.