Political Science · Ch 13 — The Crisis of Democratic Order
In this chapter…
In this chapter…
The story of this chapter begins where the last one left off. After the 1971 election and the Bangladesh war, the Congress party had recovered its strength, but it was no longer the same party it had been under Nehru. The difference became visible in a series of events between 1973 and 1975. These events brought new challenges to India's democratic politics and tested the institutional balance that the Constitution had created.
These developments led to the imposition of 'Emergency' in June 1975. Normally, we think of an emergency as something caused by war, external aggression, or a natural disaster. But this Emergency was different — it was imposed because the government claimed there was a threat of internal disturbance. The Emergency ended as dramatically as it had begun, when the Congress party was defeated in the Lok Sabha elections of 1977.
This chapter focuses on that crucial phase in the history of Indian democracy, working through four questions that remain debated to this day:
- Was Emergency genuinely necessary, or was the justification for it manufactured?
- What actually changed on the ground once it was imposed — for institutions and for ordinary people?
- How did it reshape party politics afterward?
- What does the episode teach about the fragility, or resilience, of Indian democracy?
The textbook offers a striking illustration of what Emergency looked like in practice. On 27 June 1975, readers of the Hindi daily Nai Dunia found its editorial page looking almost normal — except that the space where the day's editorial should have run had been left entirely blank, the piece itself having been "censored" under the government's emergency powers. Several other papers ran similar blank spaces, some deliberately, as a form of protest — until even that workaround was banned. A blank column where an opinion should have stood is the image the chapter uses to sum up its whole subject: democratic freedoms suspended, and the argument over whether that suspension was ever justified.
The figure shows the editorial page of the Hindi newspaper Nai Dunia dated 27 June 1975. At first glance, the page looks ordinary — it carries the newspaper’s masthead, the date, and the usual layout of columns. But the space where the daily editorial would normally appear is completely blank. There is no text, no headline, no cartoon — just empty white space.
That blank space is the entire point. It is a visible, silent record of censorship. Under the Emergency powers imposed just two days earlier, on 25 June 1975, the government had the authority to pre-censor all published material. The editorial that was meant to appear that day had been removed by the censor. By leaving the column blank rather than filling it with something else, Nai Dunia was making the censorship itself visible to readers. Many other newspapers across India did the same thing in the days that followed — some as a deliberate act of protest, others because they had no approved content to fill the gap.
The figure teaches a crucial lesson about the Emergency: it was not just about arrests or constitutional changes, but about the systematic control of information. The blank space is a powerful symbol of what was lost — the freedom to write, to criticise, to inform. And the fact that even leaving a blank space was later banned shows how far the clampdown went: the state wanted not just compliance, but the erasure of any sign that dissent had ever existed.