Terms of Trade | Why Emergency is not a useful stick to beat the Congress today

The Congress’s dominance in the early years after independence is comparable to status of the colonial state which was marked by ‘dominance without hegemony’.

India will observe Samvidhan Hatya Divas (literally translated as Constitution Murder Day) on June 25 every year to mark the anniversary of the imposition of the Emergency, Union home minister Amit Shah announced on July 12.

The Emergency was the darkest chapter in post-independence India’s history when an elected Congress government suspended civil rights, jailed the parliamentary opposition and even suspended elections.(HT Photo)

While 2025 will mark 50 years of the emergency’s imposition, the decision clearly seems to be inspired by the 2024 election results, which have seen the BJP fall below the majority mark in the Lok Sabha and the Congress making enough gains to, at least for now, put an end to its existential crisis after disastrous performances in the 2014 and 2019 elections. If the trend of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections were to continue, BJP's post-2014 position as the dominant force in Indian politics is bound to come under an even bigger threat than it is facing right now.

Let there be no doubt. The Emergency was the darkest chapter in post-independence India’s history when an elected Congress government suspended civil rights, jailed the parliamentary opposition and even suspended elections. It also showed us that even other institutions, including the judiciary, did not do the needful to protect constitutional rights in the face of a belligerent and dictatorial executive.

Even though then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi withdrew the draconian order on her own and ordered elections in 1977, the Congress paid a massive price and was routed in the 1977 elections. Anybody who defends the emergency cannot be consistent with the celebration of India’s democratic project which is unique and, in many ways, unparalleled in the world.

All this, however, is not the point of this column. The question which is this column seeks to answer is can the BJP turn the tables on what still looks like a much weaker but rejuvenated Congress by resuscitating a debate on the emergency 50 years after it was imposed?

Lest there is any confusion on the long-term damage the Emergency did to the Congress’s politics it is worth quoting in detail from an article historian Srinath Raghavan wrote for these pages in 2017.

“The foremost beneficiary of the Emergency was the Hindu right. The RSS’s participation in the JP movement as well as the civil disobedience against the government during the Emergency gave it – notwithstanding some craven letters by its supremo to the prime minister – a legitimacy that it had hitherto lacked. The mobilisation of RSS cadres during this period also provided the template for the populist Hindutva mobilisations of the late ’80s and the early ’90s. The Jana Sangh too got its first taste of national power, if in a cacophonic coalition, following Indira Gandhi’s ouster in 1977. What’s more, when Mrs Gandhi returned to power three years later, she began appropriating elements of Hindu majoritarian politics”, Raghavan wrote, arguing that “The Emergency, in short, fundamentally reshaped the landscape of Indian politics. And its historical consequences are still unfolding”.

In fact, if one were to make a (somewhat) crude historical argument, it can be said that the coming into being of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) after the BJP emerged as the single largest party in 1996, was in many ways, a more pragmatic resolution of the dual membership debate in the Janata Party which was a key (or convenient) factor behind its collapse in 1980.

By agreeing to form the NDA, the anti-Congress elements among the ranks of the socialist and Hindu right spectrum came to an agreement that they could share power without letting go of their actual identities. While the BJP is a much stronger force today than it was in the 1990s, the criticality of JD(U)’s support for its current government’s survival underlines the importance of this pact.

The Congress, on the other hand, continues to suffer because of the political churn, which followed the emergency, both within and outside the party. Its political flirting with majoritarian politics with occasional recourse to appeasing minority communalism led it to commit the blunders of overturning the Shah Bano judgment and then trying to make the optics look better by allowing shilanyaas in Ayodhya.

The dialectics which followed ate up the Congress from both ends. Muslims deserted it for more “secular” socialist formations and the Hindus warmed up to what was a clearly rising right-wing formation in the form of the BJP. Even among the socialist formations which decided to warm up to the Congress in the aftermath of the demolition of the Babri mosque or later, the Congress had to reconcile itself as the junior partner in the alliance. Although much weaker and ideologically diluted today, the emergency also generated large tailwinds for the anti-Congress faction of the communist left, namely the CPI (M), in the country at the cost of Congress’s dominance.

The narrative so far does not tell us why reviving a debate around the emergency should not help the BJP in countering the Congress. Answering this question requires a critical analysis of what the BJP is hoping to achieve by raking up this debate. A hint of what the BJP’s thinking on this could be was seen in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speeches in the parliament while replying to the debate on the motion of thanks to the president’s address.

The Congress, Modi accused, had become parasitic in nature and was only winning seats by entering into alliances with other regional parties. A lot of these parties were targets of the Congress’s excesses during the emergency. Clearly, the BJP is hoping that at least some of these parties decide to desert the Congress or become uncomfortable in their alliances due to a renewed debate on the latter’s role in imposing the emergency.

Here are three reasons why this strategy will likely not work for the BJP.

One, and this is the most important, is the fact that India’s post-independence political competition has often aligned itself along the lines of congruent political interests rather than ideological beliefs. When the Congress was the dominant party, we saw a rainbow political coalition including everything from the far right to the far left coming together to defeat it in elections or prevent it from coming into power after polls.

Thanks to the blows the Congress has suffered because of this wider alignment to dislodge it as the dominant political force in India, its political strength is a pale caricature of what it used to be in the pre-emergency era. While this is what had helped the BJP claim the position of the dominant political force in the country, it also means that almost all political parties which are not aligned with the BJP for ideological or tactical reasons do not see the Congress as the kind of threat which it used to be in its heydays. In fact, it is the BJP which is seen as the hegemonic beast which is prepared to eat every other political party in today’s polity.

No amount of waxing eloquent on how terrible the Congress was during the emergency is going to change this reality and therefore willingness of regional parties to do business with the Congress. Of course, this is not to say that local disagreements cannot derail such alliances.

The second, and many people will find this extremely provocative, is the fundamental difference between the nature of hegemonic influence which the Congress enjoyed during its political dominance and the BJP enjoys today.

The Congress’s dominance in the early years after independence is comparable to what historian Ranajit Guha used to describe the status of the colonial state in India which was marked by ‘dominance without hegemony’. The modern, secular and almost cosmopolitan ideological outlook which was championed by leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru, which pretty much shaped the trajectory of the post-independent Congress and the Indian state, was hardly shared by the large number of political actors or the electorate whom our founding fathers decided to give universal franchise.

As democratic competition took root in India, the Congress started haemorrhaging to cede ground to these multiple and divergent ideologies, which often found it conducive to come together to oppose it. Today’s Congress, unlike what it was in Nehru’s and even Indira Gandhi’s era is anything but ideologically committed to its old values and has in fact brought peace with the ideological critique and damage which India’s democratic competition unleashed on it.

Nothing proves this more than the Congress’s championing of a caste census and demanding that the OBC reservation quota to increased. This basically means that what we are seeing as the revival of the Congress is the revival of a very different political force compared to what existed until the 1970s.

The BJP faces a very different situation today. Its core ideological project of Hindutva has widespread currency in large parts of the country, which is what explains a complete lack of or failure of efforts to undertake widespread popular mobilisation against core-Hindutva issues such as the Ram Temple movement, revocation of Article 370 etc.

This ideological traction, however, as this column has argued in the past, does not always lead to electoral support and more importantly victory and leaves the BJP with a predicament of hegemony without dominance. This means that the BJP’s challenge is not to ideologically convert voters by reiterating the history of the emergency but to make sure that the desertion of ideologically inclined voters to the enemy camp is reversed. It can hardly be the case that the shift between 2019 and 2024 is on account of some sudden collective amnesia about the emergency.

This brings us to the third and final point. The central contradiction facing the BJP when it comes to securing its political fortunes today is not some ideological debate about the commitment of the BJP or the Congress to democratic values but the tangible benefits it can offer to hundreds of millions of voters who have been left behind in India’s otherwise impressive growth performance in the three and a half decades of economic reforms.

This is exactly where the Congress pulled off a new trick in the 2024 elections by completely burying the bipartisan consensus on the sanctity of fiscal prudence and making promises which are clearly not compatible with India’s fiscal rules. The BJP, instead of trying to find a halfway house or even paying lip service to it, went to the election with what can only be described as an extreme form of fiscal conservatism. While this has pleased financial markets and their beneficiaries no end, they are nobodies when it comes to the one-man one-vote electoral game in India.

Why did the BJP not do more in terms of offering economic palliatives to the poor in the elections? The only plausible answer is overconfidence in the tailwinds of social contradictions (as seen in Modi’s divisive rhetoric during the campaign) over the economic contradiction between placating capital and the resource-poor at the same time. Placating capital is an important task for a party which hopes to rule for a long time.

We will have to wait for the budget on July 23 to see whether the BJP is planning to make amends in the economic strategy so that it can handle this contradiction in a better manner. Minus such a pivot, tactics such as reviving the debate about the Congress’s role during the emergency will not be of much help to the BJP’s future political fortunes.

Roshan Kishore, HT's Data and Political Economy Editor, writes a weekly column on the state of the country's economy and its political fall out, and vice-versa