India’s Authoritarian Turn: Understanding the Emergency (1975-1977) and Its Afterlife
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On June 25, 1975, Prime Minister (PM) Indira Gandhi imposed a national emergency (the Emergency) in India, suspending civil and political rights. Lasting for 21 months, the Emergency was the only dictatorial turn in India's democratic history. The authoritarian rule was in response to an assertive citizens' protest against Prime Minister Gandhi, which demanded her resignation on the grounds of the centralization of power, corruption, rising prices, and in the name of fair wages for workers and unemployment. The higher courts had also debarred her from contesting elections. Since then, the dominant accounts of this period have tried to ascertain answers to three questions: Why was the Emergency imposed? What did the Emergency entail? And finally, why was it lifted? The books in this review essay together comprise a tour de force on these three aspects, while also seeking to go beyond these questions. Christophe Ja relot and Pratinav Anil's India's First Dictatorship: The Emergency, 1975–77 shows how the Emergency has cast a long shadow and is also a window into understanding some of the present trends in Indian politics. Gyan Prakash's Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy's Turning Point claims that the Emergency had both a "before" and "afterlife"; the origins of excessive state power are inherent in the Constitution. Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr.'s The Emergency: An Unpopular History provides a revisionist account of the Emergency through the lenses of parliamentary discussions. While engaging with these important books, this review essay suggests an alternate "afterlife" of the Emergency that is untreated in the works discussed here.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".