Emergency, Then and Now; 'Proof of Citizenship' Test for Bihar Polls May See Disenfranchisement of Voters; Mamdani's Big Win in NYC Primary

Press freedom under Modi worse than during Emergency, BJP’s new ritual: Meat and liquor bans before bhakti, governance after, the chimera of India's defence university

A newsletter from The Wire | Founded by Tanweer Alam, Sidharth Bhatia, Pratik Kanjilal, Seema Chishti, Sushant Singh, MK Venu, and Siddharth Varadarajan | Contributing writer: Kalrav Joshi, with additional inputs by Anirudh SK

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Over to Siddharth Varadarajan for today’s Cable

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Snapshot of the day

June 25, 2025

Siddharth Varadarajan

It’s the 50th anniversary of the Emergency today and the fact that the purveyors of India’s current, undeclared emergency are commemorating it as ‘Samvidhan Hatya Divas’ (‘Constitution Murder Day’) is their way of countering the Opposition’s charge that Narendra Modi is hollowing out the Constitution.

Indira Gandhi’s government issued a self-serving White Paper [PDF] soon after the imposition of the Emergency blaming opposition protests as treasonous. One of the benefits of trampling on democracy without a formal declaration of emergency is that Modi does not need to issue statements justifying himself. This silence serves him well since the changes being wrought are much more long-term and structural than anything Mrs Gandhi came up with. As Suhas Palshikar notes,

“More worryingly, unlike the Emergency, the present moment is guided by a larger purpose: Of undermining the national movement’s legacy and rejecting the constitutional imagination. Operational wrongs can be corrected through institutional efforts but normative or ideological departures are not easy to stall once they are imposed on a society and crowned as the true ideas the nation should uphold. When a gigantic media machine joins the ruling party in legitimising Hindutva and when mobs are unleashed to delegitimise difference and opposition, you have a thoroughly new template of controlling government, politics and popular sentiment.

“From Mrs Gandhi’s somewhat ad-hoc attempts to divert democracy in order to retain power, India seems to be moving into a very different terrain of using formal democratic mechanisms to undermine both democracy and Indianness. If the Emergency was a dark moment when democracy was suspended, the essence of that Emergency is being normalised in India’s current moment.”

Is theModi government trying to revive its much-reviled National Register of Citizens process through the backdoor? “In a decision aimed at weeding out illegal immigrants erroneously included in the nationwide electoral roll,”