Emergency 1975: A disaster of Indian Constitution

26 June 1975 is a Black Day for Independent India, because at that day Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi. Actually in Indian constitution an Emergency was wrote very danger rules. I think dictatorship is good to compare Indian Emergency, let’s discuss big disaster of Indian Constitution very shortly.

Under the Emergency rules, workers were denied the right to strike. But the industrialists were given a free hand to dismiss employees. They lay off about 500,000 workers within six months after the declaration of Emergency. Anti-working class ordinances were issued curtailing the workers’ minimum bonus from 8.33 per cent of the earnings to 4 per cent. It was not surprising therefore that the Indian industrialists at home, as well as the World Bank abroad, applauded these Emergency measures of the Indira Gandhi government. The large scale Indian private sector industrialists, like the Birlas and the Tatas, welcomed her industrial policies, and the Western-dominated Aid India consortium promised her government an aid of $ 1,600 million – a record of sorts in those days.

These oppressive measures under the Emergency were accompanied by Indira Gandhi’s announcement of a `Twenty-Point Program’ – claiming to improve the lot of the poor. Under this program, she promised to implement land reforms, abolish the practice of bonded labor (under which rural landlord-moneylenders tied poor and landless laborers to eternal bondage if they failed to pay off their debts), fix minimum wages for agricultural laborers, supply clothes to the poor and increase job opportunities for educated young people, among other things. In her speeches, she asserted that it was to be able to implement this pro-poor program that she had to impose the Emergency, so that the rich who opposed it could be suppressed.

But in reality, how did this economic package work out for the Indian poor? Land reforms and minimum wages remained a distant dream for the rural laborers. The rich village landlords could not be forced to part with the excess land that they held illegally for distribution among the landless, and pay the wages officially fixed for their agricultural laborers – since they were the main pillars of Mrs. Gandhi’s Congress party, her prime constituency in rural India. Even those few, who were freed from bonded labor, came out to find that no means were provided to them by the government to enable them to earn a living. They again reverted to the old practice of taking loans from landlords and money-lenders in order to survive – and got entangled in the same bondage being unable to pay off their debts. In the urban areas, rising prices affected the common citizens, and workers often resorted to strikes facing the risk of loss of jobs and imprisonment. The promise of jobs for the unemployed youth also turned out to be false. By October 1975, registered job seekers among the educated had climbed to 4.1 million. Twenty four percent of the urban youth remained unemployed. The twenty-point program thus cut nowhere near deep enough to solve the manifest problems of the country – whether in the villages or cities.