The Indian Emergency (1975-1977) in Historical Perspective - from the book When Democracy Breaks
Book Title: When Democracy Breaks
Chapter Title: The Indian Emergency (1975-1977) in Historical Perspective
Chapter Author: Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal
Date of Publication: 2024
Book Citation: Fung, Archon; Moss, David; Westad, Odd Arne. When Democracy Breaks, Oxford University Press, 2024 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197760789.001.0001
Chapter Summary: Democracy and authoritarianism have been historically bound in a complex and sometimes intimate relationship. The global emergence of quite a few democratically elected authoritarian leaders today has made explicit what had always been an underlying feature of the history of democratic practice. The authoritarian strain was perhaps more marked in countries aspiring to democracy by shedding an inheritance of colonial despotism. India’s experiment with democracy after winning independence from British rule offers a fascinating case study of the struggle to establish democratic norms amid the lure of falling back on the structures of an authoritarian legacy.
The chapter is available in PDF format here, and entire book is open access with PDFs for each chapter available here. Paperback and hardcover versions can also be purchased from Oxford University Press here. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from Oxford University Press and selected open access locations. A discussion of the book held by the Harvard Ash Center is available on video here.
The book description is as follows: Democracy is often described in two opposite ways, as either wonderfully resilient or dangerously fragile. Both characterizations can be correct, depending on the context. When Democracy Breaks aims to deepen our understanding of what separates democratic resilience from democratic fragility by focusing on the latter. The volume's collaborators--experts in the history and politics of the societies covered in their chapters--explore eleven episodes of democratic breakdown, from ancient Athens to Weimar Germany to present-day Russia, Turkey, and Venezuela. Strikingly, in every case, various forms of democratic erosion long preceded the final democratic breakdown. Although no single causal factor emerges as decisive, linking together all of the episodes, some important commonalities--including extreme political polarization, explicitly anti-democratic political actors, and significant political violence--stand out across the cases. Moreover, the notion of democratic culture, while admittedly difficult to define and even more difficult to measure, may play a role in all of them. Throughout the volume, the contributors show again and again that the written rules of democracy are insufficient to protect against tyranny. While each case of democratic decay is unique, the patterns that emerge shed much light on the continuing struggle to sustain modern democracies and to assess and respond to the threats they face.
