"The President has proclaimed a state of emergency. This is nothing to panic about."
With those crisp words, in an unscheduled radio broadcast on All India Radio last Wednesday, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi announced the temporary suspension of civil liberties in the world's largest democracy and second most populous nation (600 million). It was, both for Mrs. Gandhi and for India, a dangerous gamble that caught her political opposition off guard and shocked much of the rest of the world. Assuming extraordinary powers under the emergency decree, Mrs. Gandhi inaugurated a nationwide roundup of her political opponents. At week's end, the government admitted that more than 870 people had been taken into custody (some observers believe the total is far higher). None of those detained under terms of the emergency decree will be able to appeal to the courts for release. Many details of the crackdown and its aftermath were hard to discern; for the first time since India won its independence from Britain in 1947, censorship was imposed not only on the country's press but on foreign journalists as well.
Mrs. Gandhi insisted that the abrupt suppression of political dissent was "not a personal matter. It is not important whether I remain Prime Minister or not. However, the institution of the Prune Minister is important." Despite the argument, many Western critics felt that the imperious Mrs. Gandhi—rather like Richard Nixon during the Watergate crisis—had come to identify her own survival in office with the office itself. As the president of her ruling Congress
Party put it, "India is Indira and Indira is India." Although the Prime Minister insisted that the suspension of political liberties was temporary, there were some who inevitably wondered whether she would use the emergency to seize absolute power.
There was little doubt that the country had been in a state of turmoil and uncertainty ever since a judge in her home city of Allahabad found her guilty of campaign irregularities and deprived her of her seat in Parliament (TIME, June 23). Even before that, as Mrs. Gandhi noted in one speech last week, there had been threats to India's internal security. "Duly elected [state] governments have not been allowed to function, and in some cases force has been used to compel members to resign in order to dissolve lawfully elected assemblies," she declared. "Agitations have surcharged the atmosphere, leading to violent incidents." Although she did not mention the apparent attempt on her own life in March, when a Hindi newspaper editor was arrested with a loaded pistol as he entered the courtroom in which Mrs. Gandhi was testifying, the Prime Minister did cite the "brutal murder" of Railways Minister L.N. Mishra in January and the unsuccessful assassination attempt on India's Chief Justice three months later.