About the event

The year 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the Indian Emergency. While many regard it as a dark period in India's democratic journey, when executive overreach inflicted atrocities on citizens, a few see it as a bitter pill that saved Indian democracy from the enveloping anarchy. The occasion for the discussion is a recently published book 50 years of the Emergency: Lessons for Democracy by Orient Blackswan.

The book asks us to primarily address three questions: (i) Why was the Emergency imposed, (ii) What happened after it was imposed, and (iii) Why was it lifted. While question (ii) has been extensively researched in the vast literature on the Indian Emergency, from the sterilization campaign to the arbitrary incarceration of innocents, questions (i) and (iii) have been inadequately discussed. The book, especially the intervention by the editors, seeks to remedy this shortfall. The discussion is both timely and necessary, timely because a 50 year gap should have given us sufficient critical distance to review a painful episode in India's recent history, and necessary to protect India from a repeat and perhaps also to offer lessons for other democracies. The book revisits the Emergency from different perspectives that range from law, to the international situation in the mid 70s, to protest poetry, to Indira Gandhi's motivations. It offers both new insights and a new perspective with which to view such episodes in a country's democratic journey.

The meeting will be chaired by Professor Niraja Gopal Jayal and will have as discussants, Professor James Manor, Dr Shalini Grover and Professor Peter Ronald deSouza and Professor Rukmini Bhaya Nair.

Speakers

Peter Ronald deSouza

Professor Peter Ronald deSouza was the Director, Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS), Rashtrapati Nivas, Shimla, for two terms (2007- 2013) during which period he set up the Tagore Centre and the International Centre for Human Development. Prior to that he was a Senior Fellow and Co-Director of the Lokniti Programme of Comparative Democracy, at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi (2003-2007) and even earlier was Professor and Head, Department of Political Science at Goa University (1996-2003). After serving as Director at IIAS he returned to CSDS as Professor in 2014. He is currently Senior Research Associate, African Centre for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science (ACEPS), University of Johannesburg. Prof. deSouza has served as a consultant to UNESCO; International IDEA; UNDP; The World Bank; Inter Parliamentary Union (IPU); Ford Foundation and Social Science Research Council (SSRC), New York (2001). He is an independent scholar.

Rukmini Bhaya Nair

Rukmini Bhaya Nair is Professor of Linguistics and English at IIT Delhi. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and has taught at universities ranging from Singapore to Stanford. Awarded a second honorary doctorate by Antwerp University for her contributions to narrative theory, Nair has authored 10 books, including three collections of poems with Penguin Books, and over 150 papers and articles. Among her widely acclaimed critical works are Lying on the Postcolonial Couchand Poetry in a Time of Terror, as well as the recent co-edited reference volume Keywords for India: A Conceptual Lexicon for the 20th Century (Oxford University Press and Bloomsbury Academic).

Discussants

Shalini Grover

Dr Shalini Grover has served as an Assistant Professorial Research Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at LSE and from 2024 remains a visiting Fellow. She is an Associate Fellow with the Royal Historical Society and Affiliate Anthropologist at LSE's Department of Anthropology. From 2007-2016, she was based at the Institute  of Economic Growth (IEG), University of Delhi as an Associate Professor in Anthropology. Her 2011 monograph (‘Marriage, Love, Caste, and Kinship Support: Lived Experiences of the Urban Poor in India) now features as a new international revised edition by Routledge (London and New York, 2018). Her second anthropological-historical monograph is forthcoming in 2026 with Cambridge University Press. 

James Manor

James Manor is the Emeka Anyaoku Professor Emeritus of Commonwealth Studies at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. He has previously taught at Yale, Harvard and Leicester Universities, at the Institute of Development Studies in Sussex, and at the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore. Some of his recent books include Politics and State-Society Relations in India, Politics and the Right to Work: India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and Against the Odds: Politicians, Institutions and the Struggle Against Poverty.

Chair

Niraja Gopal Jayal

Professor Niraja Gopal Jayal joined King’s India Institute as Avantha Chair in October 2021. She was formerly Professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and presently also Centennial Professor (2019-23) at The London School of Economics, in the Department of Gender Studies.

Her book Citizenship and Its Discontents (Harvard University Press and Permanent Black, 2013) won the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize of the Association of Asian Studies in 2015. She is also the author of Representing India: Ethnic Diversity and the Governance of Public Institutions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and Democracy and the State: Welfare, Secularism and Development in Contemporary India (OUP, 1999). She has co-edited The Oxford Companion to Politics in India, and edited, among several others, Democracy in India (OUP, 2001) and Re-Forming India: The Nation Today. (Penguin Random House, 2019) Her most recent book is Citizenship Imperilled: India’s Fragile Democracy (Permanent Black).

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