New Delhi: Senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor Thursday called the 1975 Emergency a dark chapter in India’s history and added that this should serve as a reminder for everyone and everywhere that democracy cannot be taken for granted.
In a strongly-worded Op-Ed in a leading daily, the Congress MP said that the Emergency, imposed in 1975, demonstrated how fragile democratic institutions can be trampled upon, even in a country where they are ostensibly robust and reminded us that a government can lose its moral compass and sense of accountability to the people, it purports to serve.
Tharoor’s sharp criticism of the Emergency comes in the backdrop of the nation recently observing 50 years of the Emergency imposed during the Congress regime, when the rights of citizens were taken away, people’s voices crushed, media freedom muzzled, and the judiciary silenced.
The Emergency was imposed by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi June 25, 1975, and it stayed in place for the next 20 months, curtailing and crushing the basic rights of citizens.
Tharoor, having served as Under-Secretary General at the United Nations earlier, also drew three lessons from the Emergency for the new generation.
Outlining freedom of information and independent press as the first lesson, he said, “When the fourth estate is besieged, the public is deprived of the information it needs to hold political leaders accountable.”
“Democracies depend on an independent judiciary able and willing to serve as a bulwark against executive overreach. Judicial capitulation, even when temporary, can have severe and far-reaching consequences,” he added.
He further said that an overweening executive, backed by a legislative majority, can pose a grave danger to democracy, especially when that executive is convinced of its own infallibility and impatient with the checks and balances that are essential to democratic systems.
The Congress leader also highlighted that ‘India of today is not that of 1975’ and added that today we are a more confident, more prosperous, and, in many ways, a more robust democracy.
Tharoor’s criticism of the Emergency and tacit acknowledgement of robust democracy under the current government is set to trigger fresh political fireworks in the power corridors, as this comes days ahead of the upcoming Monsoon Session of Parliament, beginning July 21.
His Op-Ed is set to create fresh heartburn in the Congress while the BJP will look to further corner the grand old party over acknowledgement of the Emergency as the darkest era, from one of its own veteran leaders.
IANS
