Fifty years of the Emergency is a diagnostic moment. This volume of essays, edited by Peter deSouza and Harsh Sethi, makes it quite clear that the lessons, if any, learnt from the Emergency, have been fairly limited. These essays provide a point of departure to discuss whether an “undeclared emergency” has become the norm now.
There is an eerie similarity between then and now, in terms of the actors, sites of conflict, and institutions.
The introduction to this volume begins by recalling how a student leader, Prabir Purkayastha, was kidnapped from the campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) by the police who mistook him for another student leader, D P Tripathi, but kept him in jail in any case even after realising their mistake.
The same Purkayastha was arrested nearly five decades later in October 2023, under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA). No written grounds of arrest were provided to him at the time of detention; the arrest memo was generic and his legal counsel was not provided the FIR or the remand application. His arrest and remand were finally declared illegal by the Supreme Court, granting him bail. For Prabir Purkayastha then, things had worsened. Unlike during the Emergency, this time around he was charged under anti-terror law.