ABSTRACT
What had struck so many commentators of the Emergency at the time was the speed and comparative ease in which democratic governance was collapsed into authoritarianism (Dhar 2000). And yet such ease was testimony to the creeping nature of authoritarianism in India since the early 1970s, the fact that this degree of centralisation was made possible by the constitution itself, and a certain evident anti-democratic streak within middle class, elite opinion. Citing Arun Shourie, Granville Austin notes that ‘[a]lthough the emergency, in the extensiveness of its evils, was an aberration in the history of Indian democracy, it was also “the culmination of long tendencies”. The centralisation of authority grew from the constitution and the central-command structure of the Congress Party’ (Austin 1999: 297).
