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Fifty years ago, India was in the early throes of the Emergency, declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on June 25, 1975. A thoroughly Orwellian moment by any standard, the Emergency – the suspension of democracy – was justified by Gandhi as the only way to save democracy.

It was both deadly and farcical: as prisons filled to their cyclone-wire-topped brims with opposition politicians and the state inflicted brutal violence on dissenting forces, Gandhi’s government ensured that even parliamentary discussion of censorship was censored.

The Emergency constitutes only one part of Srinath Raghavan’s definitive work on India’s only female prime minister, Indira Gandhi and the Years that Transformed India. As Raghavan discusses in this episode of Past Imperfect, this authoritarian interlude was the product of broader trends: Gandhi’s inexorable concentration of executive power and the dismantling of political norms. The prime minister hardly acted alone in these processes. As Raghavan makes it clear, it is possible to understand events like the Emergency only by taking into account the unscrupulous, self-serving, and flagrantly illegal actions of a whole host of political actors, both in the Congress Party and in the opposition. When democracy died in India, it died from a...

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