RECENT commemorations of the Emergency Indira Gandhi imposed on India in 1975 are frequently fraught with warnings about how the Congress might behave if it is returned to power, amid far more egregious violations of the seculardemocratic spirit that India`s founding fathers sought to inculcate from above.

The 1950 constitution, hammered out by freedom fighters who saw no further need, in what became the world`s largest democracy, for the kind of popular agitations deployed against colonial rule, incorporated within it the seeds for the authoritarianism 25 years later. Indira wasn`t the obvious choice after her father`s successor died during the Tashkent negotiations, following the 1965 war. But the so-called Syndicate that had already sullied the Congress party`s democratic credentials saw her as a potential puppet.

The Syndicate was rapidly disillusioned, and elections in 1971 before the war that created Bangladesh were a fraught affair. Four years later, the Allahabad High Court found the prime minister guilty of electoral malpractices and debarred her from holding office for six years. She appealed, and imposed the Emergency almost as soon as the supreme court stayed the order on June 24, but debarred the PM from voting in parliament. That leeway led Mrs Gandhi to impose the Emergency by midnight.

Its consequences were brutal not just for political opponents from the radical left to the far right but also for the segments of society that were targeted for sterilisation campaigns. Like various other aims, Sanjay Gandhi added to his maternal administration`s 20-point programme, family planning might have sounded no worse than the laudable aims of caste abolition, tree plantation, dowry cancellation and adult literacy. But it was the coercive methods deployed by Sanjay Gandhi`s goons to demand sterilisation targets that made it so much worse.

The Emergency included curbs on free speech that were resisted at the time, unlike the current mainstream media`s capitulation to the ruling clique`s depredations since 2014. The Modi regime routinely shuts down free speech, incarcerates dissidents and victimises minorities without imposing a constitutional emergency. What might come next remains to be seen, but Mrs Gandhi would not have dared to venture to the extremes that the Narendra Modi clique has gone.

In this day and age, the Congress party, led by Indira`s grandson, remains a relatively minor presence on the political spectrum, even though it appears that Modi`s days are numbered, following his comeup-pance at the last election and his government`s stupid response to the Pahalgam atrocities, which appears to have badly backfired. It`s worth noting, mind you, that China delivered a similar blow in 1962, just a couple of years before Nehru died.

There are a few trolls who will query whether Pakistan has done any better. And the answer, on a variety of levels, might be no. But Pakistan is a different story, with its long history of sporadic military rule, direct or otherwise. Religious fundamentalism became the ruling idea under the Zia regime, and there has been little recovery ever since. Despite viewing this phenomenon from across the long border, Indian voters voluntarily ushered in Hindutva more than a decade ago. As with Mrs Gandhi`s Emergency, the consequences will be reflected far and wide even after the immediate threat is gone.

The days when some Pakistanis looked upon secular-democratic India as a potential role model are over. Ultimately, the Indian retort was to copy the Pakistanimodel of fundamentalist supremacy, even though minorities in India are humongous in comparison. Obviously, that is no excuse for the Pakistani state`s targeting of certain minorities. Yet, moek as one might themodel of hybrid governance, the declining quality of democratic rule in the neighbourhood and beyond is hardly a beacon.

It should be possible to decry the socioeconomic depredations we have witnessed in the past decade or so without pretending that Indira`s authoritarian turn was comparatively inconsequential. I`m inclined to agree with the thesis offered by Princeton history professor Gyan Prakash in his Emergency Chronicles that the 1975 Emergency was a turning point rather than an aberration, and that Indira`s supposedly socialist opponent Jayaprakash Narayan`s dalliance with the Jana Sangh and its even more rabidly right-wing paterfamilias the RSS led to what`s happening today.

Much like the Democrats in the US, though, the Congress can`t be let off the hook for failing so badly that the alternative is a drift towards fascism. And, as in the case of Donald Trump in the US context,Indiawillbeliberated fromitsfascistic impulses only when a decisive majority of voters realise that the Hindutva hole is not a desirable destination for any sentient being. • mahir.dawn @gmail.com