She catalogues the mechanisms through which this attack on Indian democracy was orchestrated. Although it focuses on the role of personalities, its cumulative effect is to leave a chilling effect on the reader. There were important social forces at work in the Emergency. But the casual ease with which nearly the whole elite establishment drifted into Emergency, as if it were some kind of parlour game, is astonishing. And Kapoor tells that story with good effect. Not the least of the book’s virtues is the naming and shaming of so many protagonists, who transformed the rule of law into oppression by law.
The strength of a personal history lies in human detail. The effortless, if understated, descriptions of an elite in a mode of complicity will leave you reeling: judicial mendaciousness where eminences like Justices Bhagwati and Chandrachud caved in atrociously, the pathetic enfeeblement of almost all Congress politicians, the zeal of civil servants like Navin Chawla who, while being personally gracious, fed Sanjay Gandhi’s most destructive institutional tendencies. LK Advani recently said that there had been no apology for the Emergency. He was stating a deep truth. Not only have very few of the participants admitted their mistake, but, for a large number of them, there was also no mistake. They effortlessly slipped into whatever role the state assigned them, and slipped out when circumstances changed. This is, in part, because social networks transcended all differences of principle.
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