It can be emergency of a different nature.

The author said, 'But Emergency like conditions are bound to prevail in some parts of the country where people in power take the law into their own hands and there is no accountability. That is not really possible today.that all-encompassing Emergency with a legal cover,' she said. 'Let's put it this way that an Emergency of the type which was imposed in 1975 is difficult to replicate, because that had some kind of legal sanctity, because Mrs Gandhi had two thirds majority in both the houses and she could pass amendments to the constitution. 'Eternal vigilance is the price to pay for freedom,' she said. While dismissing the possibility of a situation like the Emergency being imposed again, Kapoor cautioned against an 'Emergency like situations of a different nature,' which could arise 'wherever authoritarianism increases.' I mean they are very vague about what the emergency was all about.they don't realise what a traumatic time it was, how Indira Gandhi stifled the media, went with a heavy hand against the judiciary and arrested all her political opponents', Kapoor told PTI. 'I wrote this book because I felt, there was a need for a younger generation to know what the Emergency was all about, because they didn't really know. It was because he had a quarrel with the then youth Congress leader Ambika Soni,' Kapoor recalled when asked about her most traumatic and abiding personal memory of the period.Īccording to Kapoor, she felt a need for a book because the younger generation needed to get acquainted with the atrocities committed during that time. He had gone to cover a function and the next thing I know is I get a call from a colleague to come to the police station because he had been arrested. It did affect me a lot the way it suddenly happened.

And personally the most difficult moment for me was when my husband was arrested. The book, released on the 40th anniversary of the Emergency, is an account of one of the bleakest periods in the nation's history and is, in Kapoor's words, 'half a personal account and half a chronicle of the time.' Veteran journalist Coomi Kapoor a young reporter with the Indian Express at the time has penned a first-hand witness to all the excesses committed during that time, in her just launched book 'The Emergency: A Personal History'.

The blackout was the beginning of a 21-month period lasting up to January 1977, characterised by the worst excesses, including muzzling of the press, snatching of the people's freedom of speech and expression, and the suspension of fundamental rights. NEW DELHI: On the night of June 25 1975, the lights went off here at Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, the 'Fleet Street of India' from where most of the country's major national dailies are published.

The emergency by coomi kapoor