Kapoor’s book shows the folly of such easy references – the sheer scale of the repression, the hundreds of thousands of arrests, the horrific slum clearance and family planning programmes, the suffocating censorship of every publication – all this is hopefully beyond the ambitions of the present dispensation, and its actions so far pale in comparison. It is fashionable to compare recent events that portend bad tidings – the everyday lynchings and the Governmental silences and justifications in response to them, the draconian laws passed through the Money Bill route or promulgated through ordinances – to the Big E. While Kapoor does detail her extended family’s predicament in the 19 turbulent months where India faced its biggest danger as a democracy (including a full chapter on the escapades of her brother-in-law, Subramanian Swamy*), the bulk of the book is devoted to providing an overview of the Emergency, the immediate events that lead up to it, the clamping down on any dissent, the sinister 5- & 20-point programmes and their consequences on India’s poorest, detailed profiles of Indira & Sanjay, and the aftermath of the event. If – like I was – you are slightly hesitant to buy a book that declares itself a personal history of the Emergency, since you’d rather read an impersonal one, don’t be.
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