—Indira Gandhi

she thought people would endorse the policies brought in under the Emergency rule and thus give them a popular legitimacy. It has also been put forward by some that her inherent democratic instincts were against continuing with the draconian emergency rule. Yet others observe that when she got an idea of the excesses being perpetrated she wanted to get out of a situation that was getting out of her control. The announcement of the elections came in January 1977. Political prisoners were released and press censorship lifted, even as political parties were allowed to campaign

freely.

Opposition Gets Together In the elections, the Congress of Indira Gandhi was opposed by an alliance of opposition parties. The Jan Sangh, Congress (O), Bharatiya Lok Dal led by Charan Singh, and the Socialist Party got together to form the Janata Party. In February, Jagjivan Ram, Nandini Satpathy and Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna left the Congress of Indira Gandhi to form their own party, Congress for Democracy (CFD). The CFD, Akali Dal, DMK and the CPM allied with the Janata Party to fight the elections in opposition to the Congress and its allies, the CPI and AIADMK. After the elections, the CFD merged with the Janata party.

A Historic Election The Janata alliance made the

excesses of the Emergency and the issue of civil liberties the major planks of its election campaign. The people voted in March 1977; the elections seemed to be practically a referendum on the Emergency. The Janata alliance got a huge mandate with 330 out of the 542 seats in the Lok Sabha. The Congress was trounced, especially in the north, and its allies did not perform well either. Both Indira Gandhi and Sanjay Gandhi lost their seats. Incidentally, the Congress did well in the south where it got most of the 150 odd seats

it won. (The election results reflected the fact that the south escaped much of the Emergency excesses; furthermore, the pro-poor programmes were better implemented there than in the north.)

Before the elections, many political observers of India had despaired that democracy had no place in a country in which a majority of the populace was illiterate and presumably unaware of democratic values. They predicted that with the Emergency, India would cease to be a democracy in the true sense. But the elections proved that the Indian people were astute and used their political power to good effect. The poor too understood the value of civil rights. The elections which brought a non-Congress government at the Centre for the first time since independence showed that democracy was well imbedded in the country.

The Emergency came to an end on Mach 21, 1977.