The Diaspora’s Fight Against India’s Emergency

Fifty years on, the story of the Emergency proclaimed by Indira Gandhi (1975–77) has been told and retold, in popular histories, academic studies, memoirs. But one story has remained almost entirely untold: the resistance mounted from abroad by a small, largely unknown group of Indian diaspora who had no political affiliation or ties to any ideological formation. Organizing themselves as ‘Indians for Democracy’, individuals like Anand Kumar, Ravi Chopra, S.R. Hiremath, Shrikumar Poddar, along with Americans like Mavis Sigwalt, Paula Bronstein, Horace Alexander, and George Willoughby, worked to build international pressure against the Emergency from outside India. 

In this episode, we are joined by Sugata Srinivasaraju, author of ‘The Conscience Network: A Chronicle of Resistance to a Dictatorship’, who brings this forgotten chapter of history to light, the story of fascinating individuals who fought for Indian democracy from thousands of miles away.

References: 

1. Sugata Srinivasaraju: Blogspot, X, Instagram

2. The Conscience Network: A Chronicle of Resistance to a Dictatorship by Sugata Srinivasaraju

3. Other works by Sugata Srinivasaraju: Furrows in a Field: The Unexplored Life of H.D. Deve Gowda, Strange Burdens: The Politics and Predicaments of Rahul Gandhi, Pickles from Home: The Worlds of a Bilingual, Keeping Faith with the Mother Tongue: The Anxieties of a Local Culture, Phoenix and Four Other Mime Plays

4. Penguin Book of Socialist Verse by Alan Bold (Editor) 

5. Ki. Ram. Nagaraj, Chandrashekhar Patil, G. S. Shivarudrappa, Prasanna

6. The Life and Times of George Fernandes by Rahul Ramagundam (Episode 5)

7. Rama Bhima Soma: Cultural Investigations into Modern Karnataka by Srikar Raghavan (Episode 10)

8. India after Gandhi by Ramachandra Guha

9. Samuel Beckett and Marcel Marceau

10. Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered by E F Schumacher

11. Jayaprakash Narayan, Ram Manohar Lohia, Narendra Deva, George Fernandes, Prakash Karat, Ramnath Goenka, Triloki Nath Kaul, Fazlur Rahman Khan, Ram Jethmalani, Subramanian Swamy, YB Chavan, Khushwant Singh

12. Luce-Celler Act, signed by President Harry S. Truman in July 1946

13. Ashis Nandy, Indian political psychologist

14. Mary McGrory, Homer Jack, Bayard Rustin, Horace Alexander