An Emergency to Protect Pluralism? Rethinking 1975-77.

Abstract: When Carl Schmitt argued that emergency situations give rise to an exercise of sovereign power, he further concluded that this results in the elimination of internal pluralism in states. After the declaration of the Emergency, Indira Gandhi repeatedly emphasized that the Emergency would protect Indian democracy from falling prey to anti-pluralist forces, accusing chiefly the Hindu Right and the extreme left of posing a threat to Indian pluralism. And the sovereign “political” in 1975 saw these formations as challenges to its power and marked them as enemies. Indira Gandhi affirmed that India will not be a one-party state and that the rule of law will not be abandoned. She claimed that change of the Constitution’s Preamble to include “socialism” and “secularism” was done to protect diverse interests and marginalized groups. This poses considerable conceptual challenges to Schmittian theory where the question of internal pluralism or diversity are seen as obstacles to the realization of sovereignty. Can a state exercise sovereignty in times of crisis while at the same time respecting pluralism in society?

Bio: Karthick Ram Manoharan is faculty at the National Law School of India University and most recently Smuts Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge. He is currently working on a monograph on the Indian Emergency for Cambridge University Press. He is the author of Periyar: A Study in Political Atheism (2022) and Frantz Fanon: Identity and Resistance (2019) and the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Periyar (2025) and Rethinking Social Justice (2020).