In June 1975, Indira Gandhi, the third Prime Minister of India, imposed a State of Emergency throughout the country in response to what she called a “conspiracy” against her. Convicted of corruption and threatened by a growing opposition and mass demonstrations, Gandhi acted ruthlessly. Basic civil liberties were suspended, thousands were detained without trial, censorship imposed, and corruption reached new heights. Surprisingly lifted after twenty months, the Emergency became an anomaly in India’s democratic history—and was all but forgotten for many years, except, significantly, from literary fiction.
Refracted in the pandemic emergency, it became clearer in my study that emergencies worldwide are not only similar to past emergencies, but that they are constructed on a template of “emergency”: a structure within which an emergency could be comprehended despite its ostensible singularity. In other words, emergencies are unprecedented, but need to be recognizably so.
Building on existing scholarship, I argue, for example, that the neither-left-nor-right opposition to the Emergency was pivotal in legitimizing the fringe elements of this Hindu right, paving the way to the rise of today’s BJP government. I also show how the mass forced sterilization campaign, which is often seen as emblematic of the Emergency, was in fact a continuation of a long-standing globally-funded project of population control. Relatedly, the Emergency was central to family and class politics in India, revealing that there were individual elite families that need to be guarded and preserved and lower-class families of populations that need to be limited and curtailed.
The question of unprecedented political emergencies brings us to our present crisis in Israel/Gaza. I wish to speak about it with care, both because it is ongoing and shifting all the time, and because I speak of it from a very personal and very painful place. As an Israeli, I am in anguish about the people and places decimated by Hamas’ attack on October 7. At the same time, I am paralyzed by my feelings of shame and complicity in the senseless carnage that Israeli has unleashed on Gaza.
The current deadly violence is not, in fact, either a singular moment of crisis, nor an inevitable result of a two-sided “conflict” in which we must line up to take sides. It is deeply embedded in a complex historical context, inextricable from occupation of Palestinians by Israel, with its attendant apartheid regime and ethnic cleansing.
"Yehoshua Radler-Feldman, known by his pseudonym R. Binyamin (1880-1957) was a Galician-born, observant Jew, a prominent figure in modern Hebrew literature and journalism, and, although a committed Zionist himself, a sharp critic of the Zionist settler-colonial repertoire of perceptions and practices. He was one of the prominent figures in the movements that called for the establishment of a joint Jewish-Arab political framework during the British mandatory period and criticized the Zionist alliance with and reliance on the British colonial authorities. He also turned against the secular Zionist notion of an exclusive sovereign that reclaimed Biblical Jewish existence in Palestine, while he adhered to traditional Jewish notions of existence in Palestine, Eretz Yisrael, which enabled him to explore the notion of binational existence. Following the establishment of the state of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba, he founded the journal Ner, which served to voice the demand for the return of the Palestinian refugees, and where various representatives of those Palestinians who remained inside the state of Israel (48 Palestinians) published their articles as well."
Thanks for posting. This also took me down a rabbit hole of how Taiwan's status has also been complicated since WWII, more than I normally knew, by how Japan had agreed to surrender and how they did/didn't relinquish sovereignty of Taiwan at the time.
@testing thank you for the boost and thank you for introducing me to Asymptote Journal - how could I have missed this? I speak English and French, am learning the local Indigenous language Likwal'a. My husband is Dutch (don't speak any). My mom spoke Ukrainian (I only know a few words). The world is so much more than English.
re: asymptote journal: it's a small, taiwan-based project with a down-to-approach > asymptote has not published a new issue for quite some time, but the blog is very much alive, and the asymptote's archive is a treat, so i keep waiting and stick to the blog in the meantime
re: languages: being german myself, i grew up monolingually, and began picking up some other languages only in my early teens > it absolutely broadened my horizon
The is only one world war. WW1 and WW2 were the same war with a 25 year armistice in between. The ending of WW1 and the treaty signed directly lead to WW2.
It was even known at the the end of WW1 that this would happen
This is not a peace. It is an armistice for twenty years. Ferdinand Foch on the signing of the Treaty of Versailles
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