Modalidades similares al Plan Socio Vivienda a nivel mundial

In the early hours of 26 June, 1975, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi stunned the nation by proclaiming a state of emergency in India. The surprise soon turned into fear and anxiety as hundreds of Opposition leaders and members were arrested on the same day under the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA). During the following months, around 111,000 people were detained under the MISA. Press-gagging measures were put in place. The Press Council turned into an agency for government propaganda. Constitutional reform was carried out to reduce the power of the Parliament and to smother all dissent. These developments were then followed by what is commonly known as the ‘excesses’ of the emergency: mass sterilisation and slum clearance programmes.527 Nineteen months later, on 18 January, 1977, in an equally dramatic and sudden fashion, Gandhi dissolved the Lok Sabha – the lower house of the Parliament – and declared that fresh elections would be conducted in the following March. In these elections, for the first time in post-independence India, the Congress Party would be electorally defeated. The period between 1975 and 1977, known as the Indian Emergency, has puzzled critics and invited wide scholarly attention on the question of democracy and authoritarianism in postcolonial India.528 This chapter will discuss how the economic and political crises of the period led to the

527 _{See Bipan Chandra, In the Name of Democracy: JP Movement and the Emergency (Delhi: Penguin,} 2003), pp. 159-69, pp. 203-09.

528 _{Apart from Chandra, on this question and on the general studies of the emergency, see Partha} Chatterjee, A Possible India: Essays in Political Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 35-57; Ranajit Guha, ‘Indian Democracy’, pp. 39-53; Emma Tarlo, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Vernon Hewitt, Political Mobilisation and Democracy in India: States of Emergency (London: Routledge, 2008); Arvind Rajagopal, ‘The Emergency as Prehistory of the New Indian Middle Class’, Modern Asian Studies, 45.5 (2011), 1003–49; Mary E. John, ‘The Emergency in India: Some Reflections on the Legibility of the Political’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 15.4 (2014), 625-37; Patrick Clibbens, ‘The Destiny of this City is to be the Spiritual Workshop of the Nation: Clearing Cities and Making Citizens during the Indian Emergency, 1975-1977’, Contemporary South Asia 22.1 (2014), 51-66; and, Rebecca Williams, ‘Storming the Citadels of Poverty: Family Planning under the Emergency in India, 1975- 1977’, Journal of Asian Studies, 73.2 (2014), 471-92.

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catastrophic conjuncture of constitutional emergency, and how novelists have approached the issue and represented Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian regime.

The emergency is portrayed in the novels of Salman Rushdie, Nayantara Sahgal, Arun Joshi, O. V. Vijayan, and Rohinton Mistry as a mechanism for autocracy and personal profit, with depictions of a powerful and mysterious high command, a corrupt bureaucracy, and the infliction of suffering on the public from above. In many of the novels, Gandhi’s character is not presented in person, but is understood as a grand, mysterious, larger-than-life force that controls the lives of people from outside. Her mammoth and evil power is concretised through the severe adverse effects that her emergency measures have on the poor and the weak. The novels situate the emergency primarily within the realist discourses of class struggle, caste consciousness, and bodily oppression, but the writers also employ a number of aesthetic modes to meaningfully engage with the puzzle and crisis of the period. Sahgal, for instance, focuses mainly on the elite and ruling classes and their corrupt politics in the postcolonial aftermath; her narrator and protagonists see the world of the emergency from the top and ignore the damage being inflicted on the lower classes. On the other hand, Rohinton Mistry reverses the angle and highlights the suffering of the lower castes, lower classes, and marginal communities during the period. The aesthetic modes used by the two novelists, inflected by their focus on class, caste, and marginal communities, could be seen as a realism from above and from below, respectively. In Rushdie, Joshi, and Vijayan, Gandhi and her emergency appear allegorically. In order to represent and to criticise the brutality of the regime and the corrupt neo-colonialist politics of the government, these writers exploit the resources of the body through the modes of magic, myth, and the grotesque that both challenge realism’s rational logic and reconstruct its framework. I call this framework extra- realism or a realism from without, which I will show is different from that of critical irrealism. The chapter will discuss more broadly this social-spatial use of realism in emergency narratives. Contrary to critics’ claims that there were few contemporary ‘oppositional’ narratives that ‘truly’ represented the emergency and its measures, I argue that the creative literature of the period gives us powerful evidence of how the emergency was understood, analysed, criticised, and resisted through fiction. In addition, through an experimental use of form and mode, these novels also demonstrate their investigative as well as instructive prowess, exposing the powers

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that obscure and mystify knowledge productions, and pointing to the constructed nature of ‘truth claims’ in official representations and discourses.

The Emergency: Authoritarianism, Violence, and Representation