History

from the interview:

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.

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