Inside the Emergency: The ‘mess’ that triggered India’s darkest hours

Around fifty years ago, students at a government engineering college in Ahmedabad walked out over a steep hike in their monthly food bill.

The cause was parochial; the consequences were not.

From an OPEC meeting in Vienna in October 1973 to the midnight broadcast on All India Radio on June 25, 1975, a chain of economic shock, popular fury, political mobilisation, and institutional crisis unfolded without interruption.

This report reconstructs that chain from primary sources — and asks, which links are held and which ones are more complicated than they appear. ...