Diasporic Response to India’s 1975 Emergency

In response to India’s 1975 Emergency, the Indian diaspora organized from abroad. Indian American and Canadian organizers were part of the emergent Third World Left, broadly defined by its commitment to transnational anti-imperial and anti-racist praxis. This paper looks at three anti-Emergency organizations: the Indian Students Association (ISA) at UC Berkeley, Indians for Democracy (IFD) based in Chicago, and the Indian People’s Association of North America (IPANA) based in Montreal. These groups explicitly linked struggles in India to similar authoritarian crises in the Third World, each identifying the root causes in Western industrial development models, the centralization of economic and political power, and the reproduction of colonial power relations. How they arrived at these conclusions, however, differed greatly. This paper argues that the solidarities and the fissures within this movement were informed by how each group understood the Third World project. IFD understood the Third World in terms set by the nascent postcolonial state and exemplified in the optimistic framings of the 1955 Bandung Conference—exemplified by their collaborations with civil rights veterans such as Bayard Rustin and Roy Innis. By contrast, groups like ISA and IPANA were informed by populist movements in the intervening years that took postcolonial states to task for their failures to deliver promises of economic, political, and social equality – exemplified in their partnerships with groups like the Black Panthers and Union of Democratic Filipinos. My paper aims to complicate assumptions about the coherence of a single ‘Third World Left’ or singular ‘Asian American’ identity. Through archival research and extensive oral interviewing with participants of these movements, I argue that the crisis of Emergency illuminates new modes and forms of interracial solidarity that reflect the often fractured nature of pan-Asian discourse, political activity, and identity.