'The Conscience Network': Sugata Srinivasaraju's book on the Emergency chronicles a brave defiance

We live in a world where genocide is celebrated. We live in a world of mass-produced opinions. We live in a world of crumbling moral frameworks. We live in a world where the very game – this brutal game of existence – is rigged.

What then? Do we call it a day? Do we fight on despite knowing that the powers that be will always win? Do we resist for the sake of resistance itself? Do we defy without any end goal in sight?

Sugata Srinivasaraju’s The Conscience Network: A Chronicle of Resistance to a Dictatorship, is, among many things, an answer to these questions.

Resisting dictatorship

Over 110,000 people – students, activists, opposition leaders, ordinary citizens – vanished from open society into detention centres without any trial when the Emergency was declared. At the centre of this “constitutional” massacre was Indira Gandhi, then the prime minister of India.

Across India, despite everything, resistance bloomed in many shapes and forms: underground newspapers began circulating, universities became centres of resistance as students, professors, and workers formed an unlikely union in the face of the State. Surprisingly, though, some of the strongest resistance came, not from the streets of Delhi, but from American suburbs.

The Conscience Network tracks one of the most sustained challenges...

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