On June 25, 1975, the president of India, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, declared a national emergency, citing “internal disturbance” in the country. Acting under a provision of the Indian constitution at the urging of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Ahmed authorized her to rule by decree and suspend civil liberties. Gandhi’s government muzzled the press and jailed opposition leaders. The most prominent of the imprisoned dissidents was Jayaprakash Narayan, known to Indians as “JP,” a close associate of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and the organizer of a coalition of opposition parties ranging from the socialist left to the Hindu nationalist right. (Indira Gandhi was the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Indian prime minister, and unrelated to Mahatma Gandhi.) The world’s largest democracy passed into a phase of autocracy just 25 years after its constitution came into effect—an event that became known as “the Emergency.”

In the United States, a diverse group of Indian students, expatriates, and exiles created an organization, Indians for Democracy (IFD), to bring the pressure of Americans and the United States government on Indira Gandhi. The story of their campaign is told in The Conscience Network: A Chronicle of Resistance to a Dictatorship (Vintage, 2025) by Sugata Srinivasaraju. One of the characters at the story’s center is Anand Kumar, PhD’85. In June 1975 he was 25 years old and two quarters into the PhD program in sociology at the University of Chicago.

Kumar was a native of Varanasi, the sacred city on the Ganges River. He arrived at the University with degrees in sociology from Banaras Hindu University (BHU) and Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). The University of Chicago was well known in India for its South Asian studies scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, which attracted many Indian students. Kumar, however, chose to study sociology, and chose Chicago because its sociology faculty was widely recognized as the best in the field. A fellowship from the Indian government made his enrollment possible.

Kumar’s political commitments, which drew on Gandhian and socialist ideals, were an inheritance. His family, he told Srinivasaraju, held socialist and anti-colonial political leaders in high esteem. Kumar served on the executive committee of the Young Socialists League of India and as president of his university’s student union twice, once at BHU and once at JNU.

While Kumar was attending JNU, student protests against Indira Gandhi–aligned state governments in Gujarat and Bihar grew into a nationwide challenge to her regime. It became known as the “JP Movement” and the “Sampoorna Kranti Movement” after its leader, JP Narayan, and his call for sampoorna kranti (total revolution). In March 1974, just months before Kumar was to begin his studies in Chicago, police killed multiple student demonstrators in Bihar. Kumar and other JNU students staged a protest at the prime minister’s residence. A few weeks later he met with Narayan. “I was so overwhelmed,” he told Srinivasaraju, “that I decided to become a 100 percent unpaid servant of JP.”

Kumar enrolled at the University of Chicago in Winter Quarter of 1975. But he was no sooner settled into graduate student life in Chicago than he was drawn into the beginnings of Indians for Democracy. In January 1975 a JNU friend, who was now a student at Michigan State University (MSU), invited him to speak to the Indian community there about the political situation at home.

After his presentation, Kumar dined with Shrikumar Poddar. Poddar had come to MSU in the 1950s to study civil engineering and had since founded the very successful Education Subscription Service, which pioneered the marketing of magazines to students in their registration packets. With his wealth and expertise, Poddar raised funds for causes in South Asia and built relationships with American politicians. Kumar stayed an extra day to coauthor a statement on the gathering crisis in India.

He returned to Chicago with the name of another contact, Poddar’s friend Sangayya Rachayya “SR” Hiremath. Hiremath had moved from India in the late 1960s to study operations research at Kansas State University. His first job brought him to Chicago. At a dinner party in Hyde Park, Hiremath met his wife Mavis Sigwalt, AM’71, a student at the School of Social Service Administration, now the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice.

Kumar met Hiremath shortly after his return from Michigan. Hiremath was also an admirer of Narayan and concerned about the direction of Indian politics. Within days the operations expert drew up a plan for mobilizing support for the JP Movement in America. The first step was creating an organization; the second, sending Kumar on a national lecture tour to promote its cause to students and the Indian diaspora. The name the organizers chose, Indians for Democracy, echoed Citizens for Democracy, an organization Narayan had started in India. Drawing from Narayan’s speeches, Kumar wrote a three-page letter to the Indian American community to raise awareness and rally support, posting it from his apartment at 850 East 57th Street, #9.

His tour began in April, and he visited 22 cities over three months. As urgent as the situation appeared, most of the Indians for Democracy founders had not anticipated the Emergency. They imagined that, as Srinivasaraju puts it, “JP’s moral standing would tame Indira Gandhi’s arrogance.” Their goal, Srinivasaraju continues, “was to build a pressure group in the United States to influence the trajectory of reform and development in India after JP had stabilized the political situation.” Like Narayan, Indians for Democracy welcomed support from across the political spectrum.

Between weekend lectures, Kumar focused on his doctoral studies, attending seminars, taking exams, and writing papers in sociology. In his first quarter, guided by his adviser, China expert William Parish, he took classes on social stratification, political sociology, modern social analysis, and social mobility. Later he took courses on other topics, including macrosociology, revolutions, the politics of development, and modernity in India. He was active in an interdisciplinary project on the study of new nations. “I was very focused on the courses,” he wrote in an email. “I made the Regenstein Library my second home.”

On June 12, 1975, as Kumar’s tour neared its end, a justice of the Allahabad High Court ruled that Indira Gandhi illegally used government resources to win reelection in 1971 within her constituency in Uttar Pradesh. The justice voided the election and ordered Gandhi’s removal from her seat in the Lok Sabha, or House of the People, and from her office as prime minister. She vowed to resist, and her supporters as well as her opponents took to the streets. Twelve days later the Indian Supreme Court mostly upheld the decision. The next evening, near midnight, Gandhi’s ally President Ahmed granted her demand for extraordinary powers. Hours later, police arrested Narayan at his quarters in New Delhi. The Emergency had begun.

Kumar heard the news in New York. He was scheduled to speak at Columbia University along with other leaders from Indians for Democracy. They recognized the moment for what it was: a requisite and an opening for broader action. Four days later Indians for Democracy staged a protest at the Indian Embassy in Washington, DC. They constituted a six-member steering committee, Kumar among them. Then they sent him back on the road.

In July and August he made three dozen appearances in 18 cities. His lectures now got more attention. He spoke at Washington University in St. Louis, predicting that popular opinion would bring the government down in six months. In the following weeks, he was in Iowa City, Iowa; San Francisco and Berkeley, California; back in Iowa City; then Madison, Wisconsin. He articulated the demands of the JP Movement in India: lifting the state of emergency; releasing all political prisoners; restoring the fundamental rights of all Indian citizens, including freedom of the press; and allowing the judicial process to continue in seeing that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi abided by the ruling of the Supreme Court of India.

The coverage of the Emergency in the American press brought the cause of Indians for Democracy to the attention of a public beyond college students and the Indian diaspora, appealing to Americans who admired Mahatma Gandhi and his tenets of nonviolent resistance to oppression, as well as those dedicated to democracy and human rights. In Madison, Kumar and Hiremath met University of Wisconsin professors who put them in touch with like-minded activist friends. At MIT, they visited the radical linguist Noam Chomsky, who shared a letter of protest he had just addressed to Indira Gandhi. Other members of Indians for Democracy approached John Kenneth Galbraith, a Harvard professor and President John F. Kennedy’s ambassador to India.

In January 1976 Indians for Democracy and allied groups chartered the Committee for Freedom in India, another group concerned about the decline of democracy in India. The Reverend G. G. Grant, a Jesuit priest and Loyola University Chicago professor, was the chairman, and Hiremath was the executive secretary. Sigwalt and Kumar represented Indians for Democracy. The committee included others with ties to the University of Chicago: C. M. Naim, a professor in South Asian Languages and Civilizations; law student Alex Spinrad, JD’76, the new Student Government president; and Hyde Parker Bradford Lyttle, AM’51, the son of a professor at the Meadville Seminary and an on-and-off student at the University. Father Grant sent Kumar and Hiremath on another mission to solicit support from American opinion leaders.

On a cold February morning in 1976, Kumar received a telephone call from the education secretary at the Indian Embassy. The man inquired whether he had been on “some kind of a lecture tour.” Receiving confirmation that he had, the secretary asked whether Kumar’s scholarship from the Indian government was to enable him to study or to go around giving lectures. Kumar replied that he traveled on weekends and attended all his classes during the week. In the preceding months, in fact, he had passed his preliminary examination and the first of two special field exams. The answer, however, was not to the secretary’s point. “You are not supposed to criticize the Indian government on foreign soil,” he said. “The ambassador is very unhappy.” A few days later an official in the Chicago consulate told Kumar that his fellowship was canceled and he should arrange his return home.

Kumar’s response was wryly defiant. “I feel quite satisfied that the Government of India has now taken notice of my activities,” he told The New York Times. “Otherwise, I was really frustrated that we are doing so many things and nobody is taking any notice. So it’s kind of gratifying to me personally.” The article, a discussion of the actions of the government and the protests of Indians in the United States, began on page one and continued for more than half a page inside. Several newspapers reprinted it. Hundreds more published Kumar’s mordant riposte.

The Chicago Tribune condemned the retribution against him. It noted the Indian ambassador’s remark accusing Indians for Democracy of “degrading themselves by washing dirty linen in public.” “But who dirtied the linen in the first place?” the Tribune asked. “According to our national values, [the ambassador] would serve his country better by advising the government in New Delhi to cease giving offense than by criticizing Indian nationals … who take offense when serious offense is given.”

The University of Chicago community rallied behind Kumar. The social sciences dean of students, Kenneth J. Rehage, AM’35, PhD’48, wrote to the ambassador, the education minister, and the president of India. “Mr. Kumar has an excellent record as a scholar in the field of Sociology in this University,” he testified. “The Division of the Social Sciences, as well as the Department of Sociology, will regard it a great misfortune if he is unable to continue his studies with us.”

The Indian Students Association organized the Ad Hoc Committee for the Defense of Anand Kumar, which agitated for his relief. (They shortly recast it as the International Students Defense Committee, supporting colleagues from Chile, Argentina, Iran, Ethiopia, Greece, and Taiwan in addition to India.) Student Government got involved. Many sympathetic professors, notably Bernard S. Cohn and Milton B. Singer, PhD’40, both anthropologists and India experts, urged action as well.

The pleas to the Indian government were for naught. The Division of the Social Sciences absorbed Kumar’s tuition, enabling him to maintain enrollment and retain his student visa. For his subsistence he relied on donations from admirers and friends; 20 hours a week in the Chicago Tribune mail room; and, finally, a job as a guard in the Regenstein Library and what is now the D’Angelo Law Library.

Kumar pursued the Indians for Democracy campaign to restore democracy to the end. He undertook another speaking tour in 1976, appearing in 15 cities. He helped with demonstrations in New York, Chicago, and Washington, DC. Beginning in September 1976 he took part in a roughly 100-mile trek from Independence Hall in Philadelphia to the United Nations in New York, a Satyagraha March meant to evoke the ideals of the American Revolution, the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and Mahatma Gandhi’s great movement for Indian independence.

Indira Gandhi announced a pause of the Emergency in January 1977. In some 18 months, University of Chicago political scientists and India specialists Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph wrote, Gandhi believed she had succeeded in “revers[ing] the political deterioration” that prompted her to declare it. “Although the crest of the wave of political gains from the emergency had broken, the political tide appeared still to be high,” they wrote. “Before it receded, it seemed expedient to capitalize on the apparently favorable environment.” Gandhi called elections for March and set the Emergency to expire just after.

She miscalculated. The elections were a disaster for her and her party, the Indian National Congress. Narayan’s opposition coalition, the Janata (People’s) Party and its allies, won a supermajority. Gandhi’s rival Morarji Desai became the first prime minister of India who was not from the Congress Party. The opposition routed the Congress in the belt of northern states from Gujarat to West Bengal, the heart of the JP Movement. It lost every seat it held in Uttar Pradesh, including Gandhi’s own. The Desai government restored Kumar’s scholarship in April 1977.

Kumar departed Chicago at the end of that year. Despite the intensity of his involvement in Indians for Democracy, he had kept up his studies and advanced to PhD candidacy. His dissertation committee, chaired by William Julius Wilson, approved his proposal titled “Political Sociology of Peripheral Capitalism: Making of the State’s Agenda in Colonial and Post-Colonial India.” He returned to India in 1978 after a time at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He joined the faculty at his first alma mater, Banaras Hindu University, and later moved to his second, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Along the way, in 1984, Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph arranged an 18-month residency in Hyde Park that enabled him to complete his University of Chicago degree. Among the “elders and friends” he thanked in his acknowledgments were SR and Mavis Hiremath and Shrikumar Poddar.

Through rare victories and many disappointments, Kumar kept up the good fight for India’s democracy, as he saw it. In 2014, at 64, he stood for public office for the first time, slated for a parliamentary seat in Delhi. He outpolled the incumbent but lost to the nominee of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.

Anand Kumar, his associates, and his friends and supporters at the University of Chicago wrought a compelling example of human agency in trying times. It has a sobering resonance in our own moment, on both sides of the globe.

John Mark Hansen is the Charles L. Hutchinson Distinguished Service Professor in Political Science and the College. He was the interim director of the University’s Center in Delhi from 2016 to 2017.