It’s not normal when students are sleeping the hostel, and suddenly some of them are taken away for no reason. This happened during nights. Imagine the trauma everyone had to go through External Affairs Minister Dr. S. Jaishankar said, speaking at the inaugural session of the Mock Parliament organized by Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM) on Friday (June 27, 2025).

This whole exercise was done to bring down the morale of the country, he said.

I was studying when the Emergency was imposed in 1975, and I will never forget what happened and what everyone had to go through. The lesson I took away from Emergency was, “Never take freedom for granted.”

Everybody assumes Emergency is related to politics, but it was always more than that. It affected every aspect of the country, including arts, culture, cinema, education. “It affected everybody’s way of life,” the External Affairs Minister said.

Emergency was imposed based on the rationale that there were imminent internal threats to the Indian state, and some minor internal issues were portrayed as security threats to the country. Many important leaders were arrested, he noted.