THE essence of the action taken on June 26, 1975, and in the weeks and months that followed it, was to suspend the political process in India. There may 'have been some rationale in doing this at that time, both in dealing with the immediate and exceptional situation created by the Allahabad judgment, which ruled against Prime Minister Indira Ghandi in a case involving alleged election law infractions during her 1971 campaign for Parliament, and in meeting the more long-term threat posed by the opposition parties and the "JP movement" led by the popular and prominent Jayaprakash Narayan. Indeed, since 1974, the political process—particularly the manner in which dissent, discontent, and disenchantment were expressed—had begun to operate more outside than inside the basic framework of the polity, and it was felt by some in positions of power that the only way of dealing with such a political system was simply to suspend it. The assumption was that the system (or what remained of it) could then be more manageable. The Emergency, in other words, was seen to be an efficient instrument of crisis management—a drastic step no doubt, but one that was necessary to put an end to the serious strains to which the system was being put.