"From Victim to Agent: Memories of the Emergency from a Resettlement Colony in Delhi"

Literature about the emergency tends to portray the intellectual as the emotional sufferer, the bureaucrat as the active participant and the poor as the passive victim. Such stereotypes are dangerous for they seem to mask the most frightening aspect of the emergency regime - its ability to draw all kinds of people, through fear, into participation. To ignore the active role of the thousands of men and women who competed for plots in the resettlement colonies of Delhi is tantamount to denying the generality and diffuseness of the power of the state as it seeped into the corners of everyday life, inviting strange and unnatural responses.