India, June 17 -- Fifty years after the Emergency, the memory of that period continues to haunt the conscience of India's constitutional democracy. Central to that collective reckoning is the Supreme Court's judgment in ADM Jabalpur Vs Shivkant Shukla case in 1976, famously dubbed the "Habeas Corpus case".

At a time when the judiciary was expected to act as the guardian of civil liberties, the apex court chose to become an instrument of the executive, handing down a verdict that effectively sanctioned state authoritarianism. The judgment is a cautionary tale of how legal formalism and deference to executive authority can gut the soul of a liberal constitutional democracy.

HT takes a look at the legal, political and moral dimensions of t...