With the Indian government launching an increasingly brazen attack on the country’s students and workers, several commentators have argued that India is going through an “undeclared Emergency.” This conjures up images of the actual State of Emergency declared in 1975, which Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her coterie in the Indian National Congress party used as an opportunity to jail political enemies, censor the press, ban rival political parties, and dissolve intransigent state governments.

These days, Indira Gandhi’s legacy is being invoked not just in think pieces, but in the halls of parliament. This has played out in unexpected ways. On March 2, Rahul Gandhi, Indira’s grandson and Congress Party scion, lashed out at Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Criticizing Modi’s authoritarian style, Rahul chided, “The country is not the prime minister. The prime minister is not the country.” (An inversion, perhaps unconscious, of the famous Emergency slogan, “India is Indira, Indira is India,” coined by the Congress party sycophant D. K. Barooah.)

While Rahul seemed to repudiate his grandmother’s legacy, Modi embraced it. Responding to Rahul’s remarks, he questioned the Congress’s lack of support for his “Make in India” manufacturing initiative, and suggested that Indira would have taken a different tack, quoting her disapproving 1974 remark that “we make our image as that of a beggar in front of the world.” Modi, like Indira, is extremely conscious of India’s image on the world stage, and he is not afraid of using draconian measures to push his agenda.