The Emergency was declared on 25 June 1975. Civil liberties were suspended, the press was censored and opposition politicians were jailed across India.
The Akali Dal mounted the campaign against it from the Akal Takht at Amritsar. Whether it was the only party in India to run a sustained campaign rather than a protest is a claim the party made for itself and no source settles it. What is not disputed is that the campaign ran for the whole nineteen months.
Around forty thousand arrests are usually attributed to the Akali morcha over nineteen months, which if accurate is a very large share of the total detained in India during the period.
Punjabi writers, including Sant Ram Udasi and others, were jailed. The Punjabi press was censored with the rest.
The Akali Dal's role in resisting the Emergency is not part of the standard national account of that period, in which the resistance is generally credited to Jayaprakash Narayan's movement and to the courts.
The Janata government that followed in 1977 included Akali ministers, and the Akali Dal formed the Punjab government.
The Akali Dal working committee resolved on the morcha at Amritsar at the end of June 1975 and the first jatha courted arrest in the second week of July. Accounts differ on the exact day. A fixed number of volunteers went out on a fixed day, courted arrest and were replaced by the next, week after week. It is a machine rather than a protest and that is why it lasted.
Harchand Singh Longowal, Gurcharan Singh Tohra and Parkash Singh Badal were all inside for most of it. The men who ran Punjab politics for the next twenty five years spent nineteen months in jail together, and a good deal of what was settled between them there shaped what came afterward.
Both the method and the memory were used later. The morchas of the 1980s were organised the same way by the same people, and the claim that this was the only party in India that had fought the Emergency was made in every one of them.