June 26 has gone down in the pages of modern India’s political history as a dark day in the country’s existence as a democracy. The imposition of Emergency had exposed Indira Gandhi’s dictatorial and brutal conduct
As a large section of the Indian population was born after June 26, 1975, they would probably not be able to identify why this particular day has such a monumental significance for senior citizens like myself. As those who were born on that day would be turning 40 in a few days — in Swiss parlance, celebrating their ruby anniversary — I think it is important for those of us who lived through that period to apprise our youngsters why we all feel so strongly about the day and year.
This is the day when Indira Gandhi, after being found guilty of corrupt electoral practices, decided to declare a state of Emergency. She made no attempt to camouflage the real reasons for this draconian measure — to prolong her rule by any means possible. The official version, however, was that the country was under ‘great threat’. The pliant President, as head of state, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, debased his office as never before, by appending his signature to this phony and dangerous document.
My generation will distinctly remember the day when the entire nation was converted into a police state; we ceased to have any fundamental rights — even the right to life had been abrogated. All because a politician wished to remain at at the helm of affairs!
Congress politicians and the numerous goons affiliated with them began to have a field day. PS Bhinder, the notorious police official who reminded us of the loathsome Sheriff of Nottingham, converted the whole city into a quasi-concentration camp. All the politicians known to be critical of Indira Gandhi were rounded up and incarcerated. Critical journalists were also not spared. Kuldip Nayar wrote about the manner in which he was picked up. The police officials in other parts of the country were not to be left behind — after all, they had to be seen to be more loyal than their counterparts.
The goonish Chief Minister of Haryana did not see anything wrong in rounding up all and sundry for vasectomy camps in order to meet targets set by the powers-that-be. The Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh was content to be seen removing the footwear of the dictator’s son. It is not that there were no voices of dissent within the Congress; Inder Gujral’s finest hour came when he refused to comply with Sanjay Gandhi’s instructions.
That he was replaced by the opportunistic Vidya Charan Shukla tremendously added to his stature. The professional journalists at the time, many of whom are still alive, would attest to the thuggery that was practised by Shukla and his henchmen Kumar Nandan Prasad and l Dayal in the Information and Broadcasting Ministry. Only the likes of Khushwant Singh found Indira Gandhi and her henchmen ‘lovable’.
Among those incarcerated was a middle-aged, polio-ridden university professor of Hindi. His upper limbs had been rendered dysfunctional, which meant his wife had to feed him with her hands. The stated crime against him was that he had been tampering with the telephone connections up on a pole!
This writer himself had some unsavoury experiences. His recently widowed mother was visited by Jayaprakash Narayan, a kin, during the latter’s visit to the mofussil town only a few weeks before the promulgation of the Emergency. Within no time, his mother was served a notice to explain how she was in possession of the house she was living in; the ancient house had been a family property for nearly 200 years!
Perhaps the only redeeming feature was the determination among a section of society to keep on fighting. Clandestine networks were set up between different students bodies-socialists, communists and those affiliated to the Jana Sangh, all of whom had professed loyalty to Jayaprakash Narayan. It would be worthwhile pointing out that many of the senior politicians today had their political baptism during the Emergency period. Mr Arun Jaitley was from the Delhi University and Mr Sitaram Yechury from the JNU. Forsaking their political affiliations, these people fought towards a higher goal: The destruction of a dictatorship.
The legacy of the Emergency is that no political formation has ever dared to even think of resorting to this measure again — despite the fact that political space has become far more venal and corrupt and politicians have become far more authoritarian. Even an acknowledged diehard Nehru/Gandhi family fan, Amitabh Bachchan, for the first time, recently admitted that the Emergency was a mistake.
Those who until very recently supported the promulgation are the ones who directly profited from it or those like Khushwant Singh and Vasant Sathe whose sycophantic quotient had assumed stratospheric magnitude. Meanwhile, remember that Indira Gandhi never formally apologised to the nation for this atrocity.