JUNE 25 marked the anniversary of Indira Gandhi’s 21-month 1975-77 emergency. The 50-year-old event came up for censure in the Lok Sabha Speaker’s and president Draupadi Murmu’s address to the joint sitting of the two Houses of Parliament last week. The fuss over the emergency looks clearly designed to frame the resurgent Congress and mask the BJP’s role in far worse and truly horrific events like the ethnic cleansing in Manipur, Gujarat pogroms and the destruction of Kashmiri lives under the Modi government.

Be that as it may, Khushwant Singh, J.R.D. Tata, Bal Thackeray and the Communist Party of India (CPI) supported Mrs Gandhi’s suspension of civil liberties. The usually phlegmatic Tata said that “things had gone too far. You can’t imagine what we’ve been through here — strikes, boycotts, demonstrations. Why, there were days I couldn’t walk out of my office into the street”.

The emergency, of course, was fought when it needed to be fought. At JNU, at the dead of night, K.N. Ganesh would be on the prowl with cyclostyled sheets excoriating the dictatorship. The targets included alleged ‘collaborators’ from faculty and management. Ganesh would slip in his subversive papers under the doors of hostel inmates. A few could tell from the dragging sound of his worn-out slippers with which he attended Romila Thapar’s ancient history classes that the zealous CPI-M supporter was on the move.

The Gestetner machine, its ink, A4 sheets and stencils were to be kept from the security guards and ‘enemy agents’. An “enemy’s” room was selected as safe for the purpose. Ali Javed, whose communist party supported Mrs Gandhi, would chortle for as long as he lived remembering his playing trustee of the rival partisans’ printing machine. Several students were rounded up and released. Probir Purkayastha was jailed for the entire duration of the emergency. Purkayastha was in Tihar jail again recently for running a media platform critical of the Modi government. A double whammy for the former communist student whose party once courted the BJP as an ally in the fight for democracy. JNU students’ union president Devi Prasad Tripathi was arrested soon after. Popular as DPT he became a Rajya Sabha MP and used his position to arrange visas for Pakistani peaceniks.

The other inference is that Indira Gandhi saw a threat to India’s democracy as it was conceived by her father’s enlightened associates.

When elections were held in March 1977, Indira Gandhi suffered a resounding defeat in her bastion of Rae Bareli. The socialist maverick Raj Narain who laid her low would soon plead with her to help depose her successor Morarji Desai and instal Charan Singh as a short-term prime minister. While the northern states — where the BJP would gain strength — routed Mrs Gandhi, the southern states stood solidly with her. Which explains her winning 154 seats even as she lost her own. That’s much more than the Congress tally in recent polls. Mrs Gandhi made her last comeback with 373 MPs in 1980, marking the end of the Janata Party experiment. The tally has mocked her rivals.

The emergency came in for censure in addresses by the Speaker to the Lok Sabha and by India’s president to the mandated meeting of the two Houses of the new parliament last week. Let’s see why Rahul Gandhi was miffed by the strange references.

Months of student violence — more vicious than what prompts the bulldozing of suspects’ homes these days — was widely seen as sponsored by the RSS. It started in Gujarat and spread to Bihar. It spurred the rise of Jayaprakash Narayan — JP — who called on police and army to disobey Indira Gandhi’s orders, which effectively meant a call to revolt against the sitting prime minister of India. Mrs Gandhi locked him up with his supporters from the right to the left of the spectrum, by declaring internal emergency.

The trigger for the measure lay in the Allahabad High Court judgement that found Mrs Gandhi guilty of using the Public Works Department to construct a podium from which she addressed an election rally. Also, her election manager was a junior government official, which was illegal. For that, she had to be removed as prime minister and not be able to contest another election for six years. Going by the leeway available to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for example, the high court verdict was vicious, if also a bad joke. JP came out of the jail as a hero, the Lok Nayak, the people’s leader who helped retrieve Indian democracy from Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian talons.

Two inferences can be made. It’s legitimate, even heroic, to call on the army, the bureaucracy, the works, to disobey the orders of a dictator, a deemed dictator, since dictators don’t normally accept the accusation of being one.

The other inference to be drawn is that Indira Gandhi saw a threat to India’s democracy as it was conceived by her father’s enlightened associates in the constituent assembly. In the insidiously right-wing upsurge that JP was leading, she clearly read the fingerprints of religio-fascist groups camouflaged as seekers of democratic liberties. And this is said to have prompted her to take the steps she believed were provided for the situation in the constitution.

Did Mrs Gandhi fall short of her objective — by focusing more on grooming her son Sanjay Gandhi as successor — in vacating the threat to democracy she saw and many now also see? “This is worse than the declared emergency”, is a common refrain today. These critics have seen dark methods of seeking to crush the opposition, intellectuals, farmers and students among them, some jailed for years without trial, manifold longer than Mrs Gandhi kept her quarries.

“Only one thing could have stopped our movement — if our adversaries had understood its principle and from the first day smashed with the utmost brutality the nucleus of our new movement.” Thus exulted Adolf Hitler while addressing the Nuremberg party rally in September 1933. Did Indira Gandhi fail to grasp his point?

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, July 2nd, 2024