The Emergency: A Personal History

Author: Kapoor, Coomi

• Imperious, often icy, in her manner towards her colleagues, Mrs Gandhi was described as the ‘only man’ in the cabinet of ministers, and was dubbed ‘the Empress’ by The Economist. Now the iron lady was in danger of being eased out of the political arena because of electoral malpractices which her supporters indignantly claimed were mere technicalities that could be compared to minor traffic-rule infringements

• Justice Sinha had held Mrs Gandhi guilty of two malpractices out of fourteen charges made by Raj Narain. The first was that Yashpal Kapoor, officer on special duty in the prime minister’s secretariat and an old family retainer, had handled Mrs Gandhi’s campaign in Rai Bareilly from 7 January 1971, although he continued in government service until 25 January, according to the official record. Government servants were barred by the electoral code of conduct from active participation in political campaigns. The other impropriety was that UP government officials had helped make the arrangements for her election meetings, including constructing podiums, arranging loudspeakers and electricity connections—a practice which was not uncommon, and to which the authorities generally turned a blind eye.

• He was a young man in a hurry, impatient with what he considered the hypocrisies of political correctness, in stark contrast to his grandfather Pandit Nehru who was deeply sensitive to his image as the upholder of liberal, secular, socialist and democratic values.

• D.K. Barooah, the rotund sycophantic party president, described contemptuously by Sanjay as a ‘joker’, declared ‘Indira is India and India is Indira’, a refrain which sounded ominously similar to the Nazi slogan ‘Germany is Hitler and Hitler is Germany’.

• Ray tried to pacify him, stating he should not interfere in what was not his sphere.15 Later when he met Mrs Gandhi, he thought she looked red-eyed. She assured him the drastic measures suggested by Sanjay would be stopped. Sanjay, however, had his way regarding the disconnecting of electricity supply to newspaper offices.

• He pointed out that since an external Emergency was already in place, the powers were sufficient. When Mrs Gandhi replied that it would be wiser to go for a second Emergency, he did not argue the point.

• She in turn had forgiven him for his ‘memory lapse’ in forgetting to pay his income tax for ten years.

• He had already met the Delhi lt governor Kishan Chand and DIG Bhinder at Chand’s residence, but both men were adamant that the arrests be made only under MISA, since that way the courts could be bypassed—under its draconian provisions, those arrested could be held without trial and judicial review for as long as the Emergency lasted.

• The operation was planned and carried out in so secretive a manner that the IB chief, S.N. Mathur, claimed he came to know about the Emergency only on the morning of 26 June.

• Chawla, who walked in and out of the prison with impunity, had even suggested that some new cells could be constructed with asbestos roofs so that the prisoners would bake in the heat. Chawla also proposed that certain troublesome detainees should be kept with the ‘lunatics’.

• The impact of such harsh conditions was to wreck the detainees physically and mentally and force them to write humiliating letters of apology to the authorities.

• ‘Jail is a state of mind. If you are too upset about your position you would get depressed and demoralized and have hair loss and other traumatic experiences. If you were young and thinking of fighting the Emergency you felt fine,’ Jaitley reminisces

• Rising in politics through opportunism and sycophancy, Shukla was willing to follow Sanjay’s orders blindly.

• Advani was to remark later that during the Emergency the press ‘was asked to bend and it chose to crawl’.

• A law granting immunity to journalists covering Parliament which, ironically, Mrs Gandhi’s husband, Feroze Gandhi, had introduced, was repealed.

• ‘A’ category was considered friendly, ‘B’ was deemed hostile and ‘C’ neutral. Of the national dailies published in English from Delhi, Hindustan Times and Times of India were put in the ‘A’ category and Statesman and Indian Express were blacklisted with a ‘B’ grading.

• The obituary column in the Times of India, Bombay, regretted the demise of ‘D’Ocracy, DEM beloved husband of T. Ruth, loving father of L I Bertie, brother of Faith, Hope, Justice [who] expired on 26th June’. The obituary became a popular Emergency joke.

• Jain returned to Delhi and reported the matter to Burney, who hit the roof on hearing of Kishore Kumar’s impudence. He gave orders that all songs of Kishore Kumar be banned from AIR and Doordarshan. All films starring Kishore Kumar were to be listed for further action. The sales of gramophone records of Kishore Kumar’s songs were to be frozen. The peremptory action against Kumar was presumably not just to teach him a lesson, but also to serve as a warning to other film artists.

• In fact, many genuinely believed that there was a sinister conspiracy that had been discovered in the nick of time. The country needed a bit of discipline too, they felt. The trains began to run on time, government officials were more responsive, prices were coming under control. The government brought out a spate of slogans to try and sell the Emergency. There were big billboards with homilies like: ‘Discipline makes the nation great’, ‘Talk less, work more’, ‘She stood between order and chaos’, ‘Courage and clarity of vision, thy name is Indira Gandhi’.

• The terror of being picked up by the police without any reason summed up the Emergency for us.

• Indira Gandhi announced her Twenty Point Programme. The goals set included bringing down the prices of essential commodities, cutting down on government expenditure, declaring bonded labour illegal, setting up special squads for cracking down on conspicuous consumption, bringing in special legislation for the confiscation of smugglers’ properties, increasing power production, developing the handloom sector, and so on. It seemed like old wine in a new bottle: most of the programmes were old hat and had been repackaged for propaganda purposes.

• It was Sanjay Gandhi’s five-point programme that came out shortly afterwards which was more controversial. It focused on family planning, tree plantation, slum clearance, abolition of dowry and eradication of illiteracy.

• Pandit Brothers, a very reputable shop in Connaught Place, owned by the family of P.N. Haksar, who had once been Indira Gandhi’s closest adviser, was raided and the owners arrested.

• Eulogies to Mrs Gandhi came from all corners of the country. Eminent artist M.F. Husain portrayed her as the goddess Durga astride a tiger. I considered it the height of sycophancy, but then court painters in medieval times would no doubt have done the same.

• Mohan Dharia, expelled from the Congress, declared that 26 June would be remembered as the blackest day in Indian democracy and the history of the country.

• It was claimed that after Mujib’s death Mrs Gandhi was in a state of constant terror that she would be bumped off.

• The courts seemed to be the sole area that had not succumbed to the fear psychosis prevailing in the rest of the country. (In fact, all the bar associations, other than the Calcutta bar association, had issued statements condemning the Emergency rule.)

• The number of those in Indira Gandhi’s prisons during the Emergency far exceeded the total number jailed during the 1942 Quit India movement.

• In Gujarat the RSS often sent a young pracharak to pick him up from station and take him to Desai’s house. This humble pracharak was Narendra Modi, who would become leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and prime minister of India four decades later.

• In 1959, at the age of forty-one, she was elected president of the Congress party despite her father’s ostensible reservations at what appeared to be nepotism. It was the Congress leaders who pushed for her appointment, not Nehru.

• D.R. Gadgil, deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, once held forth for forty minutes on economic issues. He thought he held the PM’s full attention and she was taking notes on his lecture. When he leaned over he was shocked to find that she had been doodling on a piece of paper.

• Influenced by her leftist advisers, particularly Mohan Kumaramangalam, Mrs Gandhi in April 1973 ruthlessly broke with judicial tradition and superseded three Supreme Court judges, J.M. Shelat, K.S. Hegde and A.N. Grover, in order to appoint a junior judge, A.N. Ray, as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

• Corruption flourished in the early 1970s. One man who epitomized the rot in the party was Lalit Narayan Mishra. As minister for foreign trade, Mishra was widely believed to have introduced the system of ‘licence raj’: businessmen were granted government contracts and import and export licences in return for contributions to the party.

• Mrs Gandhi’s indignation stemmed from the fact that, in her usual self-deluding way, she had convinced herself that the judgment was not against her but against the people of India.

• At the time the Emergency was imposed, the triumvirate consisting of West Bengal Chief Minister Siddhartha Shankar Ray, Congress president D.K. Barooah and Bombay Pradesh Congress Committee boss Rajni Patel was the current favourite.

• In May 1974, Mrs Gandhi wrote to JP inquiring about his health. She added that in view of the long friendship between the two families, their political disagreements should not create personal bitterness or questioning of each other’s motives. Mrs Gandhi’s offer of peace would have seemed more genuine if she had not, just a short while earlier, at a speech in Bhubaneswar, made disparaging remarks about Sarvodaya leaders keeping the company of the rich and living in posh guest houses.

• Targets were fixed for each district and each divisional-level officer. Failure to meet the target resulted not only in withholding salary payments but even in suspensions and transfers.

• One group in the Congress believed that India should turn into a Nasser–Tito type of dictatorship with a one-party rule and a new Constitution. The other group, of which Bhagat was a part, believed that the party should return to democracy.

• ‘Charan Singh’s attitude towards Mrs Gandhi fluctuated. He grumbled that not even the British would have treated us the way she did. He was very disturbed in jail. At the same time he was willing to compromise if it suited his interests. But he would never compromise on two things: the economy and the importance of agriculture,’ Malik reminisces.

• While the government was attempting to work out deals with individual members of the Opposition, JP was trying to bring about the formation of a single opposition party. Representatives of the Socialist Party, the Jana Sangh, the BLD and the Congress(O) held a joint meeting in Bombay in JP’s presence in March 1976. They decided to form a single new party. A steering committee was set up for the purpose with N.G. Gore (Socialist), Om Prakash Tyagi (Jana Sangh), H.M. Patel (BLD), and Shanti Bhushan (Congress(O)). Goray was convenor.

• In the beginning Vinoba seemed to back the Emergency unreservedly when he declared that it was a period of anushashanparva, an era of discipline. He was dubbed as a sarkari sant (government saint) by those opposing the Emergency, particularly as the government utilized Vinoba’s phrase on discipline for its propaganda purposes.

• But what was not reported in the censored media was that Vinoba also had reservations about JP’s imprisonment and the continuation of the Emergency.

• Unlike the socialists and the three rightist parties, the Jana Sangh, the Swatantra Party and the Congress(O), the CPI(M) was let off rather lightly. Only a few of its leaders and some of its cadres were jailed. The government wanted to maintain its image of battling only the right.

• The ‘My dear Om’ letter caused consternation and demoralization among those who were either in jail and still uncompromising, and among the few that were left outside who were determined to continue the fight.

• Mrs Gandhi had by now veered away from the more extreme course of action supported by a powerful group within the party, including her son Sanjay. They wanted to convert the existing Parliament into a Constituent Assembly which could recommend major amendments to the Constitution, so that India could change from a parliamentary form of government into a presidential system.

• Bansi Lal was the most enthusiastic: ‘Nehru sahib, get rid of all this election nonsense. If you ask me, just make our sister president for life and there’s no need to do anything else.’

• To the philosopher J. Krishnamurti she confessed in 1976, ‘I am riding the back of a tiger. I do not know how to get off its back.’

• She won 351 seats out of the 529 Lok Sabha seats on a heady promise of a performing government. ‘Vote unhey dein jo kam kar sakein’ said the posters.

• He was so determined to prove his credentials as a leader of rural India that he imposed a series of new taxes targeting urban India, even taxing toothpaste.

• Fernandes reluctantly agreed to be minister for industries in Morarji Desai’s government and it was during his tenure that the multinationals IBM and Coca Cola were asked to leave the country for violating foreign exchange regulations.