Sunday Times 2
50 years on: Indira’s emergency and India’s descent into political darkness
View(s):By Kumar Chellappan in Chennai
A Carnatic musician, known as Chennai’s enfant terrible, declared that there was no freedom of expression in India under the Narendra Modi regime. A media baron based in Tamil Nadu is going around the world alleging that there was an undeclared emergency in the country.
Though these allegations could be described as oxymoronic, the Indian media have been celebrating the charges made by the musician and the media magnate. If you do not have freedom of expression or if there is an undeclared emergency, how is it possible to lambast a government, stage sit-ins along the thoroughfares or shout from rooftops that Bharat Tere Tukde Honge?
The seriousness of these allegations could be understood only by those who went through the dark days of the internal emergency declared by the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, on June 25, 1975. This year marks the 50th anniversary of that period, which no one wants to experience again.
The musician, having been born six months after the proclamation of the internal emergency, might not have heard about the dark days. The media baron’s close relations travelled all the way from Chenni (then Madras) to Delhi to garland Indira Gandhi for the bold initiative. The Communist Party of India (CPI), which questions the 1975 emergency proclamation now, was then a close ally of the ruling Congress Party. C. Achutha Menon, the CPI’s founder leader, was heading the United Democratic Front Government in Kerala, in which the Congress was the major partner. The CPI called off the ties with the Congress and joined hands with its big brother, the CPI(M), only after the Congress was voted out of power in the 1977 general election. But the poor cousins of the CPI(M) continued its alliance with the Congress in Kerala even after the 1977 general election.
The internal emergency was declared to safeguard the prime ministerial chair of Indira Gandhi after she had been unseated by the Allahabad Bench of the Lucknow High Court for violating the Representation of People’s Act as well as the Prevention of Corrupt Practices Act in her election from Rae Barelli in Uttar Pradesh. Raj Narayan, her rival, filed the petition against her election, citing misuse of power and deployment of government servants for her election-related work. Her personal secretary, Yashpal Kapur, was seen campaigning for Indira Gandhi, and she was summoned by the Allahabad High Court to record a statement, a rare incident in India when the Prime Minister herself stood in the witness box to answer the queries of the prosecution. Justice Jagmohan Lal Sinha, in his verdict, declared that Gandhi had violated all laws associated with the election, and she stood disqualified as Member of Parliament and the Prime Minister. She was granted a stay so that she could approach the apex court of the country to file an appeal. This was an obvious signal that there was the possibility of Gandhi getting a reprieve from the highest court in the country.
But Gandhi, along with the coterie surrounding her that included her younger son Sanjay Gandhi, personal assistant R K Dhavan and the then Bengal chief minister Sidharth Shankar Ray, chose the tough stand and declared an emergency. Civil rights were suspended, and media censorship was enforced across India.
Meanwhile, Gandhi got a major relief from the vacation judge V R Krishna Iyer who ordered that she could continue as the Prime Minister but could not vote in the House, a strange judgment indeed. Iyer, before donning the robes of a judge, was a minister in the first Communist government led by E. M. S. Namboodirippadu in Kerala (1957-1959). It was only after his failure to make it to the legislative assembly again that Iyer went back to the Bar, from where he was elevated to the Bench at the instance of Namboodirippadu. Iyer has given a detailed account of this in his autobiography “Wandering In Many Worlds”.
The Allahabad High Court verdict on the election petition filed by Raj Narayan, a political lightweight, was just one of the reasons that made Gandhi declare the internal emergency. By 1975, the whole of India was burning as charges of corruption, favouritism, nepotism and other scams shook the people’s trust in the Congress Party. The opposition camp was a house divided, and the country had more than six or seven socialist parties fighting for the establishment of a socialist economy. The Constitution was misused by the Gandhi government to dismiss state governments which did not fall in line with the whims and fancies of Indira Gandhi.
The ire of the people towards the Indira Gandhi regime’s wanton misuse of power could be understood as they named All India Radio as All Indira Radio and Akashwani as Indira Vani. You tune in to AIR services, and you will hear only the announcers singing paeans to Madam and her policies.
This writer remembers a radio programme in which the interviewer asked an interviewee about life before and after the emergency. The poor interviewee was heard saying, “I am a fisherman. Before the emergency days, there was a scarcity of fish in the sea. Once the emergency was declared, I started getting big-sized fish.” Similarly, a farmer engaged in banana cultivation said in the programme, “Before the proclamation of emergency, the banana that we got was small in size. But since 25th June 1975, we started getting big-sized bananas.”
It was widely believed that Indira Gandhi had learnt a bitter lesson for taking the voters for a ride through the declaration of emergency. Her son Rajiv Gandhi, who succeeded her as Prime Minister, declared that he would not hesitate to bring back the internal emergency if the situation demanded it. True to his words, Rajiv Gandhi tried to enact a law to curb media freedom. In 1988, taken aback by the media publishing reports on the Bofors scandal and other such scams, the Rajiv Gandhi government tried to usher in the Defamation Bill to put a blanket ban on “tendentious writing” and placed the onus of proof on the offending media house. The government made a hasty retreat following the agitation launched by journalists across the country.
During the run-up to the 1989 general election, the opposition parties were asked not to utter anything about the Bofors scandal during their campaign speeches on AIR and Doordarshan. The opposition leaders boycotted the time allotted to them in the official media for their election campaign. In 1975-76, the internal emergency saw the leaders of the opposition parties being shepherded to prisons across the country under the draconian Defence of India Rule (DIR) and Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA). Indira Gandhi used this opportunity to amend the Constitution and added the terms “secular, socialist democratic republic” in the preamble. B. R. Ambedkar had vehemently opposed in the Constituent Assembly the introduction of the term secularism in the Constitution, saying that India can never become a theocratic state. Why this amendment was made in the preamble of the Constitution remains a mystery even today. The governments led by Indira and Rajiv Gandhi had bent, moulded and mutilated the Constitution to suit their political convenience. The constitutional amendment to subvert the Supreme Court verdict in the Shah Bano case is proof of the scant disregard the Gandhis had for the Constitution.
Fortunately, such things have not happened at any time in the recent past. But as the saying goes, eternal vigilance is the price we have to pay for liberty. The 50th anniversary of the internal emergency is an ideal occasion to reboot the system and remind the people of the black days which we experienced.