BackThe Emergency sped up the decline of the Congress
The party that imposed the Emergency is today a pale shadow of its past, while the RSS now has pride of place in the new dispensation
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Indian polity has turned on its head in the 40 years since the declaration of Emergency on 25 June 1975. A man who fought the Emergency as an underground activist of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is today the prime minister of India. His colleagues at the helm, including the home minister, finance minister, foreign minister, parliamentary affairs and urban development minister and telecommunications minister, were all incarcerated under the draconian Maintenance of Internal Security Act, or MISA, for the entire duration of the Emergency.
The party that imposed the Emergency is today a pale shadow of its past, not even enjoying the status of a recognized opposition, having faced the worst-ever electoral defeat in its history.
The RSS, which was banned for supporting Jayaprakash Narayan’s agitation and became the chief victim of the Emergency regime, with all its leaders in jail under MISA, now has pride of place in the new dispensation with its chief Mohan Bhagwat being accorded Z-plus category security.
The irony is that stopping the RSS and perpetuating family rule was the Emergency’s agenda, but it propelled a reverse process, eclipsing the Congress and establishing the RSS as the fulcrum of a resurgent India.
It’s a quirk of destiny that some parties that formed the pivot in the struggle against the Emergency are today trying to steam the Congress bandwagon to stop the Narendra Modi juggernaut in Bihar, the cradle of Narayan’s “Total Revolution" campaign to unseat the corrupt Congress regime.
The parties aligning with the Congress to resist the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Bihar were in the JP (as Narayan was popularly known) Movement with the Jan Sangh in 1975, opposing the Congress.
The Emergency triggered a churning in politics like never before. For the first time, it made Indians aware of the limits and threats to their freedom and how democracy can be subverted to impose dictatorship. JP in his book Prison Diary predicted, “A people who fought British imperialism and humbled it cannot accept indefinitely the indignity and shame of totalitarianism. The spirit of man can never be vanquished, no matter how deeply suppressed."
As a student and part-time journalist with Hindustan Samachar, I worked closely with some underground leaders. My main job was to carry messages stealthily from one place to another. I was lucky that I left Kerala after graduation for higher studies. Many of my colleagues in college were arrested and tortured mercilessly by the tyrannical K. Karunakaran regime in Kerala. Though most top RSS leaders were in jail, the entire resistance network was handled by the RSS cadre.
The ideological differences at that time did not come in the way of cooperating and collectively organizing satyagrahas throughout the country. The Congress (O), Charan Singh’s Lok Dal, the socialists, the Akalis and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) were coordinating with the RSS to foil the Emergency. Justice V.M. Tarkunde’s People’s Union for Civil Liberties also played a sterling part in legally exposing the Emergency regime.
A colleague, then a student, recalled how for once Indians up to the village panchayat-level realized what fear of authority meant. Anybody in power could fix anybody anywhere, deprive them of all their possessions, get them dismissed from jobs and thrown into jail without rhyme or reason and without any legal recourse. It was perhaps like the Soviet Union under Stalin. But for the RSS, the resistance to the Emergency would have been limited to a few feeble voices here and there. All the senior leaders of all the opposition parties were in jail. Only the RSS had the ideological stamina and organizational network spread across the country.
The formation of the Janata Party in time for the 1977 election itself was the outcome of the assiduous spadework and tremendous dialogues undertaken by RSS ideologue and Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh founder Dattopant Thengadi, who was guiding the underground movement throughout the country. He moved from one part of the country to another in disguise, contacting and coordinating with all the top leaders of the parties and impressing upon them the need to form a single party to challenge the Congress. The negotiations were conducted mainly through lengthy letters, explaining ideological positions and areas of agreement and discord.
The chief architects of these dialogues those days included Atal Bihari Vajpayee, N.G. Gore, Charan Singh, Morarji Desai, Madhu Limaye, Madhu Dandavate, George Fernandes, Nanaji Deshmukh, RSS general secretary Madhavrao Mule and Babubhai Patel. This interesting bit of the formation of the Janata Party is yet to be written about.
Immediately after the Emergency, the RSS thought of bringing out a source book on the struggle against dictatorship. The author worked on those documents for nearly three years, under the guidance of Thengadi. They were essentially first-hand narratives and primary sources on how they fought the Emergency. The RSS role in the resistance movement and the sacrifices it made in the formation of the new government have not been fully appreciated or written about. RSS leaders in many states have written books in local languages. Narendra Modi, who led the movement in Gujarat, has written a fascinating account of the struggle in Gujarati. Modi also worked for some time on the national project. But after the collapse of the Janata experiment, that was discontinued.
Truth was the biggest casualty of those 21 months. Officially, 10,000 people suffered brutality, 125,000 people were arrested, 25,000 of them under MISA. More than 15,000 RSS and Jan Sangh workers were kept in jail even after the polls were announced. A complete history of the underground struggle, the huge volume of literature in different languages to beat censorship and spread the truth about the atrocities on the people in the name of discipline is a bone-chilling saga.
The author is a member of the BJP National Training Programme Committee and former editor of Organiser weekly.
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