BackThe scars of Emergency
'Mint' traces the sequence of events, beginning with the Allahabad high court order on 12 June 1975 that led to the Emergency being imposed
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New Delhi: At midnight on 25 June 1975, the Indira Gandhi-led Congress government promulgated Emergency. Mint traces the timeline of events starting with the Allahabad high court order of 12 June 1975 that found Gandhi guilty of using government officials and machinery for her 1971 poll campaign. This triggered the inclement step that unleashed a sequence of events over the next 21 months.
It was Raj Narain, a socialist leader, who accused Gandhi of corrupt electoral practices prompting the court to declare her election null and void. Shanti Bhushan, a senior advocate in the Supreme Court, represented Narain in the case. “To start with, the press and people were not interested in the case. It was only when Mrs Gandhi decided to appear as a witness in the Allahabad high court in early 1975 that it created a buzz in the whole country. When the arguments started, it is my impression that he (the judge) didn’t take the case seriously. It was on the second or the third day that the arguments began registering and his demeanour became grey," says Bhushan. See full interview here.
Since Rae Bareli was Gandhi’s constituency, it became almost like ground zero of Emergency, where her decisions affected the party in the 1977 elections. Congress leader and Gandhi’s close associate Sunita Singh Chauhan, while acknowledging that the latter was a great leader who believed in developing her constituency, says of Emergency that “the reality is, people suffered and you cannot justify it".
The constituency, however, remembers little. As political analyst Badri Narayan puts it: “You cannot find much memory of the Emergency now in Rae Bareli. Those who connect with it are either dead or old. The new generation has new aspirations and that’s the future." Read more
Hours after Emergency was imposed, police turned up at the doorstep of Jayaprakash Narayan, the lightning rod for social unrest against the Congress government, to arrest him. JP, also known as Lok Nayak (people’s hero), is credited as the face of the people’s movement that sprang up to resist the Emergency rule imposed by Gandhi and which grew into the biggest anti-corruption movement in the nation. A visit to his birthplace in Sitabdiara, reveals a tale of two birthplaces, and sums up the forgotten legacy of JP. Read more
In another house in the heart of Delhi, Indira Gandhi memorial, is a board that lists the most important decisions taken in the house, “through national and regional newspapers". Declaration of Emergency is ranked sixth in a list of seven decisions that include the Garibi Hatao programme, bank nationalization and support to Bangladesh for its liberation. The last entry is, “decision to call elections in 1977". Read more
Among the worst manifestations of the Emergency was the forced sterilisations drives and the camps to which men were taken to. Mohammad Yaqoob, a resident of Uttawar in Haryana, remembers loudspeakers blaring at 3am, asking every man over the age of 15 to assemble at a government high school where they were shoved into buses and taken away to be operated upon. Read more
Several prominent politicians and individuals were jailed during the time, including Bharatiya Janata Party leader L.K. Advani who recounts the hours before his arrest. Asked if Emergency can be imposed once again, he says: “My answer is that going by this experience, at least those who have witnessed it and seen it, it is not easy for them to rule it out. Though having seen it, the Emergency itself is a kind of deterrent for the future, particularly because of the consequences that those who imposed it on the nation had to experience after that." Read the full interview here.
While BJP leader Subramanian Swamy recounts his experience of the Emergency, veteran journalist Kuldip Nayar who was working at The Indian Express at the time says that the whole nation went silent. “But later, they fell in line, nobody spoke. I am sorry to say that the press also caved in to the circumstances. Because of fear." Read more
The Emergency was a significant moment in Indian history. Here are the men and few of the women who grew powerful and remained close to Gandhi during the Emergency.
Yet, Bollywood, the larger-than-life mirror to our everyday life, the chronicler of our struggles, happiness, sorrow and changing times has deftly avoided this period, as if it never existed. Sudhir Mishra’s Hazaron Khwaishein Aisi tracked the impact of the Emergency on the lives of three Delhi University students remains the only mainstream work to extensively deal with the subject. Read more
Looking back with the advantage of hindsight, writes Mint’s deputy managing editor Anil Padmanabhan, the Emergency is by far the single biggest political mistake of the Congress party. “No matter what it did subsequently, it could never atone for the misdemeanours of its government over the next two years. It temporarily transformed India from a democracy to a dictatorship, where all the pillars of democracy—Parliament, the Executive, the judiciary and the media—were stripped of all freedoms (yes, some voluntarily signed on, believing that democracy was a curse and not a gift)." Read more
What about the free press?
During the Emergency years, in 1976, the government passed the Prevention of Publication of Objectionable Matter Act, which again gave it sweeping censorship powers and sought to muzzle the media. The law was eventually repealed by the Janata Party government that came to power in 1977. Could this happen again, asks Mint’s editor R. Sukumar here.
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