Indira Gandhi

  I asked Om Mehta, minister of state in the home ministry, about this and he replied vaguely, ‘There were some metal swords too.’ Even with some metal swords, I asked, how could boys with staves pose much of a threat to a superbly equipped army of about one million men, the Border Security Force of about 85,000, the Central Reserve Police of about 57,000, and some 755,000 state policemen? ‘Well,’ Mehta said, ‘there were undoubtedly some rifles too.’ ‘Did you seize any?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he said, ‘but they probably kept them at home. Don’t underestimate these people’s capacity for mischief.’1

  In a standard speech Mrs Gandhi made, with minor variations, over the next twelve months to interviewers and different audiences, she claimed there had been a‘plot’ against established authority. The charge was never substantiated, and no one accused of conspiracy was brought to trial.* The more specific charges she repeated were: the Opposition wanted to remove her and the Congress party from office; it wanted to weaken the nation; it was insignificant and had no following; the only following it had came from the press:

  It was necessary in order to avoid any trouble because it would have been their effort to provoke violence on our part. If they did something, that would not have created a good situation. So it was more to keep the peace. (To a Bombay weekly, July 8, 1975).

  A large section of the press had identified itself with the Opposition. (To a group of editors, July 9, 1975).

  In the last few years a consistent attempt was being made to weaken the fabric of the nation. (To members of the Lions Club and Lions International, July 19, 1975.)

  The Opposition had no support except the support of a vociferous section of the press… . These parties concentrated their entire energy on denigrating me and spreading the most baseless canards such as that I smoke and drink, which I do not do. (To members of the Nehru Youth Centres, July 11, 1975).

  Sections of the press had become total partners of the Opposition front… Censorship of Opposition newspapers had become necessary… . In the process other sections of the press have also had to face inconvenience. (Interview with the Sunday Times and the Observer, July 12, 1975.)

  Reverting to the situation leading to the proclamation of Emergency, Mrs. Gandhi said there had been a steady effort to weaken‘our system’ since 1950. (To 7th Biennial Conference of State Anti-Corruption and CBI Officers, July 1975.)

  A section of the press was anti-government and it was projecting only what was anti-government… . Newspapers were building up the Opposition. (To correspondent of West German daily, Bild Am Sonntag, August 10, 1975.)

  The press was not only a mouthpiece of the Opposition, but spear-heading it too. (To Comex VII, September 23, 1975.)

  The Opposition had united for the purpose of forcing me and the Congress Party out of office. (Interview with NBC, published August 24, 1975.)

  The press, both Indian and foreign, were denigrating India. (At Bhubaneswar, September 27, 1975.)

  In a situation where no voice but her own could be heard, now that debate and dissent had been silenced, and there were no enemies at large, real or illusory, to react to, Mrs Gandhi’s utterances laid bare a complaining naiveté. She sounded aggrieved and perplexed that the Opposition should want her and the Congress out of office and that sections of the press should support the Opposition. Her answers to questions in an interview with NBC made her reasons for declaring an emergency sound no more rational:

  Q: You yourself say the Opposition is in a small minority. Why did you really have to move in the extreme way you did? We simply cannot see that there was a national emergency.

  A: Well, perhaps you’re just too far away. Many things could not go on because a very few people, a handful of people, were disrupting it.

  Q: If you want to tell the world this, why not put the people on trial? You have a good court system. Why not let the world know what they were about to do?

  A: Firstly, our court cases go on for years and years. And it is very difficult to prove anything.

  Q: How much real danger was there that the armed forces would mutiny?

  A: I don’t think that there was a real danger. But this sort of thing causes confusion in the minds of the people.

  The home ministry’s document ‘Why Emergency’, placed before Parliament on its opening day, July 21, 1975, laboured hard. The Opposition, it said, had held a series of meetings between June 21 and 25 to work out a ‘grand design’ to dislodge Mrs Gandhi and her government. On the 25th Jayaprakash Narayan had called on the army, police and government employees not to obey orders they considered ‘wrong’. He had urged the chief justice, A.N. Ray, not to sit on the bench to hear the prime minister’s appeal against the Allahabad High Court judgement.

  Thus these Opposition parties had irrevocably embarked upon the path of chaos and anarchy and were soon to set about executing their grand design… . The true justification for the present Emergency under Article 352 of the Constitution is the preservation of the social interest in peace and order and the promotion of the public good.

  The document listed as ‘unconstitutional’ methods the railway strike of 1974 and the movements in Gujarat and Bihar.

  Jayaprakash Narayan, arrested before dawn on June 26, and reduced to sudden, rapidly deteriorating illness in prison, wrote to the prime minister on July 21, 1975 from his solitary confinement alternating between hospital cottage and hospital ward at Chandigarh:

  Dear Prime Minister,

  I am appalled at press reports of your speeches and interviews. (The very fact that you have to say something every day to justify your action implies a guilty conscience.) Having muzzled the press and every kind of public dissent, you continue with your distortions and untruths without fear of criticism or contradiction… .

  About the plan to paralyse the government. There was no such plan and you know it. Let me state the facts. Of all the States of India it was in Bihar alone where there was a people’s movement… and you should know, if your ubiquitous intelligence has served you right, that it was spreading and percolating deep down in the countryside. Until the time of my arrest ‘janata sarkars’ were being formed from the village upwards to the block level. Later on the process was to be taken up, hopefully, to the district and State level.

  If you had cared to look into the programme of the ‘janata sarkars,’ you would have found that for the most part it was constructive, such as regulating the public distribution system, checking corruption at the lower levels of administration, implementing the land reform laws, settling disputes through the age-old custom of conciliation and arbitration, assuring a fair deal to Harijans, curbing such social evils as tilak and dahez etc. There was nothing in all this that by any stretch of the imagination could be called subversive.

  Only where ‘janata sarkars’ were solidly organised such programmes as non-payment of taxes were taken up. At the peak of the movement in urban areas an attempt was made for some days through dharna and picketing, to stop the working of government offices. At Patna whenever the Assembly opened, attempts were made to persuade the Members to resign and to prevent them, peacefully, from going in. All these were calculated programs of civil disobedience and thousands of men and women were arrested all over the State.

  If all this adds up to an attempt to paralyse the Bihar government, well, it was the same kind of attempt as was made during the freedom struggle through noncooperation and satyagraha to paralyse the British government… . What right has anyone to ask an elected government and elected legislature to go?… The answer is that in a democracy the people do have the rights to ask for the resignation of an elected government if it has gone corrupt and has been misruling… .

  … the students of Bihar did not start the movement… . After formulating their demands at a conference they had met the Chief Minister and the Education Minister. They had had several meetings. But unfortunately the inept and corrupt Bihar government did not take the students seriously. Then the latter gheraoed the Assembly. The sad events of
that day precipitated the Bihar Movement. Even then the students did not demand the resignation of the Ministry, nor the dissolution of the Assembly. It was after several weeks during which firing, lathi charges and indiscriminate arrests took place, that the Students’ Action Committee felt compelled to put up that demand. It was at that point that the Rubicon was crossed… . Thus the plan of which you speak… is a figment of your imagination, thought up to justify your totalitarian measures.

  If there was a plan, it was… announced at the Ramlila grounds by Nanaji Deshmukh on June 25 and which was the subject matter of my speech that evening. The programme was for a selected number of persons to offer satyagraha before or near your residence in support of the demand that you should step down until the Supreme Court’s judgement on your appeal. The programme was to continue for seven days in Delhi, after which it was to be taken up in the States. And… it was to last only until the judgement of the Supreme Court… . It goes without saying that the satyagrahi willingly invites and accepts his lawful punishment. This is the new dimension added to democracy by Gandhi. What an irony that it should be obliterated in Gandhi’s own India. It should be noted—and it is a very important point—that even this programme of satyagraha would not have occurred to the Opposition had you remained content with quietly clinging to your office. But you did not do it. Through your henchmen you had rallies and demonstrations organised in front of your residence, and posters appeared in the city suggesting some kind of link between the judge and the CIA. When such despicable happenings were taking place every day, the Opposition had no alternative but to counteract the mischief… by orderly satyagraha.

  And why has the freedom of the press been suppressed? Not because the Indian press was irresponsible, dishonest or antigovernment. In fact, nowhere, under conditions of freedom, is the press more responsible, reasonable and fair than it has been in India. The truth is that your anger against it was aroused because on the question of your resignation, after the High Court’s judgement, some of the papers took a line that was highly unpalatable to you. And when… all the metropolitan papers, including the wavering Times of India, came out with well-reasoned and forceful editorials advising you to quit, freedom of the press became too much for you to stomach… . It staggers one’s imagination to think that so valuable a freedom as freedom of the press, the very life-breath of democracy, can be snuffed out because of the personal pique of a Prime Minister.

  You are reported to have said that democracy is not more important than the nation… . It is a false choice you have formulated. There is no choice between democracy and the nation… . [Our] democratic constitution cannot be changed into a totalitarian one by a mere ordinance or a law of Parliament. That can be done only by the people of India themselves in their new Constituent Assembly, especially elected for that specific purpose. If justice, equality and fraternity have not been rendered to ‘all its citizens’ even after a quarter of a century of signing that Constitution, the fault is not that of the Constitution or of democracy, but of the Congress Party that has been in power in Delhi all these years… .

  You inherited a great tradition, noble values and a working democracy. Do not leave behind a miserable wreck of all that. It will take a long time to put all that together again. For it will be put together again, I have no doubt. A people who fought British imperialism and humbled it cannot indefinitely accept the indignity of totalitarianism… .

  The prisoner received no reply.

  The essence of the Emergency was the pinnacle of power—a position above the multitude, unaccountable and unchallengeable—it sought to guarantee the prime minister. This was accomplished by three amendments to the Constitution and an Act of Parliament. The 38th Amendment put the declaration of Emergency beyond the scrutiny of the courts. The 39th Amendment made election disputes relating to the prime minister, President, vice-president and Speaker non-justiciable. This wiped out the Allahabad High Court judgement with retrospective effect and ensured a Supreme Court judgement in Mrs Gandhi’s favour. On November 7, 1975 a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court, with no legal option but to exonerate her, upheld her 1971 election to Parliament. The proposed 40th Amendment conferred complete immunity on the prime minister, President, vice-president and Speaker, in respect of past or future criminal offences. An Act banned the publication of ‘objectionable matter’, making criticism of the prime minister, President, vice-president, Speaker and council of ministers a penal offence. The inclusion of these other dignitaries resembled light musical accompaniment to the sombre theme of prime ministerial power, finally established through a drastically amended Constitution in 1976.

  The Emergency enabled Mrs Gandhi to move towards an institutionalized control of the press and the Opposition. ‘Personally I am not for censorship at all, but the Home, and Information and Broadcasting Ministries have their own difficulties,’ Mrs Gandhi said in an interview with a Bombay weekly. The policy she had instituted was, nevertheless, censorship, controlled by a chief censor at Delhi and his counterparts at state capitals. Among the newspapers shut down by the government on June 26 were the Jan Sangh’s Motherland and Jayaprakash Narayan’s Everyman’s, with their last issues shredded by the police. The arrest of two prominent editors, among others, acted as a brake on the profession generally. Official reprisal for past criticism, at first directed at large-circulation papers and journals, narrowed its attack, until Opinion, a one-man protest paper that had flourished since Independence in criticism of Nehru’s policies was eliminated in August 1976. A series of steps including a‘code of ethics’ for journalists and editors, government nominees on newspaper boards, and the ‘voluntary merger’ of India’s four news agencies—PTI, UNI, Samachar Bharati and Hindustan Samachar—into a single, government-regulated agency called Samachar, ensured government control of the news and docile channels for its transmission. The Press Council, set up in July 1966 ‘for the purpose of preserving freedom of the press and maintaining and improving the standards of newspapers and news agencies in India’, was dissolved by ordinance on December 8, 1975. The council had recently defended some celebrated cases: the Tribune vs the Haryana government, the burning of Searchlight in Bihar and the dismissal of B.G. Verghese by the Birla proprietors of the Hindustan Times. With the establishment of Samachar, the government could‘lift’ curbs on foreign reporting in 1976, and permit a‘debate’ on pending changes in the Constitution, allowing newspapers to report limited Opposition opinion on the subject. But the censorship mandate continued to operate. It covered the writings of Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru and Tagore relating to freedom, and all news items and events adverse to government—for example, riots against sterilization measures, jailbreaks, satyagraha campaigns and Opposition opinion. Whether a political opposition could survive at all became dependent on the ruling party’s favour, when the amended Constitution in 1976 gave Parliament the right to pass laws overriding the fundamental rights, forbidding ‘antinational activity’ and banning ‘antinational associations’. Mrs Gandhi had moved before this to bring the two Opposition governments, in Tamil Nadu and Gujarat, under central control, ending the last vestige of true federal functioning. Mrs Gandhi’s style and preference in this regard was aptly stated by Congress President D.K. Barooah at a party symposium, ‘The Central Government is the national government of India. All other governments [i.e., in the states] are only municipal governments.’ Neither Tamil Nadu nor Gujarat capitulated. The campaign mounted against each, and the resistance it met lit for a while the last bright embers of political opposition and federal vigour.

  In Tamil Nadu the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) was firmly established as the dominant political force in the state. On July 12, 1975, Chief Minister Karunanidhi had addressed a mass meeting on Marina Beach in Madras, declaring there was neither an internal nor external threat to India and calling upon the vast concourse to take a pledge to defend their freedoms. His public speeches caustically directed at the Emergency were laced with Tamil folk humour and biting sarcasm
. On July 29 the police seized all copies of Murasoli, the DMK’s Tamil daily with a circulation of 30,000, for publishing ‘objectionable matter’. But the party’s hold on the state was confirmed in December, with its conference at Coimbatore:

  The biggest crowds ever seen in this industrial city of half a million thronged the 5-mile route of a long and colourful procession taken out by DMK. (The Times of India, December 5, 1975.)

  The Coimbatore conference clearly did not look like that of a party on its last legs. The size of the gathering assumes importance when one considers that the DMK is a party without ‘glamorous’ leaders, that runs against popular political currents, and that it has had a string of electoral defeats in the past 3 years. (The Statesman, January 1, 1976.)

  Karunanidhi was not the only obstacle to a takeover by Mrs Gandhi in Tamil Nadu. The enormous prestige of Kamaraj, elder statesman of the Old Congress, stood in her way. Kamaraj, normally silent and phlegmatic, had expressed his horror at the declaration of Emergency at a public meeting at Sholingar and in an interview with students at Tiruvellore:

  I am shocked to hear that leaders have been arrested throughout the country. This state of affairs is not good for the nation… . What happens in Delhi we are not able to know. The radio does not give correct news, newspapers are also not giving correct news… . Such an event has no parallel even under British rule. (Sholingar, June 27, 1975.)

  I feel as though I have been left in the jungle blindfolded. I cannot visualise the consequences of the Emergency. Can anyone even imagine that such an Emergency would be proclaimed… . During the 1971 election I had expressed my apprehension that there was danger to democracy. Mr. Karunanidhi and Mrs. Gandhi, who were then in alliance, scoffed at me. What I said in 1971 is happening in 1975. (Tiruvellore, June 28, 1975.)