Indira Gandhi

  On May 24, 1976 Mrs Alice Fernandes, mother of George Fernandes, Socialist Party chairman and trade union leader, then underground, wrote to the President of India with copies to the prime minister and other members of the Central and state (Kerala) governments:

  Sir:

  It is with a heavy sorrow-stricken heart that I am writing this, further to my letter dated May 12, 1976 (copy enclosed for ready reference), with the hope of obtaining justice at your hands… .

  On Saturday, May 1 at about 9 p.m., my 44-year-old second son, Lawrence Fernandes, was taken away from our residence by the police, on the pretext that they wanted to interrogate him about the Habeas Corpus petition filed in February… by my third son, Michael Fernandes (an officer of the Indian Telephone Industries and a trade union leader) who has been detained without trial under MISA in prison since 22 December 1975. After keeping up this pretext for about an hour, the police began questioning him about the whereabouts of my eldest son, George Fernandes, and then subjected him in a most inhuman, reckless and ruthless manner to third degree methods of physical torture, going on with this torture into the small hours of the morning until 3 a.m. Besides beating him with clubs (until five of them were broken to pieces) they used a banyan tree root to clout him with and booted him and slapped him. They also used vulgar language in abusing him and our family, and threatened him that if he did not reveal the whereabouts of George Fernandes he would be thrown on the railway tracks and killed under a moving train, leaving no evidence of their hands in his death. They were actually preparing to do so about 3 a.m. when his physical condition had deteriorated to an almost irreparable state. After thus reducing him to a condition of physical, mental and nervous wreck, he was kept in solitary confinement until May 20, during which period he was subjected to further torture and interrogation. He was kept without food for 3 days and was not given proper food on other days, nor allowed cigarettes. During all these 20 days he was allowed bath only on 3 days and made to remain in the same clothes in which he was when he was taken away on treatment. He was taken to different doctors and hospitals, each time under a different and false name, impersonating him as a police officer, for treatment to keep him alive. On one night a doctor was brought to the police station itself for treating him.

  On May 9 my son was taken by police car 300 kilometres away to Davangere, and on May 10 produced before the magistrate there, as though arrested in Davangere on the previous day. He was tortured and kept in a closed lockup there until May 11, and then brought back to Bangalore… . He was refused lawyer’s help and not allowed to contact home or anybody else either by letter or by phone. He was not allowed newspapers and kept in solitary confinement. He was threatened with dire consequences if he reported to the magistrate or anybody else about his torture. Finally on May 20 he was produced in the Second Metropolitan Magistrate’s chambers during lunch time and then removed to the Bangalore Central Prison where he has been detained in a cell meant for condemned criminals, or for convicts who are mentally unsound, or under punishment for violation of jail rules.

  In addition to oral complaints, I had lodged written complaints, sent telegrams and letters to all concerned from the highest to the lowest level of authority, but without any result and without even acknowledgement, and the whereabouts of my son, Lawrence, had not been informed to us. On May 20, upon being informed by a lawyer, I went to the prison, and although I waited along with the lawyer from 6:45 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., I was not allowed to meet my son. On the 21st after waiting for over 3 hours, from 10:45, I was taken at about 2 p.m. to the cell to see him. I found him looking dead. He was unable to move without two persons helping him about, and then too with great pain and limping. His left side is without use, as if crippled, and both his left leg and hand are still swollen. He is in a mentally and physically wrecked condition, and is unable to talk freely without faltering. He is terribly nervous and mortally afraid of the police, of anyone in khaki uniform, of the approaching sound of anyone walking with shoes on, or of any other person, all of whom he fears to be interrogators and tormentors… . As if to deal a further blow, yet another page was added to this sordid, inhuman act by serving on him in the prison in the afternoon of May 22 an order of detention dated May 21, signed by the Commissioner of Police, detaining him under MISA.

  Whatever I have stated here is on the basis of what the family could gather from Lawrence during the visits to him in the cell… . I urge upon you in the name of all that is good in civilised conduct of human beings and their governments, and in the name of justice, to order a thorough judicial enquiry into this barbaric torture, and take suitable action against the concerned authorities. I also urge that he should be transferred to a good hospital, and specialist medical and psychiatric treatment be given to him, and daily visits to him by the family allowed so that he may regain his mental and physical health and become a human being… .5

  In August 1976 an Indian Express editorial referred to the deaths of twenty-two prisoners while being interrogated in lock-up. The fact was quoted from a government-instituted inquiry in Uttar Pradesh.

  Mrs Gandhi’s most celebrated prisoner was served with more subtle punishment. Jayaprakash Narayan came close to death in the care of government doctors and the country’s two premier, government-owned, medical institutions, the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences at Delhi and the Post-Graduate Institute at Chandigarh. Released in mid-November 1975 and brought a week later to Bombay’s private Jaslok Hospital, his doctors expressed surprise at his kidney collapse not being diagnosed and treated much earlier. This dramatic deterioration contrasted sharply with his condition immediately prior to his arrest. JP had been on strenuous tours, addressed mammoth meetings in the intense heat and dust of May and June, without any adverse effects except fatigue. On his release, when facts concerning his illness became known, his condition gave rise to the chilly joke: ‘The British just put you in jail. But if they put you in jail now, you’ll find yourself tied to a kidney machine for the rest of your life.’ JP was released following a letter from his brother, Rajeshwar Prasad, to the prime minister, which described in detail the systematic deterioration, month by month, in the prisoner’s condition, at times bedridden and unable to move without help.

  Rajeshwar Prasad’s letter, drafted at his request with my help in the second week of November 1975, reads:

  Madam,

  You are aware that I am the brother of Shri Jayaprakash Narayan.

  I have been meeting him every month since July ’75 in Chandigarh.

  In July and August I found him in dubious but not serious ill health. He had been suffering from low blood pressure, low blood sugar, and had feelings of nausea.

  In September I found that he had lost all appetite, was not able to eat or relish any food. He had become very weak.

  In October, when I met him on the 5th, he told me that he had a severe pain in the stomach. A few days before I met him the acuteness of the pain had subsided, but the pain was persisting, and investigations and examinations were going on by the doctors to find out the cause. At that time he was in the hospital. His condition had deteriorated. He was very weak and his loss of appetite persisted.

  Subsequently in the later weeks of October our other relatives met him. They found that he had been transferred to the hospital ward for better medical care and attendance. They found him completely bed-ridden and on a liquid diet.

  I met him again on the 7th of November. I found that he was now able to move about in the room, but he had to be supported during his movements, such is his weakness. He was still on a liquid diet. And what is most alarming is that even after such a long period, and in spite of several so-called thorough examinations and investigation, the disease has not been identified. He is not even told what medicines are being administered to him.

  His general condition has fast deteriorated during these three months. Swelling in the legs is still there. Two toes are bent. There is some trouble in the eyes, apart from the fact that there
are swellings below both the eyes as big as hanging pouches.

  I have very serious apprehensions that if his condition continues like this he might not survive for more than two months. This is causing us the greatest anguish. I have not discussed my anxiety with JP, nor mentioned that I would be writing to you, but I feel I must apprise you of his condition so that you can make your own assessment. Apart from the great personal tragedy that his loss would mean to our family, it is for you to decide whether it would be in the interests of the Government if JP dies in jail.

  Yours truly,

  Rajeshwar Prasad

  Morarji Desai, aged eighty, a prisoner in one of Haryana government’s circuit houses, took the precaution of refusing to eat any cooked food, except what was on occasion provided by his family.

  Arbitrary arrest, with the denial of appeal or trial, created the fear necessary to obedience, while censorship kept people ignorant of events and opinions adverse to government. Both were indispensable to a state of affairs where drama substituted for the real and arduous process of governing. Ministers carried out ‘surprise’ visits to their departments to check on punctuality and much was made about getting to office on time. Orders to retire at fifty were served on ‘officers with a bad reputation for integrity’. Government made examples, via arrest, intimidation and ‘tax raids’, of ‘economic offendors’. Overnight clearances of selected localities and sterilization drives based on quotas that were indifferent to age and whether or not a man was married and had any children at all went into operation.

  It soon became clear that achievement not based on sound programmes was illusory and could not be sustained. In a free market, economy prices would fluctuate. The low price of vegetable oil in the summer of 1975 had been the result of bumper crops of mustard seed and groundnut already in the market, while low grain prices were made possible by a good monsoon. No artificial low price level could be maintained, and prices gradually took their course, with new high levels registered in a range of goods from kerosene and cooking gas to vegetables, fruit and bus tickets.

  Violent uprisings, with hundreds killed and imprisoned, erupted in fury against evictions and sterilization at Turkman Gate, Delhi, in April 1975, and the following year in Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra. Continuing arrests and repeated official references to the forces of disruption, made it clear that a large and politically conscious country could not easily be reduced to submissive conformity. Government’s anti-corruption measures acquired a spuriousness as the drive against economic offenders became linked with its own political opponents, and action to clean up the administration left the power structure around Mrs Gandhi intact, including those whose reputations had attracted the greatest public anger and criticism. Bansi Lal was appointed Union defence minister, while L.N. Mishra was enshrined for posterity on a postage stamp. At a ceremony on his fifty-fourth birth anniversary, the prime minister called him ‘a shining example of bravery and courage and readiness to make the supreme sacrifice for the cause of his country’. D.K. Barooah announced a statue of the late minister would be put up in the capital. Drama accompanied a scheme for the voluntary disclosure of wealth, promising tax evaders immunity from punishment or probe, and yielding government Rs 250 crore in tax revenue. The fact remained that the tax department, armed with drastic powers under the Emergency, could have attained its object more respectably, without showing leniency to the corrupt.

  The language in use contributed to the atmosphere of bad theatre. Emergency perorations abounded in repetition and cliché. Political heterogeneity had accustomed Indians to every kind of political speech. From the flights of early Bengali oratory to the thoughtful evocations of Nehru, a tradition had been shaped. The speeches of trade unionist, district politician, student and worker, radical and conservative, had reflected a whole political development. Public speeches and political expression, now limited to the Congress–CPI combine, filled the air with verbal gun smoke. The once dignified addresses of Governors repeated it: ‘The tide of fascists and reactionaries has been repulsed but we must not be complacent.’ (Governor of Punjab, August 14, 1975.)

  A joint statement issued by the Congress and CPI units in Bihar on August 2 warned people against complacency over ‘the inactivity of reactionary conspirators… . They want to utilise the present economic distress of the people to instigate them in support of their diabolical venture… the counter revolutionaries fondly hope that the 21-point programme will fail so that they can engineer their sinister conspiracy once again.’

  D.K. Barooah referred to L.N. Mishra as ‘a symbol of our struggle against the dark and sinister forces of fascism’. This trend displayed its full psychosis at several ‘anti-fascist’ conferences organized by the Congress and CPI. The first, held on September 11, 1975 at Town Hall, Amritsar, made much of human skulls and weapons found by the police and said fascist forces had gone underground to create chaos and destroy democracy. At the last, in Patna in December, advertised as a ‘world anti-fascist conference’ D.K. Barooah spoke somewhat obscurely of ‘the dark forces of neo-imperialism and eastern racial arrogance which were combining in a sinister attempt to snuff out the light of democracy in this part of the world’. Vested interests in India and abroad, he said, felt deeply hurt and frustrated by Congress policies and had combined for a most vicious and violent onslaught on the party. Not much research was required, the Congress president declared, to spot the international forces behind this conspiracy. On February 10, 1976 in Trivandrum, a session of the CPI’s national council stressed vigilance against ‘the sinister conspiracy of imperialism and its monstrous agencies’.

  Mrs Gandhi’s own statements sounded strangely fantasy-laden:

  I am such a meek and mild person. (To Paul Saltzman of Macleans Magazine, Canada.)

  I am a very humble person. (To Mauritius Broadcasting Corporation, October 4, 1975.)

  Hundreds of thousands of poor and humble people of India will rise in revolt if any harm were done to her. (To a news conference at Bhubaneswar, September 27, 1975.)

  Had this [Emergency] been a question about me as an individual I would have been least concerned, but it involved the Prime Minister of India. (Radio broadcast, November 10, 1975.)

  The verdict of the Allahabad High Court did not cause any disturbance to me, nor was I tempted to take any decision or steps because of it. (December 27, 1975.)

  Until the age of 13 or 14 I hated people, some but not many, one or two, e.g., the police. But after 14 or 16 I cannot remember having hated anyone… . I am not at all concerned with things like achievement, success, failure. (The Hindustan Times interview, February 7, 1976.)

  I am not the Prime Minister because I like power. I want to serve the people, and their service is the only thing I have before me as my life’s mission. (Public meeting, Durgapur, March 3, 1976.)

  In January 1976 the Congress party celebrated Mrs Gandhi’s ‘dynamic decade’ of power. The directorate of advertising and visual publicity released a book, A Decade of Achievement 1966–75, and the President opened a‘Decade of Achievement’ exhibition.Vidya Charan Shukla,information and broadcasting minister, declared that more had been done during Mrs Gandhi’s decade than during the last thousand years.

  As against the fulsome self-congratulation of Emergency language and its sharp attack on invisible antagonists, actual tragedy was met with subdued vocabulary and casual approach. Patna was flooded in the third week of August 1975. On November 23, Suman Dubey reported in the Indian Express:

  … it is hard to come by evidence of governmentsponsored rehabilitation in this city… . Where rehabilitation is under way… it is mainly through the efforts of private voluntary agencies… . The condition of roadside dwellers, such as along Serpentine Road opposite the Circuit House, is the worst of all. With the cold of the winter settling in, all these people have for shelter are four bamboo poles supporting a thatch or piece of tin or pieces of cloth… .

  A mine disaster of shocking magnitude at Chasnala on December
27, 1975 killed 372 workers. A warning by the Central Mining Research Station nine months earlier, that the mine was unsafe, was ignored. Rescue was delayed and the operation confused. A request for high performance American pumps was cancelled. On January 11 the UNI reported that five Indian pumps had developed ‘working difficulties’ that day, five high capacity Polish pumps were yet to arrive, and only two Indian and two Soviet pumps were working. On January 19 when the first rescue attempt could be made, there was no sign of life in the mine. The minister for steel and mines, admitting 372 deaths, told the Lok Sabha that conditions in India were better than in some countries, and everything possible would be done to improve mine safety.

  In terms of development, the Emergency accelerated the priorities of Mrs Gandhi’s decade, during which the total assets of the twenty largest industrial houses increased by 150 per cent, while industrial production, savings, capital formation and investment in the public sector generally declined. Liberal terms and support measures were provided to domestic and foreign big business and export promotion; foreign exchange reserves rose with incentives to non-resident Indians to maintain foreign exchange accounts in India; and, despite the government’s proclaimed policy of self-reliance, it sought and accepted unusually heavy aid from abroad. In contrast, there was no corresponding push on land reform. By mid-March 1976, 1,36,000 acres had been distributed to the landless—only 3 per cent of the approximately 40 lakh surplus acres estimated under the July 1972 guidelines, and whose distribution was to be completed within a year of the Emergency. In eight states 62,300 bonded labourers were identified, and 55,583 released, though the actual number of bonded labourers in these states was believed to be about ten times larger than identified. Those identified as bonded labourers were released from this situation. Workers fared badly with 7,00,000 laid off during the first year of the Emergency, while a freeze was imposed on the labour movement. Trade union activity became hazardous; pressure was brought to increase workloads; and militant workers were jailed or victimized. Both Congress and communist trade union leaders were compelled to voice their opposition. Evidence that the Emergency had ill served the working class was the seething discontent that erupted and had to be met as soon as freedom was restored, greatly hampering the new government, which was committed to human rights. The Emergency does not appear to have brought any improvement of substance for the mass of the people, while it did deprive them of their right to organize or protest. Even the runaway inflationary trend, arrested to an extent, was probably more a response to normal economic factors rather than an achievement of the administration. The more prosperous enjoyed the benefits of cheap labour and a frozen labour situation. There was little indication of a move towards a more egalitarian order.