by Kuldip Nayar
After the Allahabad High Court judgement, Indira Gandhi had thought of stepping down. My guess is that if she had done so and had gone back to the people for a verdict on her electoral offence, offering her apologies, she would have got re-elected. However, two persons dissuaded her from submitting the resignation. One was her principal advisor Sanjay Gandhi, her son, who completely ruled out resignation. The other was Siddhartha Shankar Ray, then West Bengal chief minister, who advised her to impose Emergency. She reportedly told him that India was already under an Emergency following the Bangladesh war. He said what he meant was an internal Emergency which would enable her to suspend fundamental rights and allow her to rule as she wished.
A dropout from Doon School and an apprentice motor mechanic with Rolls Royce in England, Sanjay had no educational qualification but was keen to enter politics. Indira Gandhi’s predicament after she had been unseated by the Allahabad High Court provided him with the opportunity he sought. What fascinated him was money and power, and he could see them within his grasp through his mother. Long before the Emergency she would discuss politics with him rather than her elder son Rajiv Gandhi who later became India’s prime minister. She would even remark at the dining table that Rajiv, who was an airline pilot at that time, had no understanding of politics whatsoever.
Sanjay was Indira Gandhi’s refuge. She was confident that he would help her in her hour of need. He was credited with having given her the election-winning slogan in 1971: ‘They say Indira Hatao [oust Indira] but I say Garibi Hatao [oust poverty].’ Now he had to do more than just coin a slogan. He had to tell her how to extricate herself from the legal tangle in which she was enmeshed. Sanjay knew his mother was not one to throw in towel easily, but at that time she was on the verge of doing just that. She had already informally sounded out Kamlapati Tripathi about his stepping in until her appeal at Supreme Court had been disposed of.
Sanjay knew that he had to convince her that she was needed by the country and had to rise above the obligations under the judgement. His chief aide was thirty-five year old R.K. Dhawan, additional private secretary in the prime minister’s secretariat. Sanjay used him to manipulate the entire government machinery. He had yet another friend in the ruthless Bansi Lal, chief minister of Haryana, who too had no scruples. Helping Sanjay from the wings was Congress president Dev Kant Barooah who ‘proclaimed that India was Indira and Indira was India’ (reminiscent of the oath administered to the Nazi youth by Germany’s Adolf Hitler).
JP received an urgent message from the opposition parties to come to Delhi to lead their rally. He however declined, being in favour of awaiting the judgement of the Supreme Court on Indira Gandhi’s appeal. Little did he suspect that Indira Gandhi had completely different plans.
Within 24 hours after Justice Krishna Iyer’s judgement Indira Gandhi imposed the Emergency on the night of 25 June 1975. She did not consult the cabinet and wrote straight to President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, beholden to her for the office, that she would have liked to take up the matter with the cabinet but unfortunately it had not been possible that night. She also wrote that ‘there is an imminent danger to the security of India being threatened by internal disturbance’.
If a cabinet meeting could be convened at 90 minutes’ notice, as was actually the case on the morning of 26 June, there was no reason why a cabinet meeting could not have been held at any time between her first visit to the president at 5 p.m. on 25 June and the actual signature of the proclamation at about 11.00–11.30 p.m. There is sufficient evidence to prove that Indira Gandhi had planned the imposition of the Emergency at least as early as 22 June. She had also shared the idea with some of her political confidants on the morning of 25 June.
When I went to meet Y.B. Chavan and Jagjivan Ram at their homes on 26 June, I found intelligence officials noting down the car registration numbers and names of people coming to visit them. Chavan was afraid to meet me and Jagjivan Ram, who met me for a minute, looked nervous. All that Jagjivan Ram told me was that he was expecting to be arrested. When he uttered these words he took off the receiver from the telephone in the room, aware that his phone was being tapped. Earlier he had told me that he expected the Supreme Court to give her only a qualified stay because the court had never granted a clear stay in such cases. He thought the Supreme Court judgement would be the time to rise in revolt. ‘We can afford to wait till then,’ he said. I thought him too cowardly to lead such a revolt.
Indira Gandhi did not explain why action was being taken only after the Allahabad judgement; why the enforcement of the ordinary law could not deal with indiscipline in factories and campuses, and why normal laws could not cope with whatever else was not well with the nation.
That would have been hard to explain, so perhaps she felt there was no purpose in attempting it. She realized her credibility was low; she said at a meeting to condole the death of Lalit Narayan Mishra, ‘Even if I were to be killed they would say that I myself had got it done.’ Mishra was a dear friend. He rang me up at midnight before going to Samastipur, that he had handed his resignation to her personally. He sadly remarked that he would be killed at Samastipur and put down the phone. It proved to be true. He was murdered at Samastipur the following day. The murder mystery has not been resolved to this day.
Indira Gandhi’s one person rule was making her more and more intolerant. She loved the story of Jeanne d’Arc. As a child, Indira would wrap her arm around a pillar, raise the other hand high and proclaim that she would lead her people to freedom some day, just as her role model, her father, had done. Instead, she led the country to disaster. There was no one either in her party or the cabinet to tell her that she was taking a wrong course.
Barooah flirted with right-wing communists because that gave him a veneer of ideology which went down well in an underdeveloped country. That did not please Sanjay Gandhi who called him a commie but the common threat they faced from the Opposition brought Barooah and Sanjay together, at least for the time being.
The first step they took was to get a crowd together to testify to Indira Gandhi’s popularity. This was an exercise they had undertaken many times before. Trucks were requisitioned and sent to villages to bring people who were paid and provided with free food for the day. Congress leaders in Punjab, Haryana, UP, and Rajasthan were rung up by R.K. Dhawan to organize rallies.
So crude was the exhibition of support for Indira Gandhi that some Congress MPs took exception to the populist demonstrations. Her reply was simply: ‘They are spontaneous.’ She even attacked the media for not giving adequate coverage to the support she enjoyed. She would tell audiences that editors would change headlines in tomorrow’s paper to run down the massive demonstrations in her support.
There was not a single report of apprehension of any serious breakdown of the law and order situation or deterioration in economic conditions from any public functionary. The official records of that time, be it secret, confidential, or public, and newspaper reports, are unanimous that there was no untoward event or even a hint of that to justify the imposition of Emergency. Why indeed was there such an acute and immediate need for it arose only after the Allahabad High Court judgement.
People at large were quite unaware of what the Emergency signified; they were dazed and confused. It gradually dawned upon them that the democratic system in which they had put their faith for over 25 years had been derailed. Fundamental rights were suspended and judicial powers curtailed. A customer reportedly walked into a book store in Delhi in those days and asked for a copy of the constitution, ‘Sorry, we do not stock periodicals,’ replied the shopkeeper.
Nearly a lakh of people were detained. JP and other opposition leaders were also put behind bars. A series of totally illegal and unwarranted actions followed involving untold human misery and suffering. In the absence of any explanation, Indira Gandhi took a political decision of dire significance in a desperate endeavour to save herself from consequences of a judicial verdict against her.
Swaran Singh did
raise the point at the cabinet that as an Emergency had already been imposed was there need for another? Two ministers, K.C. Pant and Karan Singh, after the cabinet meeting, discussed between themselves the bad name the Emergency would give to the country but they were so cowed down by fear that they obeyed Sanjay Gandhi, now the master of their universe.
The press was gagged, effective dissent was smothered, and democratic values suppressed. High handed and arbitrary actions were undertaken with impunity. Tyrants sprouted at all levels; tyrants whose claim to authority was largely based on their proximity to the seat of power. No one from her own family supported Indira Gandhi in the imposition of the Emergency; Rajiv Gandhi and his wife, Sonia, were unhappy and reportedly did not participate in the political discussions at the dining table, largely confining themselves to their room.
Vijayalakshmi Pandit was openly critical of the Emergency. It is said that there was a very unpleasant meeting when she called on Indira Gandhi to voice her concern over the Emergency. Vijayalakshmi did not, however, campaign when the Janata Dal repeatedly requested her to address meetings during the polls.
Nayantara Sehgal, her daughter, was one of the most outspoken critics of the Emergency, but in any event she and Indira Gandhi never got along well. Nayantara became particularly bitter when she found that she was not a welcome guest at Indira Gandhi’s house. One remark she made in my presence was that when ‘Mamu (Jawaharlal Nehru) was alive even our dog was welcome at that house but now none of us, not even my mother, is welcome.’
Only a handful of civil servants stood their ground, others were too scared to lose their jobs. Some found in it an opportunity to occupy high positions on the understanding that they would carry out illegal orders. Sanjay Gandhi converted the civil servants into a servile breed; the willing tools of tyranny. They have not to this day recovered from the loss of esteem in the eyes of the public if not their own. They wield authority, not respect. Their political masters know that bureaucrats are beholden to them because they are partners in the loot in which both of them indulge without a twinge of conscience.
There was no doubting the mood of triumph in the prime minister’s house. The entire operation on the night of 26 June was painless. George Fernandes, the labour leader; Nanaji Deshmukh and Subramaniam Swami, both Jana Sangh members; and a few others went ‘underground’ but all the important leaders were arrested.
‘I told you nothing would happen,’ Sanjay chided his mother. Bansi Lal said he had expected that no one would dare to rise against them. Word was sent to Allahabad to ‘fix’ Justice Sinha. All the papers relating to his career were screened, his family members harassed, and he was shadowed by the police all the time.
Inder Kumar Gujral, once a member of her kitchen cabinet, took umbrage when Sanjay Gandhi ordered him over the phone to do something about the press. Inder reportedly said that he was a colleague of his mother and not a person at his (Sanjay’s) beck and call. Vidya Charan Shukla took over from Gujral who was transferred to the Planning Commission on 28 June. P.N. Haksar, once her principal secretary, was already hibernating there after his removal from the PMO.
Shukla was as enthusiastic as Sanjay Gandhi to get the censorship machinery going at the very earliest. Till then the publication of the local newspapers was stopped by cutting off power supply to their offices and presses. The censorship rules were hurriedly copied from the home ministry manual which had been prepared after the 1962 India–China war. I, as information officer had participated in the meetings where the manual was finalized. Little did I anticipate then that the same manual would be used for purposes of censorship.
Indira Gandhi was initially nervous, and felt it was too early to say that all had gone well. Most chief ministers, however, reported that ‘the situation is under control’. On the streets of Delhi, the pall of fear hung heavy. Life was otherwise outwardly normal. The Statesman published a photograph by the gifted photographer Raghu Rai that told all: it showed a man peddling a cycle with two children on it, a woman walking behind, and scores of policemen standing all around. The caption said that life was normal in Chandni Chowk (a censor official without realizing the message the photo conveyed ‘passed’ it and was transferred the very next day).
The cyclostyled forms of MISA (Maintenance of Internal Security Act) orders came in handy to many district magistrates who put their signatures to blank warrants and left the rest to the police. Arrests were made in accordance with lists prepared earlier on the basis of intelligence records. No wonder then that the police raided a house in Agra to arrest a person who had died in 1968.
In Haryana it became normal practice for the government to arrest anyone under MISA and Defence of India Rules (DIR), two measures to detain people without trial. No grounds were required to detain anyone, high or low, friend or foe. During their detention, political prisoners were treated as common criminals.
In other parts of the country, newspapers more or less obeyed the orders of authorities. In Kerala which was under the rule of the CPM, there was no strict observation of censorship rules. Sanjay Gandhi wanted to impose central rule in the state but Indira Gandhi stopped him from doing so.
The Maharashtra High Court Bar Association was the first in the country to condemn Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian rule. Ram Jethmalani, president of the All India Bar Association, compared her to Mussolini and Hitler, although he had argued that as the Supreme Court had given her a stay it should be respected. The bar associations in many other states followed suit, but for reasons unknown, the West Bengal Bar Association remained silent.
Gujarat escaped the rigours of the Emergency because of the United Front government in the state. Chief Minister Babubhai Patel wanted to speak over the radio but was not given permission by the Centre. That was his first brush with the Emergency. The Centre sent out instructions to states to round up Jana Sangh and other political leaders. Babubhai did not oblige, and when he finally arrested them, he did so under DIR which enabled an arrested person to be released on bail, a recourse which was denied to a MISA detenu. Defiant, Babubhai said in an interview that he would ensure that civil liberty activists were encouraged to wear black badges, fly black flags from their homes, and hang on their doors the preamble to the Indian constitution which stressed human rights. Public demonstrations included silent marches, student processions, hunger strikes, and sit-ins at public places.
The state gradually became a refuge for hundreds of Indira Gandhi’s critics from all over India. Navnirman student leaders would have probably suffered had there been no Babubhai government to shield them, and it was they who had brought down the Chimanbhai Patel ministry in 1974.
Tamil Nadu defied censorship. Still, the DMK government, headed by M. Karunanidhi, did not follow a policy of open defiance and declared that it would carry out Delhi’s directives ‘acceptable to us’. Unofficially, the DMK was against the Emergency. When I met Karunanidhi to seek his support for anti-Emergency activity he was afraid to do anything in public. He said he could at best help me start an underground newspaper which, he made very clear, should be distributed outside the state.
In West Bengal, from Chief Minister Sidhartha Shankar Ray down to the foot constable, everyone found the Emergency powers useful to settle old scores, personal and political. Two journalists, Gourkishore Ghosh and Barun Sengupta of Anand Bazar Patrika, who were critical of the chief minister, were arrested. Ghosh had criticized the latter on political grounds in a booklet, Kalikata, but Sengupta’s attack was personal. It was easy to arrest Ghosh but Sengupta fled West Bengal and stayed in Delhi for quite a while, enjoying the protection of Sanjay, an indication of the strained relations between Sanjay Gandhi and the West Bengal chief minister. Eventually the police arrested him, and he was badly treated in jail, largely because of the chief minister’s annoyance.
I had been warned by London’s New Statesman correspondent, who had met me two days earlier before the imposition of Emergency that his information was that the constitution would be susp
ended, the top leadership detained, and the press gagged. I had politely admonished him that India was a democracy and such things did not happen here. The same correspondent wanted to know what lay in the future after the imposition of the Emergency. I told him I did not know because the nation had never faced such a situation before. He sympathized with me. I remarked that the third world countries had enjoyed democracy as long as their rulers had allowed it. India was different, I told myself. It had gone through a long struggle to win freedom for its people and would in the long run retain it.
After the Emergency, when the Justice J.C. Shah Commission examined the excesses, it said:
Absence of the freedom of the press and the severity of the censorship rules coupled with ad hoc authoritarian oral orders, rendered the channels of communication over the subcontinent choked and polluted.
The commission warned:
The nation owes it to the present and the succeeding generations to ensure that the administrative set up is not subverted in future in the manner it was done to serve the personal ends of any one individual or a group of individuals in or near the government.
It was shocking to observe the ease with which Indira Gandhi and Sanjay were able to assume control over the entire administrative machinery throughout the country and the willingness with which officials and other government employees accepted this. District magistrates and police commissioners obediently carried out instructions coming from Indira Gandhi and her son. ‘Where was the steel frame?’ I wondered. Was it a house of cards that collapsed when an autocrat took over? What would have happened to government servants had they not obeyed illegal and whimsical orders? At worst, they could have been transferred. It showed the extent to which Indira Gandhi would go to hold on to power. She was always an empress but had now become grossly imperious.