by Kuldip Nayar
It was disappointing, to say the least, the way the media and more specifically the journalists reacted to the new situation. Nearly all of them caved in, stricken by an epidemic of fear. However, there were a few exceptions. Two English language journals which had been critical of India’s Emergency regulations were forced to stop publication. One was the weekly Opinion, punished by the Maharashtra state government because it had ‘violated’ the censorship rules. The other periodical, the monthly Seminar, decided to voluntarily cease publication after they rejected a government order to submit their copy to the censor authorities. The courageous couple, Romesh Thapar and his bold wife Raj, wrote in the final issue that Seminar ‘cannot surrender the integrity and right of free expression in this way’. No newspaper published the news of the closures of Seminar and Opinion.
I knew Romesh Thapar when he was a member of Indira Gandhi’s ‘Kitchen cabinet’ but I had kept a distance from him then for that very reason. Raj contacted my wife when I was in jail. We became close friends, and that included their chirpy daughter Mala. What impressed me about Raj and Romesh was not their ideological background but their commitment to freedom which they doggedly defended.
L.K. Advani was quite right in chiding journalists after the Emergency: ‘You were asked to bend but you chose to crawl.’ My feeling is that virtually the entire tribe of journalists had been spoilt by the attention they received from the establishment and the corporate sector. It was well known that at selected press conferences they were doled out suit-lengths and promoters’ shares. Any sense of independence had been corroded. Some of them in fact had no real commitment to the profession. The truth was that the press was already too nice, too refined, and only too willing to ‘accommodate’. The ground was therefore fertile for the imposition of censorship. By contrast, the journalists in Pakistan showed courage in the face of imposition of martial law. They did not mince words in criticizing the military regime, some 120 went to jail, and 13 received lashes from the police.
What really worried me was not indiscriminate detentions or the atrocities committed during the Emergency but the destruction of institutions and the ejection of all morality from politics. For most, the dividing line between right and wrong, moral and immoral, ceased to exist.
Indira Gandhi and I used to be good friends. As the chairperson of the Citizens’ Committee, which Nehru had constituted during China’s attack to mobilize public opinion, she had got to know me well because I was the committee’s channel to the press. As the home ministry’s information officer, that was my job. We would often discuss the country’s political situation. At one time, I expressed my wish to join politics. She conveyed this to my friend Inder Gujral, who said that he was surprised to learn that I had ‘political ambitions’.
My quarrel with Mrs Gandhi began when I criticized her for using the government machinery to fight against the old guard in the Congress party. She did not believe in the correctness of methods but only in results.
When the Emergency was imposed I wrote a letter to Indira Gandhi to criticize her dictatorial rule and press censorship. I wrote:
Madam, it is always difficult for a newspaperman to decide when he should reveal what. In the process of doing so he knows he runs the risk of annoying someone somewhere. In the case of the government, the tendency to hide the truth and feel horrified once it is revealed is greater than in any individual. Somehow those who occupy high positions in the administration labour under the belief that they – and they alone – know what the nation should be told, how and when, and they are annoyed if any news which they do not wish to be revealed appears in print. In a free society – and you have repeatedly said after the Emergency that you have faith in such a concept – the press has a duty to inform the public. This is sometimes an unpleasant task, but it has to be performed because a free society is founded on free information. If the press were to publish only government handouts or official statements to which it is reduced today, who will pinpoint lapses, deficiencies, or errors?
The reply on her behalf came from Sharda Prasad, her information adviser. He said:
If censorship was introduced in the last few weeks it was not because of any personal or governmental hyper-sensitivitiness but because certain newspapers had become part and parcel of [the] opposition front. When these parties had to be prevented from carrying out their plans to disrupt national life, their principal organs of propaganda had also naturally to be restrained from stirring up trouble. Restrictions on the press have indeed contributed to the situation being under control in the last few days. Freedom of the press is part of the personal freedom which in any country is temporarily abridged in times of national emergency.
What hurt me most was a comment Indira Gandhi made in the presence of a few editors who had gone to ‘congratulate’ her for imposing the Emergency. She asked them what had happened to the big names in journalism because not a dog had ‘barked’. I went round to some offices of newspapers and news-agencies to request journalists to assemble at the Press Club of India the following morning at 10 a.m. (28 June 1975). To my surprise, 103 journalists, including some editors, came. I had drafted the resolution at home and it was passed: ‘We the journalists assembled here deplore the imposition of censorship and urge upon the government to remove it immediately. We also demand the release of journalists already detained.’ I sent the resolution to the president, the prime minister, and minister for information and broadcasting under my signature.
For the first time I give the list of the 27 journalists who signed the resolution which I had left at the club table after the meeting. I thought it politic to remove the list from the Press Club and kept it with me. The names, in the order of signature, are: N. Mukherjee, R. Bajpai, B.H. Sinha, Raju Nagarajan, A. Mani, Sumi Sridharan, Ashim Chowdhury, V. Raghvan, Anand Vardhan, Virender Kapoor, S.C. Raje, Subhas Kirpekar, A. Rahman, Arvind Ghose, Balbir Punj, V.P. Bhatia, Vijay Kranti, Vedpratap Vedic, Om Prakash, Prabhash Joshi, U.A. Sumya Prakash, Gopal Sharma, Chand Joshi, Irfan Khan, Jayant Mehta, S. Bhagnagar, and R.D. Gupta.
As the news spread, V.C. Shukla rang up, asking me to meet him. The first question he asked was: ‘Where is the love letter?’ I replied laughingly, ‘It is in a safe deposit’. Shukla’s tone changed and he threatened: ‘You can be arrested.’ ‘Many people are telling me to detain you,’ he repeated. When I said that I must be on the list of Yunus Khan, Indira Gandhi’s ambassador-at-large, Shukla remained silent, but his authoritative, bullying tone surprised me. He said that I had been hobnobbing with foreign journalists and he in particular mentioned the name of Peter Hazelhurst, the principal representative of the Times, London. As a correspondent of the Times, I knew him well. He was one of India’s best friends and had stood by it during the Bangladesh operation in 1971. Soon after his arrival in New Delhi on 26 June he had come to my house and discussed the state of affairs of the free Indian press. Shukla said that it would be unwise for me to be seen in Peter’s company. I told him that it was not possible for me to comply with his wishes.
Raising his voice, Shukla said, ‘We are going to fix up these foreign journalists; they have been pampered too much.’ I could guess that the adverse reaction to the Emergency in the US, the UK, and Europe had rattled the government. The foreign press had rightly sensed that India was slipping into dictatorship and that Indira Gandhi was casting personal liberties into the dustbin of ordinances and constitutional amendments. Before long Peter Hazelhurst was expelled from India.
My weekly article in the Indian Express appeared on the day (3 July 1975) I met Shukla. Entitled ‘Not Enough Mr Bhutto’, it was about Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Pakistan, comparing his presidency with that of Field Marshal Ayub Khan. My point was: ‘The worst part is the suffocation of the people. The press is gagged and statements by the Opposition are suppressed. Even minor criticism is not tolerated.’ Shukla said that those in government were not fools. Anyone could deduce that I was referring to Indira Gandhi and the Emergency. That of course h
ad been my intention and I could have thought of no better way of hoodwinking the censors.
I wrote two more articles in the subsequent weeks. On 10 July, I reviewed American history to mark the US bicentennial celebrations and wrote:
Those who preached democracy were seen to have bloodstained hands. The exit of President Nixon, even though he had won the largest majority that any American President ever had, was because of a gullible press and public opinion.
On 17 July, in a piece entitled ‘The Tasks before Students’, I again employed the allegorical technique by quoting Voltaire:
Not long ago a distinguished company was discussing the trite and frivolous question, who was the greatest man—Caesar, Alexander, Tamerlane or Cromwell. Someone answered that without doubt it was Isaac Newton, and rightly so, for it is he who masters our minds with the force of truth, to whom we owe reverence and not to those who enslave them by violence … students should become doctors, engineers, or professors but never journalists.
I had to stop writing the column because the Indian Express was informed by censor officials that ‘no article written by Shri Kuldip Nayar either in his name or written by him under any pseudonym should be published in your newspaper without being submitted for the scrutiny by the censor’.
Indira Gandhi claimed that she was working within the ambit of the constitution and defended her action in the name of saving democracy. She had to emphasize this because she loathed the word authoritarian used in conjunction with her name. However dictatorial the governance, the democratic façade had to be maintained. As George Orwell said, ‘It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic, we are praising it: consequently the dictator of every kind of regime claims that it is a democracy.’
Surprisingly, Margaret Thatcher, at a press conference in Delhi defended Indira Gandhi. When I reminded her about her defence of Indira Gandhi in London when I was high commissioner, Margaret Thatcher said: ‘I found her isolated.’ This defence sounded odd. Traits of her authoritarian personality resembled Indira Gandhi’s way of functioning.
Socialist International decided to send a delegation on 15 July, including former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, and Irish Posts and Telegraphs Minister Connor Cruise O’Brien to visit JP in his place of detention. New Delhi, however, refused permission on the ground that it would be ‘gross interference in India’s internal affairs’. In response, Socialist International said ‘all socialists must now feel a great sense of personal tragedy at what is happening to India’.
Official opinion in the West was that India had lost its democracy for all times to come and, however painful, they might as well accept this rather than annoy Indira Gandhi. US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger discussed the matter in the State Department and came to the conclusion that it would be easier to deal with New Delhi now. Indira Gandhi’s policy would be ‘pragmatic’; one of his aides said at the meeting: ‘You mean, purchasable.’
Press censorship began to be used for party and personal ends. The censor would disallow news items or even statements by Congress or Youth Congress leaders simply because they did not fit in with the ‘demands’ of the Emergency. V.C. Shukla was forever in touch with R.K. Dhawan, and through him Sanjay Gandhi. Whichever state Shukla visited, he told the censor and media not to report on the dissensions within the Congress. The chief ministers used censorship to black out criticism against them and their group. Punjab Congress president Mohinder Singh Gill found it difficult to get his statements published because Chief Minister Zail Singh had instructed the censor officials not to allow Gill’s observations to appear in the press. Information Minister Subrata Mukherjee in West Bengal told the censor’s office not to clear any news against his group.
I was distressed to see on Doordarshan Shabana Azmi and few other artists singing a chorus. It was entertainment of sorts during the Emergency to spread the message of normalcy.
I was on the panel for the selection of deputy principal officers at the UPSC office when another expert, Nikhil Chakravarty, a renowned leftist journalist, who strongly upheld the freedom of press, warned me that my house could be searched. I shared this information with my family over dinner. Rajiv, my younger son, collected my papers and deposited the bundle at the house of one of his friends. Two days later, when a police officer knocked at our door on the morning of 24 July, I told him that he could search the house but there was no objectionable material. He said he had come to arrest me and showed me the warrant. The first thing I did was to inform the UPSC secretary that I would be unable to serve on the panel because I was being arrested.
The grounds of my detention had been concocted, as the then additional deputy commissioner told me later when he was a secretary to the government. He said he had received orders from R.K. Dhawan for my arrest. When we didn’t find anything against you, he said, we rang him up to say that we had consulted the superintendent of police and found no ground for arrest. Dhawan said that they had to arrest me because Sanjay Gandhi had ordered it. Then they concocted a story that I had gone to Jama Masjid to incite Muslims against the government. In the Intelligence Bureau diary there was a noting that I had once had lunch with the Shahi Imam at Jama Masjid.
In Washington, India’s ambassador, Triloki Nath Kaul, said that he did not know the details of the offences committed by Kuldip Nayar. ‘I know Nayar,’ the ambassador said. ‘He is a friend of mine. He is supposed to have sent some dispatches abroad surreptitiously, which is a violation of the law.’
In a cable sent to Indira Gandhi, the editor of the Times, London, said, ‘Nayar has not sent any dispatches to the Times which do not comply with Indian censorship; we have of course not asked him to do so.’
District Magistrate Sushil Kumar stated at the hearings of the Shah Commission that the order to arrest Nayar came to him from the prime minister’s house through Navin Chawla, the lieutenant-governor’s secretary, who was later appointed chief election commissioner by the Manmohan Singh government. The superintendent of police who arrested me deposed that the grounds for Nayar’s arrest were prepared two or three days after his arrest. This was done on the basis of information provided to him by K.S. Bajwa, SP (CID). Bajwa, however, denied having passed on any information about me. P.S. Bhinder testified that he ‘came to know’ of Nayar’s arrest from K.D. Nayyar, S.P., and had no hand in the arrest. The only thing he did was to ask his officials to treat Kuldip Nayar with ‘due courtesy’ because he was an eminent journalist.
In this case too, Lt Governor Krishan Chand ‘merely acted’ on orders from the ‘super Prime Minister, Sanjay Gandhi’. Krishan Chand said that he was unhappy about my arrest as he knew me but Om Mehta told him that Indira Gandhi was keen that I be arrested.
Dhawan’s explanation for the arrest, as he told me later, was my stature as a journalist. Sanjay Gandhi, he said, wanted to silence the top journalists after imposing press censorship. At the discussion, Dhawan said that my name was the first because I was considered the tallest.
Then I rang RNG and Malgoankar to inform them of my arrest. They were not surprised. My wife rang up members of our family. By the time I finished my breakfast my sister’s familiar blue Fiat car turned into the crescent where our flat was located. My mother, her limbs shaking because she suffered from Parkinson’s disease, remained in the car, but my sister, father, and father-in-law embraced me. My father was weeping but my father-in-law, who had experienced many years of imprisonment under the British, was composed. He jocularly remarked that he would be the next to be arrested. ‘I shall follow you, because I have also sent her a letter,’ he said, and sure enough he too was subsequently detained.
My mother was dry-eyed. Why should she cry? she asked. She was proud that her son was going to jail for a cause. I was on the point of breaking down, but she calmed me. ‘Don’t worry about us,’ she said, ‘we shall be all right and await your return.’ My sister Raj said, ‘You are a leader now’, her eyes wet. Bharti hid her face and Rajiv wept openly as I got into
the police jeep. At the end of it all there was something of an anticlimax. The jeep had a weak battery and would not start; I had to push it until the engine showed signs of life.
‘Tiger caged,’ was how the SHO conveyed the news of my arrest to his superintendent of police over a wireless set. That was funny, but I was looking back, longingly, at my dear ones still waving me farewell. Some stretched their arms, and then I lost them as the jeep took a turn.
‘You know, I finished reading your book Distant Neighbours only last week,’ said Assistant Police Commissioner Brar at the police station. ‘I very much wanted to meet you but had never imagined that the meeting would be in such a manner.’ I stopped him from saying anything further, remarking, ‘Well, you have to do your duty, however unpleasant.’ ‘No, this one will be always on my conscience,’ he said. ‘I have arrested an innocent person,’ and was unable to say more because he was in tears. He abruptly left the room.
I felt sorry for him. For a policeman, he was too sensitive, too humane. Otherwise, perhaps my image of the police as merely a force armed with lathis and no feelings was unfounded. For a long time I gazed out through the barred window. There was a woman plaiting a girl’s long hair, probably a mother and daughter. How free and happy they looked. I was already beginning to have the oppressive sense of claustrophobia that imprisonment induces. A radio was playing loudly in the background. I thought it would probably be many months or years before I listened to music again. I love Hindustani classical music and attended virtually every concert held in Delhi and had the privilege of listening to Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, Begum Akhtar, and MS Subbulakshmi.