by Kuldip Nayar
I tried to pick up the thread of protest where I had left it off before I was jailed. However, my efforts bore no fruit. I found journalists were afraid to say anything about the Emergency in public, and editors proved to be the most cowardly. It appeared as if they had been co-opted by the system.
As a member of the press council, I approached the chairman, Justice N. Rajagopala Ayyangar, a retired Supreme Court judge to request him to convene a meeting of the council to discuss the censorship. He said that it would be futile because no newspaper would publish whatever was decided. I argued that some day the Emergency would be lifted and posterity would like to know what the Press Council, the highest body defending the freedom of the press, had done when censorship was imposed. The question, I said, was not whether the decision would appear in the press or not but whether the Press Council would register its protest.
Reluctantly, he convened a meeting of local Press Council members. I found to my horror that although most members were critical of censorship, none of them were willing to go on record or pass any resolution, I was still more disappointed to read in the White Paper, issued by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, after the Emergency, that Justice N.R. Ayyangar had played false. He had written a letter to V.C. Shukla informing him that he had been able to stop a resolution against censorship being passed. He lauded his role: ‘I was able to convince them [local Press Council members] that this [the resolution] is not necessary or desirable.’
A couple of weeks after my release, Prem Bhatia, then the editor of Tribune, organized a dinner for some intimate friends to talk things over. Satish Gujral and his wife, my wife and I, Inder Malhotra, and Rami Chhabra and her husband were there. It was more or less the old Statesman crowd. Our conversation centred on the Emergency. No one could guess how long the tunnel would prove to be but all agreed that the administration had been reduced to a brute machine to carry out Sanjay Gandhi’s orders. Indira Gandhi, it seemed, was intractable to any suggestion for normalization. One remark that everyone made was that it would be difficult to repair the institutions she had destroyed.
Little did anyone suspect that someone from among us would report our conversation verbatim to Mohammed Yunus Khan, the cruel face of the dynasty? Yunus called Satish Gujral’s brother, Inder Gujral, who happened to be in town, having come from Moscow where he was India’s envoy. Yunus, a Pathan, threatened to take action against each one present at the dinner and have their property confiscated for conspiring against the state.
Once we learnt that the entire conversation had reached Indira Gandhi, each one of us tried to guess who could have been the stool pigeon. One individual suspected the other; Satish came to my house to check whether I had divulged the conversation to ‘make up with the government’. That was his judgement on my integrity! We were all nonplussed but could not pinpoint who was responsible. After the Emergency, Inder Malhotra himself admitted to Chhabra, present at the dinner, that he had done so. True, he was on the establishment’s side, but it still escapes me what need there was for him to go to Yunus to report a private conversation?
We, in the Indian Express, were happy that our circulation was rising by the day. People had come to associate the newspaper with defiance of the Emergency. Whatever we wrote was given an interpretation which we had by no stretch of the imagination intended. We were however very careful not to give the government any opportunity to prosecute us. We raised the price of the paper but the circulation just kept rising. We were selling around two lakh copies a day in Delhi alone. RNG said that he had no money to buy more newsprint so we were obliged to restrict circulation.
As promised to my jailmates, I went to Srinagar to request Sheikh Abdullah to criticize the Emergency. He told me that she (Indira Gandhi) was in such a foul mood that she would arrest him as well. Shamim Ahmad Shamim, a friend who was a Lok Sabha member, received me at the airport. He told me not be shocked if I found that Sher-e-Kashmir had turned into a giddad Kashmir. Sheikh Abdullah came to my hotel and embraced me while observing: ‘You too have become Haji.’ In reply to my request for an interview he said he would call me. After about a week he invited me to lunch at which his family was present. Even after reminding him about the interview he did not fix any date or time.
Shamim appreciated my predicament. He told me that Sheikh Abdullah would not say anything on the Emergency on record. Shamim suggested that we write an interview and attribute it to him. Shamim said that Sheikh Abdullah would not dare to contradict it. The gist of the interview which ran as a lead story was that he had appealed to Indira Gandhi to have a ‘re-look on the Emergency’ because ‘it had served its purpose’. Both of us were careful not to use the words ‘lift the Emergency’ but attributed to Sheikh Abdullah the view that ‘a long period of restrictive measures loses its effectiveness’. We were confident that Sheikh Abdullah would not issue any contradiction as I had told him that the eyes of detenue were fixed on him for help. He did not contradict the interview but told me after the Emergency that he would not have given a better interview than the one I had written.
The Emergency was beginning to yield diminishing returns. Either Indira Gandhi, as dictators are wont, could instill fear of death in people’s minds or brainwash them. She was not cut for the first and she had no patience for the second. She proposed some amendments to the constitution to institute harsh laws and extended the tenure of Lok Sabha from five to six years. Two leaders, stormy petrel Madhu Limaye and fiery Sharad Yadav, resigned from the House in protest. Both upheld the traditions of the socialists in India.
People were further alienated by amendments to the constitution to restrict their freedom and the extension of the Lok Sabha’s tenure by an additional year. A high-power committee which the Congress had appointed on 27 February 1976 under the chairmanship of Swaran Singh submitted its report which the government adopted more or less in toto. The report read like an essay on a police state. ‘It would have been worse if I were not there,’ Swaran Singh told me. ‘She wanted the presidential system but we have buried it once and for all,’ he said.
Nearly 300 educationists, artists, and writers maintained, in a signed petition sent to Indira Gandhi, that ‘the present parliament has neither the political nor the moral authority to effect fundamental changes in the constitution’. The non-communist opposition, particularly the CPI(M) refused to have any discussion with Congress party committee on constitutional amendments and boycotted the special parliament session convened on 25 October to pass the necessary Bill. The CPI was, however, on her side.
A joint statement issued by the non-Left opposition parties said that the amendments would ‘eliminate the whole system of checks and balances provided in the constitution and leave the arbitrary exercise of authority to the detriment of the citizen’.
All the individuals who had benefited from Indira Gandhi’s rule were pressed into service to justify the amendments. This was invariably her tactic whenever she faced a problem. Former chief justice of India and chairman of the Law Commission, P.B. Gajendragadkar argued in her defence:
When Indian democracy embarks upon its missions of justifying the legitimate but expanding hopes and aspirations of citizens and establishing a new social order based on social equality and economic justice, it may have to make suitable laws from time to time to achieve that purpose.
Leftist intellectuals, who had a great fascination for Indira Gandhi’s authoritarianism, hailed these ‘revolutionary steps’. I also heard that her ‘leftist lurch’ had forced the rightist JP to launch a movement.
Indira Gandhi lashed out at her opponents in parliament on the grounds that ‘those who want to fix the constitution in a rigid and unalterable frame are entirely out of tune with the spirit of new India’. She had transferred as many as sixteen judges who she said had not reconciled themselves to the ‘demands of the emergency’.
The self-immolation of Prabhakar Sharma, working in the Acharya Vinobha Bhave camp, sent a shock-wave throughout the country, in
cluding Indira Gandhi’s establishment. When immolating himself at Surgaon outside Wardha in Maharashtra on 11 October 1976 in protest against Indira Gandhi’s dictatorial methods of governance, he said in a letter:
Forgetting God and humanity and arming itself with wide, brutal powers the government last year deprived the newspapers of their freedom of expression and attacked all those qualities of Indian living which can be decent, great and noble. This year it has shamelessly attacked the nation’s spiritual and non-violent civilization.
Vinobha vainly sought to meet Prabhakar who had found the former sympathetic to Indira Gandhi. Vinobha had defended the Emergency in the name of anushasan (discipline). Nirmala Deshpande acted as the link between Vinobha and Indira Gandhi, and her dislike of JP was in proportion to her admiration for Indira Gandhi. JP, once a close follower of Vinobha, no longer enjoyed popularity in the ashram.
When I visited Vinobha Bhave’s ashram during those days to interview him, he criticized JP’s arrest but justified ‘strong action’ to ensure people’s obedience to the call of discipline. What about democracy? I asked. He considered ‘the discipline’ that Indira Gandhi had sought to impose as being a reflection of the steps that needed to be taken to safeguard democracy.
JP’s detention was revoked on 4 December 1976. The deputy commissioner of Chandigarh, where JP was detained, wrote to the government that JP’s health was failing. This report eventually found its way to Bansi Lal’s desk. His response was that he should be left to die [Susrey ko marne do]. Although all restrictions on JP were ‘removed’ he was kept under surveillance. The intelligence department monitored his movements, kept track of his visitors, and examined his letters and speeches very closely, just in case …
In meeting later, JP admitted to me that Indira Gandhi was on the top of the world. She was indeed hailed as Goddess Durga and it sometimes appeared that she believed she embodied that shakti (power). She knew exactly how to dress for the best effect: in a village she wore a plain sari, covering her head demurely; in Kashmir she dressed like a Kashmiri; in Punjab she wore a kurta and salwar and even said that she was Punjabi because her younger daughter-in-law, Sanjay’s wife, Menaka, was from Punjab. She claimed to be the daughter-in-law of Gujarat because her husband Feroze Gandhi, a fearless member of the Lok Sabha, was a Gujarati. She refrained from mentioning Sonia Gandhi lest the question of her foreign nationality was raised. She was aware all these things went down well with the common people, and indeed they did for some time.
The structure of ‘guided democracy’ which she had evolved appeared to have acquired a semblance of permanence. Many people across India seemed prepared to accept the political reality that Indira Gandhi had thrust upon them. Many, particularly among the élite, would quite unashamedly maintain: ‘We have always needed overlords to govern us. We had the Mughals, we had the British, and now we have Mrs Gandhi. Is that so bad?’
Sanjay had consolidated his political influence. No state chief minister thought his visit to Delhi was complete until he had met Sanjay. They all vied with one another in inviting him to their state and by demonstrating his popularity through government-sponsored rallies.
For Sanjay, political management had come easily; he began building up his own political strength through the Youth Congress which he formally joined and which Barooah asked him to activate. I was at Chandigarh when the inauguration ceremony took place. The editor of Patriot, Edatata Narayanan, a left-wing newspaper, met me and rhetorically asked: ‘Is this the beginning of the end.’ I did not comment because in his editorials he had been supporting Indira Gandhi.
Sanjay manoeuvred to eject Priyaranjan Das Munshi of West Bengal from the presidentship of the Youth Congress and replaced him with a dependable Punjabi girl, Ambika Soni, who had the dubious distinction of having slapped a young socialist, Vijay Pratap, outside the gate of Indira Gandhi’s residence.
Shukla reported to Sanjay that nearly all the newspapers and journalists had begun ‘behaving’. They no longer represented a threat and were acting as their own censors. Even so, the Prevention of Publication of Objectionable Matter Act of pre-Independence days was revived through an ordinance to prohibit the publication of ‘words, signs, or visible representation’ that spread disaffection. A group of obliging editors prepared a code of ethics for newspapers. It was a curious 3,000-word exhortation that did not even once refer to the freedom of the press.
The government also withdrew the accreditation of over forty newspaper correspondents. These journalists were permitted to continue to represent their newspapers, but were deprived of such privileges as admission to major news conferences and sessions of parliament (I was one among those who were denied accreditation).
The ten-year-old Press Council of India was dissolved on 31 December 1975. Here the pressure of Kishan Kumar Birla, owner of Hindustan Times worked. He was very close to Sanjay because the Birlas provided free advice and other assistance to get the Maruti car on the road. K.K. Birla was the defendant in a complaint filed before the Press Council against the termination of the services of B.G. Verghese, editor of Hindustan Times. It was an open secret that the action against Verghese was taken at the instance of ‘some members of the ruling party who were inimical to press freedom’.
K.K. Birla had learnt from a discussion of the case in the Council that the judgement would go against him. It did, but it was never pronounced. However, the draft judgement prepared by the Council’s chairman on the basis of his informal discussions with the members, among whom I was one, indicated that Birla should be indicted.
The draft judgement stated that the termination of Verghese’s service was clearly a violation of the freedom of the press and editorial independence. The Press Council also condemned the attempt by K.K. Birla to prevent the publication of the correspondence between him and Verghese. The verdict could not be delivered because the council was dissolved by then.
The immunity extended to journalists to report parliamentary proceedings was also withdrawn. Sanjay was afraid that the press would splash in its pages all that was said in parliament on the misuse of the Emergency and the Maruti scandal. Ironically, it was Feroze Gandhi, Sanjay’s father, who had brought forward a Bill to help the press to freely report the proceedings in the two Houses of parliament. At one time Indira Gandhi wanted the Bill to stay but Sanjay disagreed and had his way. There was no room for ‘sentiments in the administration’, he told his mother.
Even though the press had become a kind of government gazette, exercising self-censorship to the extent of not even using the JP health bulletins without clearance from the government, Indira Gandhi and her son were not satisfied. There was the Indian Express chain of newspapers that had still not fallen into line.
The government first pressed RNG to dismiss Ajit Bhattacharjea and me, the two senior editors. RNG said he could not do so because of the Working Journalists Act, which was applicable in our case. Then the government asked for our transfer to places like Sikkim and Nagaland. He argued that this was tantamount to victimization. Goenka told me in private that he was under pressure to take action against both of us but he would not let either of us go.
RNG was then asked to sell his publications. He took some time to tell the government that he was willing to do so provided he got ‘a fair price’ and that too ‘in white’. While he was in the midst of ‘negotiations’ with the government, he suffered a heart attack.
B.D. Goenka, his son, preferred to side with the establishment. The government appointed a majority of its own nominees on the Indian Express board with K.K. Birla as the chairman. The first decision of the board was to retire Malgaonkar, the editor-in-chief. Birla summoned both Ajit Bhattacharjea and me. He asked me to write in favour of Sanjay Gandhi. I told him I would have done so had I found him doing anything worthwhile. He cut short the conversation. I thought his pep talk was intended to threaten me.
Kamal Nath was one of the Indian Express board members. He knew B.D. Goenka and I had met him earlier. Th
e first thing Kamal Nath told me was that they would appoint me as chief editor if I wrote in their favour. As he was a Punjabi, we would exchange a word or two if and when we ran into each other at the Express office where the board meetings were held.
Many names were bandied about in relation to the post of chief editorship to fill the vacancy left by Malgaonkar. The position was offered to one of our colleagues, Suman Dubey, but he declined it. Eventually Md. Shamim’s name was finalized. How could a film critic from the Times of India be our chief editor? we wondered.
B.D. Goenka rang me up and asked me to meet Kamal Nath and ask him to refrain from making the appointment. I told him I hardly knew him. The board was to meet in the morning, according to Goenka. At that time it was 10.30 p.m.
I however rang up Kamal Nath and went to meet him at Oberoi Hotel where he was staying. I suggested to him that he should appoint someone senior to us and certainly not a film critic. He asked me to suggest some names. I told him that for the time being the editor of the Financial Express, V. Narasimha Rao could combine the two posts. I was aware of his strong views about the Emergency. Kamal Nath accepted my suggestion for the ‘time being’. However, Kamal Nath regretted the decision later because Narasimha ran the Express as we all wished him to do. I must say that he saved the newspaper’s reputation and at the same time permitted us to write whatever we chose between the lines.
I had not visited the Press Club since my release from jail and just happened to drop in there one day. V.C. Shukla was there and this was our first encounter since my detention. He himself initiated a discussion on my arrest. He was on the defensive and told me that he had done his utmost to prevent it. I did not believe him and told him that to his face. We were once quite close but the detention had snapped the relationship. He said, ‘Kuldip, you got one million dollar worth of publicity’.