Mrs Gandhi, and the Congress, were now supreme all over the land. When the art historians Mildred and W. G. Archer went to meet her in March 1976, the prime minister expressed satisfaction with the progress of the emergency. The new regime, she told them, ‘had made the State Ministers shake in their shoes’. This was long over-due and was excellent’, for ‘too much devolution [was] fatal to India’. ‘I have to keep India together’, insisted Mrs Gandhi. ‘That is an absolute must.’20
IV
Among the casualties of the emergency was the freedom of the press. Within its first week the government had instituted a system of ‘pre-censorship’, whereby editors had to submit, for scrutiny and approval, material deemed to be critical of the government or its functionaries. Guidelines were issued on what did and did not constitute ‘news’. There could be no reports on processions or strikes, or of political opposition, or of conditions in the jails. Reports of open dissidence were naturally verboten, but in fact even stories mildly critical of the administration were not permitted.21 As a newspaper in the Punjab was to recall, items ‘killed’ by the censor included
reports about the closure of shops in Chandigarh’s Bajwara market to protest against the arrest of shopkeepers, the six-year absence of a health officer and observations about the town’s sanitation, especially the open drains; . . . three letters to the editor about pay anomalies and inadequate salary scales of college lectures in Himachal Pradesh; an unsatisfactory bus service; a Chandigarh report about the rise in the price of tomatoes; the death of two persons while patrolling the rail tracks near Amritsar; and a brief item about black-marketing in essential drugs.22
The space had to be filled; and it was, by the words of the prime minister or by stories in praise of her government. (Editors who tried to print the liberty-loving essays of Tagore, Gandhi and Nehru instead were quickly brought to book.) ‘Our newspapers, of course, give world news all right’, wrote a reader in Simla to an English friend, ‘but hardly any other news pertaining to the country itself, except the speeches of the PM . . . I have decided to forgo the pleasures of reading a newspaper.’23 In truth, the disgust was shared by the journalists themselves. As a reporter for the Bombay weekly Blitz told his English friend: ‘My paper is a supporter of the Emergency. But if we only sing the praises of the Government, what will our readers think of us?’24
Jokes tinged with satire were especially forbidden. The Tamil humorist Cho Ramaswamy failed to sneak in a cartoon showing the prime minister and her son Sanjay talking above the caption: ‘A national debate on the Constitutional Amendments’. When a reader asked the question, ‘Who is Indira Gandhi’, Cho answered: ‘She is the granddaughter of Motilal Nehru, the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, and the mother of Sanjay Gandhi’. This, too, was cut. The censors were vigilant, but the odd joke or two escaped their eye. Thus V. Balasubramanyam was able to print an article in the Eastern Economist on ‘Livestock Problems in India’, which began with the line: ‘There are at present 580 million sheep in the country’, and an anonymous democrat was able to place an ad in the Times of India announcing the ‘death of D. E. M. O’Cracy, mourned by his wife T. Ruth, his son L. I. Bertie, and his daughters Faith, Hope, and Justice’.25
As the emergency proceeded, the government tightened its hold over the dissemination of information. The independent news agencies, the United News of India (UNI) and the Press Trust of India (PTI), were amalgamated with two lesser agencies into a single state-controlled news service called Samachar. The Press Council, an autonomous watchdog body, was abolished. A law granting immunity to journalists covering Parliament was repealed. And as many as 253 journalists were placed under arrest. These included Kuldip Nayar of the Indian Express, K. R. Sunder Rajan of the Times of India and K. R. Malkani of the Motherland.26
Some freedom-loving journalists resisted, but their newspapers’ owners were mostly compliant, fearing the government might shut down their presses or seize their properties. They feared the stick, but were happy to bit eat the carrot. This took the shape of government announcements paid for by the Directorate of Audio-Visual Publicity (DAVP). While ‘liberally granting advertisements to so-called “friendly” periodicals’, the DAVP withdrew their favours from those deemed critical of the government. More than one news paper, and editor, and owner, was happy to change its tune in response to the inducements on offer.27
Among the major newspapers that willingly complied with the new regulations were the Hindu, the Times of India and, especially, the Hindustan Times. The editor of the last-named newspaper, the hugely respected B. G. Verghese, was sacked by its owner, the industrialist K. K. Birla, merely to please Mrs Gandhi. (Birla was a devoted acolyte of the prime minister-after the Allahabad High Court judgement of 12 June, he had taken a delegation of 500 businessmen to plead with her to stay on in office.28)Among the newspapers that struggled nobly to maintain their independence were the Indian Express and the Statesman. Both refused to toe the government line, resisting threats and blandishments alike. When their power was cut they got the courts to restore it. When their own stories were censored, they chose to leave white spaces rather than fill them with propaganda material. And they artfully reproduced, without comment, reports on the Indian situation in the foreign press, under such neutral headings as ‘News Digest’ or ‘What our Contemporaries Say’.29
The mass-circulation newspapers were hardest hit, but the government did not spare the high-quality and slow-selling journals of opinion either. Two esteemed Delhi journals, the weekly Mainstream and the monthly Seminar, closed rather than submit to the censor’s scrutiny. The Bombay weekly Himmat fought the censor doggedly, but finally shut down when asked to pay aprohibitively high deposit as a guarantee of good behaviour, the fine imposed for apiece that quoted, among other people, the Mahatma. Literary magazines also closed down, finding the curbs on their independence impossible to live with.
In some ways the government feared the little magazines even more. Their owners could not be bought; so they had to be coerced or bankrupted instead. Among the chosen targets was Opinion, a four-page newsletter brought out in Bombay by the former ICS officer A. D. Gorwala. A man of legendary integrity, Gorwala focused on attacks on the individual by the agencies of the state. He had also fought a long battle against corruption. A year into the emergency, Opinion was ordered to shut down, but Gorwala was able to print one last issue in which he observed that
the current Indira regime, founded on June26, 1975, was born through lies, nurtured by lies, and flourishes by lies. The essential ingredient of its being is the lie. Consequently, to have a truth-loving, straight-thinking journal examine it week after week and point out its falsehoods becomes intolerable to it.30
V
The day after the emergency was declared, a British reporter found the streets of Delhi to be ‘uncannily normal’. The city’s ‘jingling flotilla’ of cyclists setoff for work in the morning. ‘No angry crowds gathered. Shops and factories opened as usual. Beggars begged. The sleek racehorses of the rich had their daily exercise...’31 As the veteran journalist Inder Malhotra wrote, ‘in its initial months at least, the Emergency restored to India a kind of calm it had not known for years’.32
This calm was in sharp contrast to the strife-filled decade that preceded it; one reason why the emergency was widely welcomed by the middle class. The crime rate had come down and the trains ran on time. A good monsoon in 1975 meant that prices also fell. A visiting American journalist was told by an official in Delhi that it was only foreigners who cared for such things as the freedom of expression. ‘We are tired of being the workshop of failed democracy,’ said the official. ‘The time has come to exchange some of our vaunted individual rights for some economic development.’
The journalist found that the business community were especially pleased with the emergency. A Delhi hotel owner told him that life now was ‘just wonderful. We used to have terrible problems with the unions. Now when they give us any troubles, the government just put them
in jail.’ In Bombay, the journalist met J. R. D. Tata, arguably India’s most respected industrialist. Tata too felt that ‘things had gone too far. You can’t imagine what we’ve been through here – strikes, boycotts, demonstrations. Why, there were days I couldn’t walk out of my office into the street. The parliamentary system is not suited to our needs.’33
One fact is conclusive proof of the quiescence of the middle class – that hardly any officials resigned in protest against the emergency. Back in the days of British rule, Gandhi’s call to ‘non-cooperate’ with the rulers led to thousands of resignations of teachers, lawyers, judges, even ICS officers. Now, the abrogation of democracy was protested by only a handful of people in state employment. These included Fali Nariman, who resigned as additional solicitor general, M. L. Dantwala, who declined to continue as an adviser to the Reserve Bank, and Bagaram Tulpule, who left his high position in a public-sector undertaking.
There was, however, some resistance offered in the Indian Parliament. On 23 July the House met to ratify the emergency. The Congress commanded a comfortable majority; and 34 MPs were in jail. Those opposition MPs at liberty to attend made speeches of protest before walking out. The CPM member A. K. Gopalan said the arrests had reduced Parliament to a ‘farce and an object of contempt’. A Jana Sangh MP accused Mrs Gandhi of betraying the mother land for ‘the sake of personal ends’.34
The opposition MPs later boycotted the House (or were jailed), but an independent member who continued to attend was P. G. Mavalankar of Ahmedabad, apolitical scientist by vocation and the son of the first Speaker of the Lok Sabha. His lineage made it difficult for the government to arrest him. So he stayed and, when given the chance, quoted the Holy Trinity of Indian nationalism, Tagore, Gandhi and Nehru – quoted them on the merits and virtues of liberty and freedom. Their views were contrasted with the ‘draconian’ MISA, used to further ‘the political purpose of a vindictive government’, an act which was ‘the most obnoxious piece of legislation ever enacted in the recent history of India’.35
There was also resistance in the streets. On 14 November 1975 – the birthday of Jawaharlal Nehru – a body styling itself the Lok Sangharsh Samiti (People’s Struggle Committee) began a satyagraha in Bombay. Every day a group of protesters would stand at a busy intersection and shout slogans such as ‘Down with Dictatorship’ and ‘JP Zindabad’. Within a month 1,359 people had been arrested – including 146 women. The protests spread to other states, where bus stands, railway stations and government offices became the theatre of slogan shouting and the courting of arrest. One report claimed that in the first three months of the satyagraha as many as 80,000 people had been put behind bars.36
On 15 August 1976 (Independence Day) another satyagraha commenced in Ahmedabad. It was led by Manibhen Patel, daughter of India’s first home minister, Vallabhbhai Patel. Raising slogans such as ‘Remove Emergency’ and ‘Release Political Prisoners’, the fifty marchers proceeded on the road to Dandi, the same route that Gandhi had taken to break the colonial salt laws forty-six years previously. Manibhen Patel was arrested a mile down the road, but the next day a judge ordered her release. She continued the march to the sea, accompanied by a handful of policemen in plain clothes.37
One of those arrested in the Bombay satyagraha was the distinguished Marathi writer Durga Bhagwat. Other members of her fraternity protested in ways more congenial to their profession. A group of Kannada writers circulated, in samizdat form, poems satirizing the emergency and its prime mover. Consider these stanzas from G. S. Shivarudrappa’s poem ‘In this Country’:
In this country
Hero worship, family pride
Should all go.
But
Concessions to my family deity
Should stay untouched.
In this country
Everybody should shut their mouth
And remain quiet.
But
They better keep their ears open
For my words.38
Other writers expressed their dissent in other ways. Bengali essayist Annada Sankar Ray announced that he would ‘stop writing altogether in A fit of non-cooperative pique’. He refused to ‘put pen to paper so long as the state of emergency continues’. The cartoonist K. Shankar Pillai, who had once sarcastically compared the loquacious Nehru to the Niagara Falls (and been cheered by his victim for it), now closed down his magazine before the state did so. ‘Dictatorships cannot afford laughter’, he remarked mournfully. ‘In all the years of Hitler, there never was a good comedy, not a good cartoon, not a parody, or a spoof.’ The Hindi novelist Phanishwaranath Renu returned the Padma Shri bestowed upon him by the government of India, the act recalling Tagore’s disavowal of his knighthood after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. And the Kannada polymath Shivarama Karanth gave back an even higher honour, the Padma Bhushan. Back in the 1920s he had entered the freedom movement under the inspiration of Gandhi; now, after fifty years of striving to uphold its values, Karanth felt ‘impelled to protest against such indignities done to the people of India’.39
Finally, there was resistance that was carried on underground. The key figure here was George Fernandes, the firebrand socialist who had led the railway strike of 1974. When the emergency was declared Fernandes was in the Orissa town of Gopalpur-on-Sea. He lay low for a few weeks, in which time he had grown a beard and come to disguise himself as a Sikh. Then he travelled from town to town, meeting comrades and planning the sabotage of state installations. Dynamite was collected and stored, and young men trained in the act of blowing up bridges and railway tracks. From his ever-shifting hiding place, Fernandes sent out letters attacking ‘the dictator’, ‘that woman’, and the ‘Nehru dynasty’, and urging the people to rise against the regime.
No dynamite was actually detonated, yet the government of India was visibly angry that it could not capture Fernandes. His brother Lawrence was picked up from his home in Bangalore and brutally beaten and tortured. His friend, the actress Snehalata Reddy, was also imprisoned. Placed in a damp cell and denied proper food, her asthma was seriously aggravated; released on parole, she died a few weeks later. George Fernandes’s wife and child fled the country, fearing persecution if they stayed behind. Fernandes himself was finally arrested in Calcutta on 10 June 1976, nearly a year into the emergency.40
In the summer of 1976 one of the few opponents of the regime still at large was the nonagenarian J. B. Kripalani. He complained that he had been left out while all his friends were given the privilege of imprisonment. Then he recalled a Sindhi proverb: ‘When a witch goes through a street destroying everything, she leaves one house untouched.’41 On 2 October 1975, Gandhi’s birthday, he led a prayer meeting at the Mahatma’s memorial in New Delhi – speeches were made and several people arrested, but not him. It was not so much his age as his sheer stature which kept him at large. Not Shivarama Karanth, not Morarji Desai, not even JP, had patriotic credentials as good as Kripalani’s. He had joined the Mahatma in the Champaran satyagraha of 1917; several years before Jawaharlal Nehru did. He had been president of the Congress when freedom came three decades later. Later, three different states had sent him as their representative to the Indian Parliament. In sum, his CV was such that even the prime minister would have been embarrassed to arrest him on account of activities deemed a threat to the ‘unity and stability’ of the country.
In April 1976 Kripalani dared the government to print the names of those it had put in jail. Then he fell seriously ill. He was taken to hospital, where all manner of tubes and wires were put into him. When a friend came visiting he had a fresh complaint: ‘I have no Constitution – all that is left are Amendments’.42
VI
The emergency revived the debate as to whether India could, should, or ever would be reliably democratic. In October 1975 a reporter from Time visited the country, and was much impressed by what he saw. He thought that press freedom and the like were ‘of no great interest to the majority of India’s 600 million people’, who were ‘mo
re concerned’ with the rate of inflation (down 31 per cent in the past year). ‘The Prime Minister’, he wrote, ‘has won widespread support for seizing a rare opportunity to ram through a score of social reforms. These days India is engrossed in a frenzied campaign to encourage discipline, punctuality, cleanliness, courtesy.’43
So at least someone was taking the slogans seriously. Where the Time reporter thought that democracy was unsuited to India, the Sydney Morning Herald despaired that it had died out in a country which had been ‘the main hope of democracy in Asia, indeed in the developing world’. If India had ‘relapsed into traditional Asian autocracy’, said the paper, the blame must be shared between ‘Empress Indira’ and her father, who had fostered ‘heavy industrialization and nationalized bureaucracies upon the Indian entrepreneur, Soviet style, in the name of “socialism”. To make his “socialism” work his daughter has merely added the complementary Soviet-style political dictatorship.’44
The ‘India and/vs democracy’ question was, as one might expect, most vigorously discussed in the British press. The political class in the United Kingdom was divided; while some MPs signed the ‘Free JP appeal’, Mrs Gandhi’s regime was endorsed by, among others, Labour’s Michael Foot (on the grounds that Nehru’s daughter could do no wrong) and Jennie Lee, and the Tory Margaret Thatcher. Both of the last named visited India and concluded that the emergency was, on balance, beneficial to its people. After travelling to India and speaking to Congress leaders, a Conservative MP named Eldon Griffith wrote to The Times protesting that the regime was ‘far less oppressive’ than that paper reported it to be. He also suggested that the Westminster model was unsuited to non-Western contexts. In a spirited rejoinder, W. H. Morris-Jones observed that such denigration was ‘a sport in which high imperial Tory and revolutionary Marxist could find common enjoyment’. As Morris-Jones pointed out, ‘a growing number of Indians had begun to make the habit of liberal democracy indigenous’. Five elections had been successfully conducted, and a free press and autonomous institutions forged, before the emergency came to bring ‘massive damage’ to ‘a way of political life which in two decades had already converted into citizens so many who had been subjects beyond the political pale’.45
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