City Improbable- Writings on Delhi

by Khuswant Singh

  In the same way Delhi, preoccupied with its own diurnal round of consequence and command, is paradoxically protected against the dust storm of controversy, threat and misfortune which hangs always, dark and ill-defined, over the Indian horizons. That blur or slither of Delhi, which begins as a mystery and develops into an irritation, becomes in the end a kind of reassurance. After trying three times, you give up gratefully. After expostulating once or twice, it is a pleasure to accede. You think you can change the system? Try it, try it, and when the elaborations of Delhi have caught up with you, when you realize the tortuous significances of the old method, when it has been explained to you that only Mrs Gupta is qualified to take the money, that Mr Mukherjee is prevented by custom from working beside Mr Mukhtar Singh and that Mr Mohammed will not of course be at work on Fridays, when it dawns upon you gradually that it has been done more or less this way, come conqueror, come liberation, since the early Middle Ages, with a relieved and affectionate smile you will probably agree that perhaps it had better be left as it is.

  As it is! India is always as it is! I never despair in Delhi, for I feel always all around me the fortification of a profound apathy. The capital is essentially apathetic to the nation: the nation is aloof to the capital. By the end of the century there will be, at the present rate of increase, nearly 1,000 million people in India, and I think it is very likely that there will have been a revolution of one complexion or another. But the traveller who returns to Delhi then will find the city much the same, I swear, will respond to much the same emotions, indulge in just the same conjectures, bog down in just the same philosophical quagmires, and reach, if he is anything like me, about the same affectionate and inconclusive conclusions.

  ‘You see? You see? Did I not say so? You are thinking metaphysically, as I foretold!’ Well, perhaps. But the government spokesman proved his point better himself, for neither he nor Mrs Gupta ever did ring.

  Delhi During Emergency

  PRAN SABHARWAL

  ‘Prime Minister Indira Gandhi faces a court judgement Thursday that could turn the political situation in India upside down.’

  This was the lead paragraph of a front-page story I wrote that appeared in the Baltimore Sun on 10 June 1975, two days before the judgement that changed the course of Independent India’s history was delivered. The story ended: ‘If the court decides that Mrs Gandhi has transgressed any of the electoral laws, she would automatically cease to be Prime Minister from the time of the judgement and would be disqualified from any elective post for the next six years.’

  The court judgement came on 12 June. It was a Thursday. I was at Delhi’s GB Pant Hospital; Mrs Gandhi’s colleague and India’s Ambassador to Moscow, Durga P. Dhar, had suffered a heart attack and I’d rushed there with Chandrashekhar when it was still dawn. I had carried my transistor with me to keep track of the news of the judgement. As many others and I had anticipated, Justice Jagmohan Lal Sinha of the Allahabad High Court found that Mrs Gandhi had committed breaches that amounted to corrupt practice during her election campaign in 1971.

  Back at home in Pandara Park, we discussed how Mrs Gandhi would react, and what the fallout of her actions would be. In many ways, in the months that followed, political decision-making would effect my daily personal and professional life. The first thing I did on reaching home was to cancel the lunch outing celebrating my son’s birthday, lest someone think I was revelling in the judgement.

  What bothered me and others, both political and press friends, was how anyone was going to ensure that Mrs Gandhi would abide by the court’s decision. The impression we got was that she was conscious of the decision and its gravity but she didn’t want to accept the verdict. Her first reaction was to put up a brave front and declare that she would not step down. She asked for a stay on the execution of the Allahabad High Court judgement and summoned senior lawyers and Cabinet colleagues for a strategy session. She decided to appeal her case to the Supreme Court.

  There was near unanimity among her followers that sticking to power was hurting the party. The consensus among the members of Parliament was that she should nominate the defence minister, Swaran Singh, as her stop-gap successor. But Mrs Gandhi really believed that the Supreme Court would bail her out and continued to project a business-as-usual image: four days after the Allahabad court had declared her 1971 election to Parliament as void, she was at her office, presiding over the Cabinet’s weekly meeting. Meanwhile there were rallies of support outside her residence. And lawyer-advisers in her party said there was no moral, legal or constitutional reason for her to give up her job. They argued that she had been disqualified only on technical grounds, in contrast to any moral turpitude, hence even if the Supreme Court were to uphold the Allahabad High Court judgement, she should stay.

  The story I filed for 23 June began: ‘On the eve of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s day in the Supreme Court this nation of 600 million seemed to be polarized between her supporters and detractors …’ There was a serious sense of foreboding in the air—at least among the politicians and journalists I knew, even if it wasn’t yet apparent on the streets of Delhi. In my report for 25 June I wrote: ‘Prime Minister Indira Gandhi yesterday was refused an absolute stay of the Allahabad court judgement. Instead Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer [of the Supreme Court] deprived Mrs Gandhi of the right to speak, vote or draw remuneration as a Member of Parliament until the case is finally decided. However, Justice Iyer said she had the right to function as Prime Minister under the constitutional provisions.’ The Opposition, led by Jayaprakash Narayan, now intensified its campaign demanding Mrs Gandhi’s resignation. Addressing a crowd of 10,000 or more at Delhi’s Ramlila Grounds on the evening of 25 June, JP delivered a blistering attack against the Prime Minister, and called upon the police, armed forces and government servants to disobey any ‘immoral orders passed by the government’.

  Late that night, President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed proclaimed internal Emergency on the advice of the Prime Minister, citing a threat to India’s democracy due to internal disturbances. And almost immediately afterwards Indira Gandhi’s government launched a severe crackdown on political opponents, ordering the arrests of more than one hundred people.

  I was woken up at 3 a.m. on the 26th by the telephone ringing and it kept ringing almost non-stop for the rest of the night and into early morning. Friends who were being arrested called to say goodbye. Some were desperate, some jovial, some nervous and scared about how long this would last. Others regarded their arrest as a badge of courage and hoped I would join them in jail so we could get to spend long hours together. Some political leaders, including disgruntled young Turks of the Congress like Krishen Kant and Mohan Dharia, thought it was safer to take refuge in my house that morning. They brought news of arrests and I told them what little I knew.

  The declaration of Emergency was signed by the President, but it did not have Cabinet approval. That evening there were only thirteen people in Mrs Gandhi’s house: her son Sanjay, at whose behest the Emergency was declared, Bansi Lal, Om Mehta, R.K. Dhawan, some officials, and Jagannath Kaushal, who provided the legal and constitutional inputs (he later became Minister of Law in Mrs Gandhi’s cabinet). The Cabinet approved the declaration subsequently and the next morning Mrs Gandhi went on air to inform the nation of her decision. Strict censorship was clamped down on both the Indian and foreign news media.

  I had left my house—with my transistor, and this was soon to become one of the few sources of any worthwhile news—even before Mrs Gandhi’s broadcast to the nation. I did not return for over sixteen hours. I thought it safe to stay out. During this period my family received several calls informing them of my arrest. One caller said I’d been arrested ‘outside the Press Club’, another said it had happened ‘on the way to Chandrashekhar’s house’. My wife rang up friends to ask where I had been taken as I had gone out without any extra clothes, though I had asked the family to pack a small attache case with essential needs and a couple of sets of kurta pyjamas.

&
nbsp; The move against the Opposition was unprecedented in twenty-eight years of independence. The arrests were made under the Internal Security Act. One of the first persons to be arrested was seventy-two-year-old Jayaprakash Narayan. Among the several others arrested were Chandrashekhar, the dissident Congressman from Mrs Gandhi’s own party, Jyotirmoy Bosu, the CPI(M) leader of West Bengal, the Swatantra Party leader Piloo Mody, Ashok Mehta of the opposition Congress, Raj Narain, the Socialist leader who had challenged Mrs Gandhi’s election, and the leader of the Opposition in Parliament, Morarji Desai. Those who could escape flew out, some to America, others elsewhere.

  Morarji was put in a Haryana state guest house, courtesy Bansi Lal who was considered a Sanjay man. Most of the other people detained were also locked up in jails not in Delhi but in Haryana. By the 26th evening there was concern about Jayaprakash Narayan’s condition. I went looking for him with a group of young reporters and discovered that he was on the sixth floor of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. I sneaked up quietly and spoke to Dr Gopinath, who assured me that JP was well. Atal Behari Vajpayee, who was then an MP, had also got himself admitted into AIIMS on account of a kidney complaint and he stayed there most of the course of the Emergency.

  Mrs Gandhi’s surprise decision to declare Emergency and detain people nationwide shocked the country. Fear and a mild terror of an impending police raj ran through the mind of every thinking Indian. Streets in Delhi were quite empty. Most people came home to try and catch some news from whatever source. It was an unnerving time. There was, more than anything else, a constant fear of the unknown, an almost crippling uncertainty, because for most people there was no precedent in their lives of a dictatorship. What markers existed? How were people to gauge, especially in the first few days of the Emergency, the extent of the damage done to their daily lives?

  With censorship, the press was no help either. On 28 June, justifying strict press censorship, Mrs Gandhi said she was ‘for the freedom of the press’ but that lately the press had reported events in an irresponsible manner that had aggravated the problems for the government and the people. Newspapermen had very little to do because of the censorship. A few papers left large blank spaces on their front pages, and others like the Hindustan Times, which reappeared after a two-day power failure engineered by the Delhi administration, left their editorials blank.

  I could still go and talk to Dr A.R. Baji, the official spokesman, at his offices at the Press Information Bureau in Shastri Bhavan. He was a friend. But we spoke only about official news. All copy had to be submitted to the Chief Censor Harry D’Penha, who again was a friend, but he had a job to perform and I had to agree to send truncated versions of my stories via the Overseas Communication Office. All stories had to be accompanied by a censor certificate. For a long time I’d preserved some of my typewritten stories that came back with entire paragraphs scored out with thick blue lines. Two- or three-page stories were reduced to a couple of paragraphs that said nothing at all and sometimes I tore them up in disgust. The sight of those mutilated pages and the memory of the humiliation would agitate me even years after the Emergency, till my family insisted on taking them off the walls of my room and putting them away.

  Yet news did get around. When the demolitions at Turkman Gate took place, we first got the news from our tailor Abdul Gaffar who used to stay at Nizamuddin. He told us at nine in the morning, within a few hours of the demolitions. Muslims all over India also got the news. Maybe some of the news got exaggerated in the telling, but the fact was that hundred-year-old houses, largely owned by Muslims, were demolished in the guise of clearance of slums and unauthorized constructions. Many Muslims felt the Emergency was an onslaught against them, especially after Sanjay launched his brainless campaign of forced sterilizations, and the bigger mosques in Delhi became centres where news and rumours were exchanged and spread. The Akalis courted arrest throughout the Emergency in Punjab, so gurudwaras like Rikab Gunj, Sis Gunj and Bangla Sahib also became places to visit for information suppressed by the government.

  The Hindi and Urdu services of BBC had somehow managed to get their voice broadcasts going. Though guarded, their news had more substance, and a transistor became a necessary appendage wherever I went. In fact most people in Delhi and elsewhere who possessed radios tuned into BBC in their homes, and the enviable reputation that BBC news already had in India was further strengthened during the Emergency.

  In the Indian press there was only one man, A.D. Gorwala, a retired ICS officer respected for his honesty, who did not submit to any kind of censorship. His weekly, Opinion, published from Bombay, had a small but devoted readership. When censorship finally hit him, Gorwala stopped mailing the weekly by book post—which was usually intercepted—and mailed it like ordinary mail in white envelopes. This he continued to do till ill health overtook him.

  Journalists were debarred even from the Central Hall of Parliament, so the only haunt was the Press Club on Raisina Road where a lot of drinking went on. Any discussion of news was very hush-hush. Rumours too were floated very cautiously. One was never sure who would get reported back to the authorities. One was never sure even among fellow journalists. Caution became the keyword. I was careful of running foul of the establishment.

  Mrs Gandhi arrested or detained very few intellectuals or newspapermen. More than the government’s repression, what worked against the freedom of the press was that people who wished to survive shunned others and stayed away from potential enemies of Indira Gandhi. People like me who ought to have been arrested but were not were apprehensive, not knowing what to expect. I continued to write stories on food and the state of the economy and referred only obliquely to politics. Even for these I had to obtain a censor certificate. Most of the major newspapers in India surrendered much more than even Mrs Gandhi had demanded. I would go around to newspaper offices in Connaught Place and Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg with news, and the same people who earlier called to ask about JP’s next move now refused to see me.

  The first action against the press was in March 1976 when the accreditation of twenty-six newspersons was not renewed. I was one of them. This meant I could no longer go to government offices. For all intents and purposes I was a non-person till 22 March 1977 when my accreditation was given back.

  Ironically, in this atmosphere of censorship a new magazine was launched in Delhi—India Today, sponsored by the Congress party and under the editorship of Uma Vasudev. It was released by Mrs Gandhi.

  Life in Delhi was very quiet. Schools and colleges functioned normally. Buses and trains ran on time. People did not loiter by the roadside. Offices had no late arrivals after a few episodes of ministers making surprise visits to offices. On the surface it was a world made to order for the urban middle class. But evidence of a police state was more than apparent in the capital.

  For one, the police was invisible, which heightened the sense of fear; there certainly were some plain-clothes policemen around, but people saw them everywhere. And with Sanjay at the helm, young goons had become law enforcers in certain areas of Delhi. Otherwise perfectly sensible public messages—exhorting people to plant trees or fight illiteracy (‘Each One Teach One’)—also assumed a kind of menace painted blandly on large signboards that suddenly all looked similar—standard size and standard colours. Austerity measures introduced before the Emergency due to food shortages were now taken to absurd limits, so that at any function with more than fifty people only potatoes could be served.

  There was also, of course, the infamous sterilization drive. Tents were put up in several places throughout the city with loudspeakers blaring messages promising a tin of ghee and fifty rupees or a transistor to all men who would come and get themselves sterilized. Rumours, not all of them untrue, were afloat all the time about forced sterilizations. Most of these happened in slums and lower middle-class localities. Our jamadarni would report incidents to us. ‘Ladkon ko utha ke le gaye, zabardasti nasbandi kara di (They’ve taken young boys away and forcibly sterilized t
hem),’ she’d tell us. ‘Pandrah-solah saal ke bacchon ko pakad rahe hain … buddhon ko bhi nahin chhoda (They’re picking up fifteen-sixteen-year-old kids … even old men aren’t spared).’

  Book post was often intercepted. George Fernandes, who was underground, sent us cyclostyled letters with news and his views (embellished with bits from his favourite poems) in ordinary envelopes and from different post offices all over the country. A few times when he came to Delhi I met him under cover of darkness on deserted side streets. Phones too were tapped. A very senior bureaucrat close to Mrs Gandhi once remarked that his favourite evening entertainment was going into the control room and listening to taped conversations.

  All India Radio and Doordarshan, never known for their impartiality, became absolute tools for propaganda. Sanjay and his men organized rallies in support of the government at India Gate and they wanted these telecast live. When I.K. Gujral, the Information and Broadcasting Minister at the time, objected, he was shunted off to the Planning Commission and then to Moscow as ambassador.

  In February 1977, after elections were announced, Mrs Gandhi sent me a copy through an emissary of Mohan Dharia’s letter pleading reconciliation. Mohan Dharia and Chandrashekhar were brought to Delhi and detained in neighbouring houses on Rouse Avenue in the hope that Chandrashekhar and Mrs Gandhi would begin a process of reconciliation. That was not to be. The March 1977 elections became a contest between Sanjay Gandhi’s followers and the old Congressmen like Jagjivan Ram, Morarji Desai, Brahmanand Reddy and D.K. Barooah.