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India’s Undeclared Emergency: Often More Chilling than in 1975

Anil Jain

The Emergency was a dark and shameful chapter in Indian democracy—a nightmare, a wretched period! It is 46 years since the then prime minister Indira Gandhi imposed the Emergency to protect her power, turning the entire country into a prison. Opposition party leaders and workers were jailed, newspapers strangled by censorship, Parliament, Judiciary, Executive etc., turned into Indira Gandhi’s “kitchen”, and she and her son Sanjay were its resident cooks.

Leaders of the ruling party, including government ministers, were reduced to orderlies of the mother-and-son. In the elections held after 21 months, people peacefully revolted through their franchise against this dictatorship, freeing the country from the curse of the Emergency.

After the Emergency, the Janata Party government formed by the merger of five parties may have achieved nothing remarkable, but one thing it did succeed in. By resorting to constitutional provisions, it made imposing dictatorship on the country again very difficult. It was the primary duty of that government, and it faithfully performed it.

However, it does not mean that democratic values and civil rights can only get hijacked through a formal declaration. Rules and regulations can also become the perfect cover for revocation of democracy, as is happening continuously for the last seven years, in a horrific way. A close look at our political and constitutional institutions and their conduct today would reveal that the country is passing through a phase worse than the Emergency.

Indira Gandhi imposed the Emergency with the help of constitutional provisions, but all that happened during the Emergency is still taking place—and much worse—without a formal declaration. The difference is that everything done during the Emergency was in the name of discipline, while today, development and nationalism are the mantras. The tendencies that have strengthened within the Bharatiya Janata Party after the Atal-Advani era have nothing to do with democratic values. All the powers of government and party not confined to a single group but a single person. Remember that the BJP now rules at the Centre and several states.

Wherever Prime Minister Narendra Modi goes, a pre-arranged group of ardent “supporters” shout “Modi-Modi” as if he were a rock star. Modi appears pleased by this. Astonishingly, a smile appears on his face when people applaud the strange information he shares about history and science.

Crossing the limits of flattery and political hypocrisy, during the Emergency, the then Congress president Devkant Barua raised the slogan, “Indira is India, India is Indira”. Today, the BJP has many such leaders, from Ravi Shankar Prasad, Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Devendra Fadnavis, to workers at the lowest levels who unhesitatingly describe Modi as the embodiment of divine power or possessing superhuman abilities. It is Venkaiah Naidu, the Vice President, who started this trend. Last year, BJP president JP Nadda set a new example of political flattery when he said Modi is the leader of the gods, too.

Not a single institution can be called a watchdog of democracy today. Not one institution commits to democratic values beyond question. Today, again, government ministers are heard advising the courts on how to decide cases. The courts have also ruled in accordance with the intentions of the government. Supreme Court and High Court judges praise ruling-party leaders on public forums; their especially flattering praise reserved for Prime Minister Modi.

Overall, the judiciary has become practically committed to the government. The credibility of the Election Commission is destroyed, and, in a way, it has transformed into an election ministry. Election programmes are drawn keeping in mind the convenience of the Prime Minister and his party. During the last seven years, we have seen instances of the electoral mandate getting distorted with the help of defectors and state governors, such as in Goa, Manipur, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya etc. Horse-trading of Opposition MLAs is a common practice as the ruling party strives to win as many seats as possible in the Rajya Sabha elections. The bureaucracy is no longer accountable to the people or the Constitution. Barring a few exceptions, it is entirely in the hands of the ruling party.

The Right to Information Act has been made virtually ineffective. Agencies such as the CBI, Income Tax Department and Enforcement Directorate have become tools to harass Opposition leaders and social activists, writers and intellectuals who disagree with the government. In this work also, the judiciary remains an indirect assistant to the government.

The condition of the media, which is called the fourth pillar of democracy, is also worrying. Today, journalism is not the same as it was after the Emergency. The main reason is the entry of big corporate houses into the sector and the competition among media groups to make profits. Profiteering has made media institutions completely anti-people and backers of the government.

The media is being manipulated by the government in two ways—through advertisements or by showing it the fear of government agencies. Due to all this, the distinction between government and non-government media has almost ended. Not only is the media’s aggressiveness and impartiality hampered by commercial considerations, its commitment to professional, ethical and democratic values and civil rights is also eroded.

A new and dangerous trend of the last five-six years is the excessive glorification of the army by the government, the ruling party and the media. Indeed, our armed forces often deal with challenges, so they should be respected. But to consider them beyond any questioning and the military leadership engaging in political rhetoric amount to stepping towards militaristic nationalism.

The Emergency was not a sudden event but a result of the ever-increasing tendency of hypercentralisation of power, autocracy, hero-worshipping and sycophancy. Today, again, the same scenes are visible. Important decisions no longer account for the general opinion of Parliament or even the Union Council of Ministers. Only–only–the Prime Minister and his chief warlord, i.e. Home Minister Amit Shah, run the show. The role of Sanjay Gandhi and his quartet during the Emergency was an example of extra-constitutional interference in the operation of power. Today, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh plays that role. Parliament has been made almost irrelevant.

Governments openly disregard the occasional public interest orders of the judiciary. Ruthless efforts to silence dissenters or drown them in fake patriotism are visible. During and before the Emergency, those who spoke against the government were called “agents of America” or the CIA. Now, every person who disagrees with the government is labelled pro-Pakistan or anti-national.

In the Emergency, the nation got Indira Gandhi’s Twenty-Point and Sanjay Gandhi’s Five-Point programs. Today, the Hindutva agenda is being rapidly implemented under the cover of development and cultural nationalism. Under this agenda, minorities, Dalits and tribals are harassed in many ways. On the whole, a formally democratic system had taken over after the Emergency, but now a rapid erosion of democratic institutions, customs and beliefs is taking place. Civil rights are secretly being nibbled on, and at an unprecedented rate.

The Covid-19 epidemic is also a ruse for the government to continuously take arbitrary decisions, ignore Parliament and the Constitution and deprive people of their rights. In the name of controlling the virus, the country stands converted into a police state of lockdowns, curfews and deprivations. Privacy and civil liberties have been hijacked. In most cases, the judiciary is either a mute spectator or, after the slightest pretence of interference, starts singing in the voice of the government.

During the Emergency, the Congress party ruled almost all the states and the Center. Despite this, the Opposition was not as weak as now. Opposition parties had a connection with the people, and Opposition leaders had credibility. Therefore, the government put all Opposition leaders and activists in jails under stringent laws like the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA). The BJP is in power in more than half the states alone or with its allies and it is ruling at the Center. Still, the strength of the country’s largest opposition party, the Congress, is only continuously eroding. It is a victim of weak willpower and leadership crisis. The Congress was in power so long that the rites of struggle could never flourish in it. Not only is its relationship with street-level activism broken, but it also is unable to play the role of an effective Opposition in Parliament. The condition of other Opposition parties is no better. This dire situation is also instrumental in the government becoming autocratic.

However, now it is not as easy to impose the Emergency on the country as it was 46 years ago. To suspend the Fundamental Rights of citizens in the name of an internal crisis requires a two-thirds majority in the Legislative Assemblies of two-thirds of states, other than Parliament. Yet, we must not forget the apprehensions expressed by senior BJP leader LK Advani on the 40th anniversary of the Emergency, a year after Modi became the Prime Minister. In an interview with The Indian Express newspaper, Advani had cautioned that the forces capable of crushing democracy are more powerful today than ever. According to him, “If the Emergency could happen with so many of us being there [who were opposed to it], I don’t rule it out totally in the future. I don’t think the last word on this has been said. Of course, no one can do it easily, because of the experience we have had in 1975-77. But that it cannot happen again—I will not say that. It could be that fundamental liberties are curtailed again…”

Advani said this six years ago, but it is palpably more relevant today than in 2015. The country is in a worse and more frightening phase than the Emergency.

(The author is a senior freelance journalist. Article courtesy: Newsclick.)

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Review: A Comprehensive Look Back at the Emergency Which Holds Important Lessons for Today

Sidharth Bhatia

Indians woke up on June 26, 1975, to learn that a national emergency had been declared. Opposition leaders and others were jailed, habeas corpus was suspended and newspapers would be censored. Today marks the 46th year of that announcement.

For an event so seminal in the history of Independent India, which changed the political history of the country, the Emergency of 1975-77 has not received the attention it deserves.

The anniversary comes and goes and very few books have been published on it. Immediately after the elections were announced in January 1977, a number of quickie books hit the market, from political pundits of the day, and even some from Indira Gandhi’s alleged friends, promising the ‘inside story’ of the whole period. None of these books are available today.

Now comes a study, ‘India’s First Dictatorship: The Emergency, 1975–1977’, jointly authored by the veteran India scholar Christophe Jaffrelot of Sciences Po, France, and Pratinav Anil, a PhD from Oxford. The guiding hand of Jaffrelot is visible in the sheer scale and scope of the book. Jaffrelot is not just a long time observer of India and its political processes, he has a granular understanding of its many social dynamics and he remains up to date in his assessment of what goes on even in this current period.

As such, the reader expects a definitive account, not just a round up of what happened in those 19 months, but also an assessment of what exactly happened during those months.

The overarching theme of the book is based on two strands – Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian tendencies and Jayaprakash Narayan’s fight to save democracy, both in keeping with the impression built up over the years, though they do raise the question of their motivations.

Jaffrelot and Anil go deep into some of the excesses and perhaps their most detailed and fascinating account is the ‘slum clean up’ drive in the capital, begun by Jagmohan as the vice-chairman of the Delhi Development Authority and then encouraged by Sanjay Gandhi, who wanted to ‘beautify’ the capital by getting rid of the homes of the poor.

The Baron Haussman-loving Jagmohan wanted to follow his hero’s urban renewal plan.

“The DDA chief was known to make no bones about his elitism. As he saw it, he was not just battling Delhi’s inner-city slums but “slum culture” itself. In a book aimed at extenuating his role in the Emergency, Jagmohan writes that “the real problem of slums is not taking people out of slums, but slums out of people.” And the solution? Cart off “a sizeable portion of the poor” to the peripheries of cities. While getting a job in one of the “resettlement colonies” might prove difficult—Jagmohan refers to this only en passant— the poor would come to love them nonetheless, for they provide “fresh air, light, pure water, and greenery”, “balance … our needs and resources”, and “narrow … the gap between urban and rural living.”

This team went after the ‘slum’ dwellers, a vast number of them from the minority community, with a vengeance. Combine that with forced sterilisations – another of the young Gandhi’s pet projects – and it becomes clear that whatever Indira Gandhi’s objectives and concerns and even though it was her son pushing ahead with his own agenda with the cooperation of Congress politicians and loyal bureaucrats, Indira Gandhi approved of sterilisation of the masses.

“The novelty of Sanjay’s drive lay rather in the sheer scale on which the programme was carried out; in the use of myriad government departments to diffuse the policy; and in offloading the duties of the state onto citizens, “ the authors write.

The authors delve deeply into the Shah Commission, that was set up by the Janata government to inquire into the excesses during the Emergency. Almost all who were called – ministers, police officers, civil servants and one-time Indira Gandhi loyalists, appeared and gave their accounts of how she, through a handful of people (R.K. Dhawan, her secretary, being a prominent one), gave orders to everyone.

Erstwhile ministers like H.R. Gokhale and T.A. Pai tried to absolve themselves, the latter saying he had protested at some decision, but a clear picture of her authoritarianism began to appear. Many blamed Sanjay Gandhi for the excesses.

The Shah Commission report went nowhere. The government could not actually prove any specific allegation and by then, she was garnering a lot of sympathy from people who felt she was being targeted—Mrs Gandhi exploited this by saying it was a witchhunt. It was known that the Janata Party leaders, including Morarji Desai and the socialists had personal antipathy towards her. Jayaprakash Narayan was anguished at the infighting in the Janata Party, and the personal ambitions of its leaders to become the prime minister. The government just couldn’t prosecute her.

When she came back to power in 1980, she quietly buried the report. Today, no one remembers the report at all.

While writing in detail about the Emergency and what exactly happened, the authors ask a pertinent and important question:

“All the same, the Emergency was lifted after eighteen months. The third part of the book attempts to account for this puzzle. Why did Mrs Gandhi announce a snap election in 1977? Certainly, opposition to the regime played no role in the decision. For, as we show in Chapter 9, the media and the judiciary were an inadequate counterbalance to the Emergency, their dissidence effortlessly thwarted by Mrs Gandhi’s censors and wardens. The largely dismal performance of the fourth estate, in particular, was a truth captured well by Advani’s wry taunt: “When you were merely asked to bend, you chose to crawl.”81 But the opposition fared no better: most of its components, including the Sangh Parivar, oscillated between resistance and capitulation, proving utterly incapable of sustained and effective mobilisation. Indeed, in stark contrast to the received narratives of daring acts of courage and literary heroism, popular in Hindu nationalist as in liberal lore, the picture that emerges in these pages is one of chaos and confusion, of distrustful leaders gunning for one another and ever ready to cut a deal with Delhi’s rulers.”

Jaffrelot and Anil offer a few hypotheses that account for the lifting of the Emergency::

“…[F]oreign pressure, directly and indirectly applied; Mrs Gandhi’s mea culpa, induced by the realisation that Sanjay had gone too far and become too violent in implementing the Emergency’s programmes; and, more importantly perhaps, her self-assurance, her certainty that no one could defeat her at the polls.”

But while all these may be part of her decision, they preclude a further possibility: that deep down, she was a democrat, and conscious of being Nehru’s daughter. Certainly, the question about what would her father say, what may have troubled her – even if it did not stop her from imposing it in the first place. She may have felt that it had gone too far and she needed to hear the voice of the people. Certainly, she accepted the result without question and stepped down, a triumph for the country’s democratic tradition and the robustness of its constitution.

The Congress won 154 seats, mainly in the south, while the Janata Party swept other parts of India, garnering 295 seats. Three years later, the party came roaring back with 353, while the Janata Party got an abject 31, and the Janata Party (Secular), won in 41 seats.

But what of Jayaprakash Narayan?

What were his motivations and tendencies and what made him come out of a long retirement and take up a political cause, no matter if he stayed out of ‘politics’? In the Indian scheme of things, not entering the electoral fray and ‘tainting’ oneself with politics and ambition is a virtue in itself. Indians admire the idea of abnegation, of man who does not display personal ambition. But politics is much more than joining a party and standing for elections. The Navnirman movement in Gujarat and Bihar was as much political as against corruption; and the next stage was inevitably against the Congress government at the Centre and more significantly, against Indira Gandhi.

Jayaprakash Narayan

The political angle to JP becomes clear soon enough.

“Branching out from agrarian issues in Bihar, he then tried making his voice felt on the national scene by adopting various conservative positions: party politics should be replaced by a “coalition government” of all parties, Hindi imposed on the South, bank nationalisation reversed, and Mrs Gandhi ejected from office for her alliance with communists,” the authors write.

He then offered his own prescription of what needed to be done.

“But what, in real terms, was his “total revolution”? Narayan’s pronouncements suggest it was nothing more than a complex of antinomies designed to triangulate on every possible issue. On the one hand it was a “non-partisan” movement, not “anti-Congress as such”; on the other it sought a grand coalition to overthrow the grand old party: “the Right and the Left must realise that their enemy is the same.” This revolution was different from the “Marxian” one because it forsook “coercive means”; nevertheless, one of its key features was “the paralysing of the administration”. The demand for “direct democracy” came along with calls for enhancing the powers of unelected sangharsh samitis—”watchdogs” that could “ask an MLA to resign if he goes wrong.”

“What would the post-revolutionary utopia look like? At times Narayan suggests all production would be “brought under collective ownership and control”; just a few pages later, “collectivisation” and the “redistribution of land” are deemed futile because such ideas “might require 60 to 70 per cent of the population to be repressed [sic]. But the inconsistencies mattered little. Narayan was frank that his was a politics without ideological content: “what was wanted was the end of all ideologies”, he once said to the Statesman. Some aspects of his revolutionary ideology, however, remained consistent through his oeuvre, especially those relating to targets and political élan: the problems facing society (the black market, inflation, corruption, “inefficiency”); contempt for the academy (abolish degrees, flush out students from the universities and send them to toil in the countryside); the reliance on Hindu metaphors (“purifying” and “cleansing” the body politic with personal “sacrifices”); and appeals to the Indian genius (the problem with “present political and administrative institutions” was that they were “foreign transplantations”; the focus on “industrialisation and technology … in western society” was unsuited to India).”

Clearly, anti-Indiraism was the mainstay of what he was hoping to achieve and Morarji Desai, who had always disliked her, too had professed something similar. In 1974, much before the declaration of the Emergency, Narayan’s movement had already demanded the Gandhi’s resignation. The extent of Jayaprakash’s recklessness was seen when he at a public meeting on June 25, 1975, he said it was time for “state employees to tender their resignations en masse, he thundered, enjoining the armed forces to make common cause with his movement.”

This is an astounding understatement the authors make for what amounted to a call for an insurrection. Throughout the book, Jayaprakash Narayan is presented as naïve but well-meaning, a somewhat sympathetic view of a man so viscerally driven to finish off Indira Gandhi that it become personal.

More problematic was Narayan’s close association and bond with the RSS, which the authors acknowledge. ‘The Sangh Parivar: The Subtext of the JP Movement?’ ask the authors – and it is obvious what the answer is.

“In short they (The RSS) were untouchables no more. The JP Movement is “a force for the good of the society”, the RSS’ sarsanghchalak (head) Balasaheb Deoras declared in December 1974. The encomium was reciprocated: “if you are a fascist, then I too am a fascist”, Narayan told an RSS crowd in March 1975.61 He was only half joking.”

The RSS has always had an instrumental and deeply cynical approach to politics. At the same time, it remains unbending on its ideology. Its ultimate therefore remains the same – to find a way to expand and gain acceptance even if not respectabality. Its members, and those of its political arm, the BJP (then the Jan Sangh) are always prepared to share a platform with socialists, the Communists and anybody, so long as it grows. The anti-corruption campaign launched by V.P. Singh, the next avatar of the Jayaprakash Narayan template, is a good example. The Sangh itself doesn’t make any effort to change its ways.

“What was remarkable was that this new acceptability had involved precious little compromise on the part of the Parivar. There was no sign of moderation, however defined. The RSS weekly, the Organiser, continued peddling conspiracy theories in its editorials. In early January 1975, for instance, it suggested that Nehru had had M.K. Gandhi “mysteriously bumped off” in 1948 in a move to consolidate power. Similarly, Mrs Gandhi was blamed for having Sangh president Deendayal Upadhyaya “brutally murdered” in 1968.”

While they were in jail during the emergency, Sangh leaders, including its supremo Balasaheb Deoras, wrote letters to Indira Gandhi praising her fulsomely. Subramaniam Swamy has alleged that Atal Vajpayee had done the same.

At the end of it all, Indira Gandhi came to power, Jayaprakash Narayan died a broken and disillusioned man, the RSS became stronger and no one was really held accountable for the excesses of the Emergency.

What came out of those 19 months? Large sections of media, the corporate sector, the intelligentsia were shown as ready to genuflect towards the powers that be. The judiciary and the bureaucracy were flexible, even if there were stray voices of dissent. There were brave voices all over the country, but they were crushed. It may sound somewhat familiar to us today.

It is ironical that those who claimed to have resisted the Emergency are now turning out to be so adept at implementing the same tactics, only behind the fig leaf of a democratic victory.

So, was the Emergency a parenthesis a turning point or more of the same, is the questions the authors raise at the end. The underprivileged and marginalised continue to be crushed, and the privileged happily side with the establishment. Have Indians come to value their freedom and their rights?

“There appears to be no linear deepening of democracy in the country.” Instead of questioning those in power, we now seem to be questioning democracy itself.

(Courtesy: The Wire.)