Kaun Banega Next Prez

ramana · 06-29-2007, 10:58 PM

From Tribune, June 29, 2007
QUOTEEmergency, 32 years on
Slow variation in public perception
by Inder Malhotra 

COME the last week of June and thoughts of many Indians turn to Indira Gandhiâs Emergency whose 32nd anniversary fell of Tuesday. It was, unquestionably, a hammer-blow to Indian democracy and a nineteen-month nightmare for those who had to live through it. With a single stroke of a pliable Presidentâs pen, the worldâs largest democracy was converted into a tin-pot dictatorship.

Repression across the land, particularly in North India, was harsh and humiliating. At least 100, 000 people, including almost all Opposition leaders and some Congressmen, were hauled to jail without trial. All fundamental rights were in abeyance, including the right to life. Niren Dey, Attorney-General of that day, chillingly told a stunned Supreme Court bench that as long as the Emergency lasted, there was no remedy âif a policeman chose to shoot a citizenâ. Sadly, there was no dearth of judges willing to be suborned and safe. As for the performance of the Press - there was no private TV channel then - Mr L. K. Advaniâs famous taunt, âyou chose to crawl when you were asked only to bendâ, says it all.

My starkest memory of the day the heavy lid of the Emergency was clamped on India is that there was not a squeak of protest against it. The Cabinet, kept in the dark about the event, met very early the next morning meekly to endorse the fait accompli. What a startling contrast this was to the crescendo of noise, lasting many months, that those agitating for Indiraâs removal had been making. The rallying point of the seemingly powerful agitation was the respected Gandhian leader, Jayaprakash Narayan, better known as JP. He, all Opposition leaders and their serried ranks were confident that after the Allahabad High Courtâs judgment and its âconditional stayâ by the Supreme Court, she had no option but to throw in the towel. They eloquently said so at a public meeting in Delhi on the evening of June 25 at which excitement ran sky-high. Hours later, when they were roused from their beds and hauled to prison, they did not know what had hit them.

Surprisingly, the Emergency remained reasonably popular for quite a while or was submitted to with varying degrees of sullenness. Deep anger against it, though no great resistance to it, began only after city slums started to be demolished and their inhabitants âresettledâ far away. Infinitely worse was Sanjay Gandhiâs drive to control the population by coercing men of all ages to undergo vasectomies, especially in Delhi and northern states. In the words of a U.P. Congressman during the 1977 poll, the vasectomies had become for the Congress the âgreased cartridges of 1857â.

The country hailed Indira Gandhiâs defeat â both she and her son Sanjay lost personally, too â as a ârevolution by the ballot boxâ. If so, it turned out to be the revolution that was devoured by its children. The Janata Party that replaced her regime had come to power amidst tremendous goodwill. But so abysmal was its performance and so deadly the dissensions within it, that the Janata fell like ninepins and Indira Gandhi was spectacularly back in power in 33 months flat. However, she may have regained the peopleâs vote but the Indian intelligentsia remained bitterly and irreconcilably hostile to her even after her
assassination in 1984.

No wonder then that year after year, on the Emergencyâs anniversary, she was lambasted in the strongest possible terms. Even two years ago on June 26, Mr Advani not only lashed out against her but also alleged, rather absurdly, that the United Progressive Alliance government of Dr Manmohan Singh was developing an âemergency mindsetâ and might declare one soon. To his great embarrassment, Mr George Fernandes, the convener of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance, and Mr Chandra Shekhar, who also spent the entire Emergency period in jail, flatly contradicted Mr Advani.

This was the first major indication of the gradual change in the publicâs view of the Emergency and Indira Gandhi that has since escalated. In public opinion poll after public opinion poll, she has been voted the âbest Prime Minister India has hadâ. Could this have happened had the Indian intelligentsia remained as critical of the Emergency as it used to be? Doubtless, the perspective on the Emergency has changed materially, and for good reasons even though some might yet dispute this. 

The most important reason is that two-thirds of todayâs Indians were born in and after 1975. They know little about the Emergency and care even less. Secondly, the entirely polemical and partisan writings on the Emergency that held sway for long years have yielded place to some sober, scholarly work. Consequently, while not forgetting the unmerited and often horrible sufferings inflicted on people, thinking persons have begun to recognise that if Indira Gandhi was sinning, politically speaking, she was also being sinned against. Even some of his admirers have started accepting that saintly J P was wrong in appealing to the Army and the police to disobey the Indira government.

Objective and eminent historians such as Bipan Chandra have quoted chapter and verse to prove that both the Prime Minister and J P were equally responsible for the imposition of the Emergency and what happened during it. Each had lost confidence in the good faith of the other completely. Both stretched the democratic norms, from different ends, so hard that something was bound to give.

In 2000, the leading sociologist, Andre Beteille, one of the staunch opponents of the Emergency, disputed the view of the âlarge sections of the intelligentsiaâ that Indira was the âvillainâ of the Emergency, and JP its âheroâ. He argued instead that the âanarchyâ promoted by J P in the name of âtotal revolutionâ and the âabuse of powerâ by the Prime Minister and her son Sanjay were but the âtwo sides of the same coinâ. There is much greater acceptance of his view today than then.

Three other factors are even more crucial. First, Indira Gandhi redeemed herself by ordering elections in 1977, entirely on her own, and gracefully yielding power after losing them. Second, ugly though the Emergency was, India in 1975-77 was not at all comparable to Germany under Hitler, Russia under Stalin, China under Mao, or Pakistan under Zia or even Musharraf.

Overriding all this is that the Emergency just cannot be re-imposed. For, 1975-77 proved that India would be governed â to the extent it can be governed â democratically or not at all.


Some thing to keep in mind wrt to the Presidential elections now around the corner as I said above in the cartoon post.

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