Mr Jaitley is right; Emergency is here again!

Arun Jaitley, union minister without portfolio, has been tweeting a lot lately on the Emergency of June 1975.

I was a student when Indira Gandhi imposed the Emergency on India. My father then was a government servant. None in my family were political activists or journalists so we escaped the excesses of those dark days of India. The Turkman gate incident, the forcible sterilisations, the police excesses were not even known to any of us living in smaller towns with no access to information except what appeared in local newspapers and, as we now know, much of that was censored.

All that my family cared about then was that the trains ran on time, they did not have to bribe the railway clerks for tickets or even the municipal officer to fix a leaky pipe. All offices opened on time, files moved swiftly, the nation seemed quite on track.

When Mrs Gandhi lifted the Emergency in 1977, I remember my father loudly regretting it could not have gone on long enough for the culture of work discipline to be ingrained permanently into Indians. But there was still a sense of relief that it was over, and the nation could relax.

It is only in later years, as a journalist, particularly on the 25th anniversary of the Emergency as I prepared to write a commemorative piece and spoke to a vast section of the people, that the subject began to interest me. But not just the Emergency per se. The reasons behind it and, more particularly, Mrs Gandhi’s reasons for imposing and lifting it for no reason at all.

I am still no expert on the Emergency but this much I can understand – anarchic and chaotic conditions had been created in the country prior to the Emergency. Jaiprakash Narayan emerged from nowhere to ask the police and the army to revolt against the government. Was that to be countenanced in a democracy?

In later years, I met the son of an aide of Mrs Gandhi who said while his father greatly disapproved of the imposition of the Emergency, he had almost bought into her explanation that there were powers afoot who wanted to destabilise the Asian subcontinent and were beginning with India and a possible assassination of Mrs Gandhi because she was fiercely defending the nation’s political and economic sovereignty and could not be played for a western stooge.

May be she had intelligence reports about who was targetting whom. But in the months and years after the Emergency, starting with the killing of Mujibur Rehman in Bangladesh—something Mrs Gandhi had warned him about but he refused to take her seriously—there have been so many assassinations, including that of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, that his father began to believe the conspiracy theory completely.

For, everyone so assassinated by whichever hand in whichever country, was fiercely committed to the sovereignty of his or her own nation and refused to give in to the foreign powers beyond a point. Rajiv Gandhi was the last Indian prime minister in this genre and had to pay the price like his mother, I was told by a leading lawyer, nonetheless proud of the fact that it was only the lawyers who had fought back against the Emergency and did not make it easy for Mrs Gandhi.

Yes, we must never forget the dark days of the Emergency but when Jaitley tweeted, “The lesson from the Emergency is that if you curb free speech and allow only propaganda, you become the first victim of propaganda because you start believing that your own propaganda is the truth and the full truth,” I had a feeling of dèja vù without even having lived through the excesses of the Emergency.

For isn’t there a curb on free speech today – particularly when certain news reports that are inimical to certain people in power are pulled off the websites of leading newspapers and channels within hours of their publication?

“Believing that your own propaganda is the truth and the full truth"? Like the BJP believed it would sweep Karnataka or win 150 seats in Gujarat?

Yet another tweet reinforced that feeling of dèja vù.

“The most disturbing observation of the Emergency was when the government turned dictatorial, the entire system caved in. The supreme court became subservient, the media became sycophantic.”

For someone who did not really experience all this at the time, it is interesting to be educated by Jaitley on what an Emergency really feels like.

But all that I can say now is that at least there was an official Emergency imposed then through provisions of the Constitution. It was lifted and elections called for. A subsequent government amended the Constitution and made It impossible to impose that kind of an Emergency again. But, if I take Jaitley at his words, it does feel as though I am living through an Emergency again, plus a lot more hate and communal and religious bigotry that were not even heard of during the actual Emergency.

So, in Arun Jaitley's words again, I would like to remind myself and all others, “Democracy lies in the hearts of men and women. When it dies there, no Constitution can save it and no judge can protect it."

It is my solemn pledge to Jaitley and my beloved country - I will not allow democracy to die in my heart. As a media person, I will not be sycophantic ever towards anybody. And as a fellow Indian, I will fight bitterly to prevent the country from being taken over by dark forces again!