In my blogs this month, I have been consciously trying to recall the happenings of the Emergency inflicted on the country on June 26, 1975. Two events that took place on June 12, 1975 led to the Emergency.
The National Herald, the daily paper in Delhi started by Pandit Nehru, wrote an editorial then praising the one-party system in African states like Tanzania as being no less virile than the multi-party system. The paper observed: “By stressing the need for a strong Centre, the PM has pointed out the strength of Indian democracy. A weak Centre threatens the country’s unity, integrity, and very survival of freedom. She has posed the most important question: If the country’s freedom does not survive, how can democracy survive?”
Numerous books have been written on the Emergency of 1975. Most of these have been written by Mrs Gandhi’s critics. These days, I am going through an interesting book written by an admirer of hers, Uma Vasudev, a well known journalist who, shortly before the imposition of the Emergency, had an appreciative book published about her with the title ‘Indira Gandhi – Revolution in restraint’.
But the Emergency and all that happened during that period deeply disturbed her. The upshot was yet another book about the same leader, titled ‘Two faces of Indira Gandhi’.
The book opens with this passage: “Sitting out in the political cold in the hills of Pachmarhi in June 1976, six hundred miles away from India’s capital, Pandit Dwarka Prasad Mishra, Indira Gandhi’s master tactician and confidant in her battle for intra-party supremacy in 1967-69, related an anecdote to an administrator friend calling on him: ‘There was a political prisoner I knew in the thirties who was so fond of his pet cat that he was allowed to keep it with him in his cell. One day, his nerves cracked and he beat the cat blue. The cat sat cowering in a corner, not knowing where to turn, for the cell door was locked and it was trapped. Each time its one-time protector would come near, it would shrink against the wall and whimper. The jailer heard the cries and came running. As soon as the cell door flew open, the cat, instead of rushing out, leapt at her owner’s throat in such ferocious anger that he nearly died before they could release its grip. The moral of the story is that if you want to hit the enemy, you must leave a way out for him. Otherwise his despair can make him a killer.’
“The reference was Maoist, but the application was nearer home. It was one year since Indira Gandhi had declared an internal emergency in India on June 26, 1975. The opposition elite was still in jail, including such big names as Jayaprakash Narayan, Morarji Desai, Atal Behari Vajpayee, Raj Narain, L K Advani, and Piloo Mody — together with men from her own Congress Party. Censorship of the media was still in force. Argument and dissent were mouthed in whispers, while rumour aggravated fear. The politician and the intellectual subsisted in uneasy confrontation, the area of direct knowledge became narrower and narrower, and truth seemed to have more than the seven colours of the rainbow.”
When Uma Vasudev met me after my release and had a long discussion about the Emergency happenings, The National Herald’s advocacy of a one-party setup came up in the discussion. Vasudev said to me: But is it not true that, on August 25, the same newspaper wrote: “The PM has made it clear in recent days that there will be no attempt to establish a one-party system in this country and that she is not thinking in terms of a constituent assembly or a new Constitution...”
Uma Vasudev, after citing this statement of the Prime Minister, asked me: “What happened between August 11 and August 25?”
My immediate answer was: “Mujib’s assassination on August 15.” I added: “That gave her a shock; and made her realise that the kernel of Democracy must be maintained.”
(Excerpts from BJP leader L K Advani’s blog, posted on June 19)
