Here's why Emergency won't ever happen again
The Emergency is justified today in certain quarters as being the natural outcome of the political turbulence of mid-1970s.
The full force of the Emergency, declared by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on June 25/26, 1975, struck me one day at dawn.
Two CID men in safari suits rang our doorbell. Ushered in, after showing their official identification cards, they told my bemused parents that they had come to interrogate me.
I was still a student but had begun writing articles for The Times of India and other newspapers, including the New York-based India Abroad. One particular piece might have drawn the ire of the government censors.
Woken up and bleary-eyed, I explained to the two CID officers in plain clothes that they were wasting their time. They told me they had received a tip-off about my articles and asked me to be careful what I would write in future. “People are being jailed for writing against the Emergency,” they warned me before leaving.
Over 1,00,000 people were in fact jailed. Among them were Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Jayaprakash Narayan, LK Advani and a young Arun Jaitley. Also jailed were those whose names will strike a bell in today’s Opposition — HD Deve Gowda, Lalu Prasad Yadav and MK Stalin.
The Emergency is justified today in certain quarters as being the natural outcome of the political turbulence of mid-1970s. Many students deliberating on careers at the time were drawn to journalism, social and public sectors so that they could fight the anti-democratic forces that had unleashed the draconian Emergency.
It was a defining moment in India’s short history, just 28 years after Independence. India Today was launched months after the Emergency was proclaimed.
For those who see a semblance of the Emergency in today’s polarised times, a reality check is necessary. During the Emergency, the Constitution was suspended, the Supreme Court superseded and personal liberties based on the principle of habeas corpus subverted.
To provide a sense of how draconian the Emergency was, The Hindu wrote this in August 2017:
“Over 40 years after the Supreme Court’s darkest hour when it said citizens have no right to life and liberty during the Emergency period, a nine-judge Bench condemned the decision in the infamous ADM Jabalpur case, better known as the habeas corpus case, as ‘seriously flawed’. Of the five judges on that Bench, only Justice H R Khanna had dissented with the majority opinion of then Chief Justice of India AN Ray and Justices MH Beg, YV Chandrachud and PN Bhagwati. Justice Khanna’s dissent cost him the chief justiceship. He was superseded by Justice Beg, following which Justice Khanna resigned. Now, for the first time in the Supreme Court’s history, a nine-judge Bench, led by Chief Justice of India JS Khehar, officially condemned the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in the habeas corpus case. The judgment authored by Justice DY Chandrachud, who incidentally is the son of Justice YV Chandrachud, ‘expressly overruled’ the 1976 majority judgment and removed a long-pending taint on the Court’s history as a people’s champion.”
Those who compare the intolerance of today with the Emergency are either ignorant or biased. Journalists and activists mock Prime Minister Narendra Modi daily. Websites are full of stories on cow vigilantism, Dalit lynchings and other crimes, attributing them to the policies of the Modi government.
And that is as it should be: it is how free media in a democracy functions.
Freedom of speech, crushed under the Emergency, has never been stronger. The Modi government has been slow to condemn many incidents of egregious violence against Dalits, Muslims and others. Some are fake news. Some are not. In most cases though, they are met with silence from the government. It is left to a BJP MP or MLA to provide a loose canon justification.
But none of this portends a draconian state, simply a clueless state. Obviously, in 2018 we must set the bar high.
Till 1975-77, the two Emergency years, there had never been a non-Congress government. In the 30 years between 1947 and 1977, Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi had been prime ministers for a collective 28 years. India knew no worthwhile Opposition. The government in the only Communist-ruled state, Kerala, had been dismissed in 1959 and President’s rule was imposed. (Mrs Gandhi was Congress president then – Nehru had sown the seed of dynastic politics.)
What lessons can the Modi government learn from the Emergency that tore Indian democracy into shreds 43 years ago this day?
First, while our democratic institutions and civil society are too strong today to let it happen again, they must be further strengthened, not weakened. A high bar demands that governance must be more transparent. The appointment of a Lokpal and CICs has long been kept in abeyance. That damages the government’s credibility, casts aspersions on its intent, and undermines the institutions of democracy.
Second, the judiciary must be less opaque. It is today caught in a war of attrition with the government over the memorandum of procedure (MoP). When trust between two key pillars of a democracy – the Executive and the Judiciary – erodes, democracy is weakened.
Third, inclusive governance must be a priority. Polarisation for votes has long been a Congress project. It collared the minority vote bank in the 1980s before regional parties got into the act and usurped a part of that vote bank. The BJP has learnt from the Congress.
LK Advani’s rath yatras from 1990 onwards (many of which a young Narendra Modi organised) polarised Hindu votes, allowing the BJP to form the first full-term non-Congress government led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 1999 (the 1998-99 BJP-led government was shortlived).
As India becomes more prosperous, as poverty levels fall, religious polarisation will offer diminishing returns. Millennials have a different set of aspirations from their parents. They want jobs. They are religious but not dogmatic. The BJP must reinvent itself or it will soon be seen as a party of grumpy old men, full of grievances and self-pity.
The RSS, too, must reform. Glorifying India’s past is fine. But we live in the present and must mould the future. Hold symposia on Indic culture by all means. But also hold symposia on space research, electric vehicles, artificial intelligence and the exciting new discoveries in life sciences that could dramatically alter human lives in the next two decades.
The Emergency of 1975-77 happened because democracy was hijacked by the dynastic arrogance of Indira Gandhi. Sycophants like Dev Kant Barooah, who was the party president at that time, declared “India is Indira, Indira is India”. Modi must avoid such flattery from within his ranks. He is a self-declared pradhan sevak. His second term, if he gets it, will decide the course India takes for the next decade.
The 43rd anniversary of the Emergency should not be an opportunity to just score political points over the Congress, but reflect on how the BJP government can return to first principles: less government, more governance.