Emergency - then and now

 

When Indira Gandhi imposed a draconian Emergency on India 50 years ago on this day (25 June), I had just completed the first train journey of my life and started an entirely different kind of life. I had just joined a seminary as what they call an ‘aspirant’. One of the notice boards of the seminary always displayed the front page of an English newspaper – The Indian Express, if I recall correctly. I was only beginning to read English publications and so the headlines about Emergency didn’t really catch my attention. Since no one discussed politics in the seminary, it took me all of six months to understand the severity of the situation in the country. When I was travelling back home for Christmas vacation, the posters on the roadsides caught my attention. That’s how I began to take note of what was happening in the name of Emergency.

A 15-year-old schoolboy doesn’t really understand the demise of democracy. It took me a few years and a lot of hindsight to realise the gravity of the atrocities perpetrated by people like Sanjay Gandhi (Indira’s son) on the common people, especially in the North Indian states. There was much censorship, apart from cruelties like forced sterilisation of men and women. ‘Shut up and do your work’ [Naavadakku Paniyedukku] was the rule in my state of Kerala. Anyone who dared to criticise the government even subtly was arrested. Some just vanished without a trace. 

The Emergency lasted nearly two years and did all possible damage it could to democracy. When the general elections were held in 1977, Indira Gandhi and her party lost pathetically. Kerala was one of the few states that voted her party in spite of the Emergency. Probably the people of Kerala liked the temporary eradication of corruption from the state’s government offices. For two years, the bureaucrats in the state really “shut up and did their work.” So, Emergency had a good side too!

Now, 50 years later, most Malayalam political periodicals carry numerous articles written by well-known writers of the state on Emergency. One thing I noticed about most of these articles is the comparison between Indira Gandhi’s declared Emergency and Narendra Modi’s undeclared Emergency. Most writers I read these days are of the opinion that Modi has strangulated democracy for all practical purposes.

What Modi has built up is a Hindu nation in which non-Hindus are being victimised not so subtly. All public institutions of the country including the judiciary and academia have been Hindu-ised, or more correctly Hindutva-ised. The media – print, visual as well as social – have become Modi’s sycophants. Absolute falsehoods are foisted on the nation masqueraded as supreme truths. If Indira Gandhi’s Emergency lasted only about two years, Modi’s Emergency has entered the eleventh year, as one writer said. If India returned to a fully functional democracy after Indira’s Emergency, Modi’s has transmuted India into a Hindu nation and any return seems unlikely.

Suppression of dissent is the biggest damage done by Modi to democracy. Journalists, activists, students, and opposition leaders are harassed, surveilled, arrested, or even charged under draconian laws like UAPA and sedition. Decision-making is extremely centralised. Personality cult and projection of the leader as infallible are reminiscent of Indira’s Emergency. There is no effective Opposition in the country. Many opposition MLAs and MPs have been coerced into switching sides through inducement or pressure in what came to be known as Operation Lotus.

The Deshabhimani’s (Marxist newspaper in Malayalam) headline on 26 June 1975 was ‘From Semi-Fascism to Full Fascism: Emergency Declared’. Today’s Deshabhimani has reproduced that page on the cover as if to remind us that we have more than ‘Full Fascism’ now in the country. 

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