Blinded by devotion to power and her son
Wednesday is the 50th anniversary of Indira Gandhi's Emergency. Her most authoritative and profound biographer, Srinath Raghavan, whose book Indira Gandhi and the Years That Transformed India is published this month, believes the Emergency was 'the single most traumatic experience in independent India's political history'. Today let's remind ourselves of how terrible it was. The truth is, as Srinath Raghavan's book points out, Indira Gandhi never thought very highly of democracy
The cold facts of the Emergency are chilling; 34,988 people were detained under the Maintenance of Internal Security Act whilst 75,818 were arrested under the Defence of India rules; practically the entire Opposition was jailed; the press was censored; the Constitution brutally amended; and even the judiciary accepted that the right to life had been suspended.
At the height of the Emergency, LK Advani wrote in his diary that Indian democracy was over and done with. At the time, most people would have agreed with him.
There can be little doubt that the Emergency was declared to protect Gandhi's political career after the Allahabad High Court struck down her election and the Supreme Court only gave her a conditional stay. Her claim that it was necessary because the Opposition was trying to paralyse the government and Jayaprakash Narayan had called on the Army and the police to disobey orders was just a trumped-up excuse.
Raghavan believes the actual declaration of the Emergency on June 25, 1975 was 'a coup d'etat'. First, under the Constitution there can only be one emergency at a time and in 1975 there was already an external emergency going back to the Bangladesh war of 1971.
Second, under Article 352, the President can only proclaim an emergency on the written recommendation of the council of ministers. President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed didn't wait for that. He did it at the Prime Minister's personal request.
Third, the mass arrests and the cutting of power to newspaper establishments on the night of June 25 /26 'had no legal basis and were done entirely at the behest of the Prime Minister'.
At this point let's ask if Indira Gandhi was justified in claiming there was an 'imminent threat to the security of India'? The Intelligence Bureau had not submitted any such report nor did the state governments convey such information to the Union home ministry. So, did Indira Gandhi make up and manufacture this alleged internal threat? It seems like it.
The truth is, as Raghavan's book points out, Indira Gandhi never thought very highly of democracy. She once wrote to the violinist Yehudi Menuhin: 'Democracy is not an end. It is merely a system by which one proceeds towards the goal. Hence democracy cannot be more important than the progress, unity or survival of the country.'
Most people remember the Emergency for the two campaigns it is closely associated with – sterilisation and slum clearance. Both had at their head Gandhi's younger son, Sanjay. And both destroyed the credibility of the Emergency and Gandhi's personal reputation.
Yet so dependent was Indira Gandhi on Sanjay that she was blind to this. She's even on record claiming he was like an elder brother. Certainly, she considered him her strongest and most loyal supporter after the Allahabad High Court verdict. As her principal secretary, PN Haksar, points out: 'She was absolutely blind as far as that boy was concerned.'
To everyone's astonishment, in January 1977 Indira Gandhi called elections even though they weren't due for another year. It led to the collapse of her rule and the end of the Emergency. Did she do it because she thought she could win and legitimise the Emergency? Or was this a way of accepting it was a mistake and getting off the tiger's back?
The truth is Indira Gandhi never apologised for the Emergency nor accepted it was a mistake. She only regretted aspects of it which she considered excesses. Asked by Paul Brass on March 26, 1978: 'Would you have done anything differently in relation to the Emergency?', her answer began with the word 'No'. It couldn't have been more pointed.
Karan Thapar is the author of Devil's Advocate: The Untold Story. The views expressed are personal
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National leaders like Morarji Desai, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, LK Advani, Charan Singh, Chandra Shekhar, were all taken in. As were student leaders including Prakash Karat and Sitaram Yechury of the CPM, and Arun Jaitley of the BJP. George Fernandes was captured after some months of being underground. His supporter Snehalatha Reddy was thrown into prison, tortured and died shortly after, while on parole. P Rajan, a student at the Regional Engineering College, Calicut, was arrested by the police in Kerala on March 1, 1976. He was tortured to death in custody. His body was never found. This sequence, transposed over what I had learnt of jailings during the British Raj, made the prison the ugliest symbol of the State for me. It also made the prison something I wanted to see and get to know in the course of my work as a civil servant. Had I become a district collector that chance would have come to me organically. But as it happened, that coveted position eluded me in my career in the IAS. I came to see the inside of a jail only years later when, working in West Bengal, I did what Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asked all governors to do. I visited correctional homes, as jails were by then called. In one, a bearded young man came up to me and said in Hindustani: 'Huzoor, I am a Pakistani. I wanted to visit Ajmer Sharif for a minnat (vow). I got a visa and came. But my mistake was I came alone. I was detained on the suspicion of being a terrorist. I want to make no request or complaint to you. I only want to thank you. By arresting me and putting me in this jail, India has done me a favour. I have found a copy of the Holy Quran in the library here and have read it for the first time from beginning to end…' I did not know what to say to him. Was he being ironic, sarcastic, genuinely appreciative? In any case, he was being totally intellectual. In another correctional home, as I was leaving, completely torn by the spectacle of elderly women sentenced for dowry killings, and by a section cruelly called pagal ward (ward of the mad), I was accosted by a young Bengali inmate. 'Saer,' he said breathlessly, in Bangla, 'Our library here… it needs a regular supply of good new books.' He could have been a final year student in any of our universities. In yet another, the inmates made a plain request: 'Can we have, just for the day, Sir, a TV installed to enable us to watch the Wimbledon Open?' This was done, to the great delight of the set there that might have included murderers, rapists, thieves. But all of them were for that day, tennis fans no different from other free followers of Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer. We who are 'out' do not know the story of those who are 'in'. India is under no Emergency today. But is the horror of Emergency horrors, the jail, call it by whatever name, not a grim reality? 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It can announce a chapter-turn in India's penological history by releasing all so-called political detenus, and by saying detaining persons for their political views, when not accompanied by incitement to violence, or hatred, will henceforth not happen. More, it can alter for all time, our prison profile, turning our jails into serious centres for state-of-the-art correctional services across physical and mental counselling, personality therapy, re-orientation, where there is no question of custodial torture, where prisoner-on-prisoner violence and perversions are erased, where in-jail crimes with outside collaboration, especially in drugs-abuse, are a thing of the past. 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