Brinda Karat writes: From Barinda to Comrade Rita: Underground resistance during the Emergency

Indian Express

4 hours ago

Fifty years ago, independent India had its first experience of dictatorship. Indira Gandhi's actions in the declaration of Emergency, suspension of fundamental rights, the ruthless suppression of all dissent and arrests of over 1,00,000 people revealed the fragility of our Constitution and institutions including the judiciary, and the dangerous consequences of the concentration of power. The all-out assault on democracy was done in the name of the 'national interest', to guard the nation against 'internal and external threats'. Fake nationalism is a convenient instrument for dictators.
Emergency was also a concerted assault on the working classes and led to the dismantling of regulations as well as rights, which were seen as fetters on capitalism. India's capitalists had been shaken by working-class struggles and militancy in the early 1970s. The historic railway workers' strike of 1974 was followed by a series of solidarity actions. Emergency eliminated the basic right to unionise, to protest, to strike — disarming the working classes. In an interview with The New York Times, J R D Tata, put it plainly: 'You can't imagine what we have gone through here — strikes, boycotts, demonstrations. Why, there were days I couldn't walk out of my office into the streets. The parliamentary system is not suited to our needs.' Exactly — dictatorship suits the ruling classes. We should not forget that the Emergency, by and large, was backed by Indian industry.
The day the Emergency was declared, I was in Kolkata preparing to shift to Delhi to work full-time in the trade unions. Our party offices in Kolkata had been raided and hundreds of comrades arrested. Chief Minister Siddhartha Shankar Ray had already unleashed a reign of terror against Bengal's communists, subverting the 1971 electoral mandate, which had favoured the CPI(M). It was no coincidence that he was Mrs Gandhi's main advisor in declaring the Emergency. Kolkata had been turned into a virtual police camp.
After a few weeks, I reached Delhi and had my first meeting with the textile workers of Birla Mill. We had to meet in a small office after the evening shift. The door was tightly shut, a single lamp burning so as not to attract attention. There were a dozen or so workers cramped into that small room. I was informed by the leader of the union that my place in Kolkata had been raided and that I had been advised to change my name. I was not surprised as many of the leaders of the Party who were underground had used my rented rooms for their meetings. But as for my name, there were several suggestions, but then Chandrabhan, a worker in the spinning department who had been a sometime wrestler in western Uttar Pradesh said firmly, 'We will call you Rita, a much easier name to pronounce than Barinda!' Despite my corrections, he never could pronounce my name as Brinda. So, for the years of the Emergency and some years more, I was known as Comrade Rita.
The workers identified the Emergency as a time of increased exploitation through a huge increase in their workload. The annual bonus had also been cut. I worked in the union which had members in all the five big textile mills in Delhi. Since there was a police deployment outside every mill, we could meet only secretly in the houses of workers. It is in these meetings that the first strike in Delhi was planned. The Mill management was introducing the four loom system without any compensation and with the threat of retrenchment for scores of workers. We planned it meticulously. We wrote out leaflets and used a 'cyclostyling' machine to print them, working through the night. We placed the leaflets at bus stops or places where we knew workers would pass. Our members would smuggle the leaflets into the mill and leave them on the machines. We would be informed that the workers would secretly put them in the hidden pockets of the cotton vests most of them wore during work. I would often spend the night at workers' homes, getting to know their families and learning about the importance of organising the women hearing their stories late into the night. The preparations for the strike were intense. The management introduced the new system with an increased workload during the night shift of April 18, 1976 — and the workers went on strike. Harish Chand Pant was the first worker who shouted 'hartal hartal'. There was a huge response — these were the unsung heroes who challenged Emergency's anti-worker face.
It was also in this period that the so-called beautification campaign was launched. Slums were razed, displacing thousands of poor families living around the mills and factories. I was there on the first day when the workers were forced to move to Nandnagari, a resettlement colony at least 25 kilometres away from their place of work. In the summer, it was like a desert, no water, no sanitation, just thousands of the poor covered in dust. There were other ways to relocate people, but the arrogance of power made it inhuman.
Then there were the sterilisation campaigns. The women would pull me into their small homes and fearfully tell me the sarkari person had come and given a time for their husbands to go to the sterilisation camp. There was terror in many of these places and I heard the harshest words used against Mrs Gandhi and her son Sanjay, seen as the architect of those terrible coercive campaigns.
We could feel the anger building up against the government in the slums and factories of Delhi. And so, another lesson I learnt was about the strength of a people united and determined.
The Emergency lasted just under two years. India recovered. And yet, it seems today that however awful it was at the time, it was just a dress rehearsal for what is happening today — the relentless measures to dilute and weaken our constitutional framework, the concentration of power, the handover of India's resources to the top business houses, the huge inequalities, the targeting of minority communities. Let the 50th anniversary of the Emergency be an occasion to renew our pledge to save India's democracy, India's Constitution.
The writer is a member of the CPI(M) Politburo