Emergency: 40 years
The
19 months since Indira Gandhi’s proclamation of the Emergency (it was her
decision though proclaimed by Fakruddin Ali Ahmed as required by the
Constitution) late in the night on June 25, 1975, were perhaps the darkest
phase of our young democracy. It should, however, be added that the few weeks, between
January 18, 1977, when she announced her decision to hold elections, and March 20,
1977 when the election results began trickling in, confirmed that the people of
India cared for political democracy most. The summary defeat of the Congress
party, when Indira and her son Sanjay too were defeated was beyond anyone’s
expectation. And this forced Indira to hold a cabinet meet on March 21, 1977 to
recommend withdrawal of the Emergency.
A
lot has happened since then and the Constitution amendments have rendered it
impossible for any regime to repeat what Indira Gandhi could do on June 25,
1975. Article 352 now makes it imperative for a written resolution by the
Cabinet before the President proclaims Emergency; and `Internal Disturbance’
has since been replaced with `armed rebellion’ as condition precedent for such
a declaration. Article 359 has been amended to ensure that the Right to legal
remedy (under Article 32 and 226) shall not be suspended insofar as the
freedoms guaranteed under Article 20 and 21 are concerned. In other words, the
Writ of Habeas Corpus, which was denied by the infamous decision by the
majority in the ADM Jabalpur vs S.K.Shukla (when Justice H.R.Khanna was the
lone dissenter) during the Emergency, shall now hold good even during an
Emergency.
In
short, the democratic edifice stands stronger today insofar as political rights
are concerned and this indeed was the outcome of the mandate of March 1977 and
the Constitution (44th Amendment) Act, 1979. The Janata regime, that
learnt its lessons from the 19 months of Emergency, ensured this much.
However,
the Emergency was not merely about tampering with the Constitution and
indiscriminate arrests and denial of political democracy. The 19 months also
witnessed the might of the Indian state against its people, especially the
poor. The Turkman Gate action, for instance, was about throwing out the poor,
forced t live in urban slums, to ensure that the city was cleansed of dirt and
squalor. Such forced evictions were carried out during the Emergency elsewhere
too and such poor people voted against
Indira and her party, in March 1977, to redeem democracy in India.
In
the four decades since the intervening night of June 25/26, 1075 and many
changes in the regime in New Delhi and in the States, we do find slum dwellers
evicted with impunity. And the Supreme Court’s judgment in the Olga Tellis case
(AIR-1986-SC-180), has since been rendered meaningless by successive regimes
and even the judiciary. The violence unleashed on people to ensure their
displacement is indeed a matter of fact detail of our own times. Emma Tarlo, in
her 2003 book (Emma Tarlo, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of India’s
Emergency, Permanent Black, Delhi, 2003) reminds us of this part of the
Emergency and yet we have not cared to learn; and it may not be an exaggeration
to hold that this dark aspect of the Emergency lingers, with approval from
politicos across the spectrum (and not just the Indira dynasty) to this day.
For a generation
that was born after the dark age, is indeed, oblivious of this and is even one
that approves that. We may not have had another Emergency, thanks to the
changes in the Constitution. But then, one of its dark faces persist without
such official curtailment of the Fundamental Rights; It happened in New Delhi
in the early 1980s (while preparing for the Asian Games) and as recently for
making Delhi look good for the Common Wealth Games. It has been happening in
the Narmada valley for over two decades now; in almost all our cities where
farmers are dispossessed of their land for building houses and fantasy parks;
and in the forests where adivasis are forced out of their forests to facilitate
handing over the mines and the minerals to exploitation. And in all these
instances, we hear the rulers declaring any resistance to such atrocities as
`anti—national and even as the largest threat to the nation.
This is
reminiscent of Indira’s declaration that those who opposed her were enemies of
the nation and that the Emergency was needed to defend the nation! It is here
that we will also have to take stock of the media in our times, 40 years after
the Emergency. True that the media, as it is now, cannot be dealt with the same
way as the Indira Gandhi regime could during the Emergency. Technology today
has ensured this. 24 X 7 TV now brings developments to the drawing rooms and
the possibility of beaming visuals from anywhere in the world to anywhere in
India will ensure that such largescale arrests (over a lakh men and women
detained across the country without specific charges and held under Preventive
Detention Laws) cannot be kept away from the people as could the regime do in
1975-77. Similarly, the internet media has shown that such measures will not
work.
Contrast this
with the Baroda Dynamite Conspiracy case: George Fernandes and his comrades,
then, had to attempt smuggling of 500 Low Power Transmitters that they intended
to locate in various parts of the country and intervene into the AIR sound
waves in a synchronized manner to transmit sound waves with messages against
the Emergency! They were caught before doing that and sent up for trial. One
does not have to do all that in the event of another Emergency thanks to the
advances in satellite broadcast! But then, it is mere wishful thinking given
the corporate influence over the media and the nexus with the liberalized
Indian state as such.
The fact that
the media today is so much under corporate control is a fact that raises the
spectre of propaganda control in a different way than we saw some 40 years ago.
And the fact that the concerns of evictions and mass displacement of the people
or the life in the slums are no longer the concerns of our mainstream media is
something that conveys that we may no need an emergency to achieve what the
Sanjay-Jagmohan-Maneka kinds did during the Emergency. And the Emergency will
have to be remembered not only because it curtailed political freedom but for
the fact that such attacks on political freedom also meant denial of social and
economic freedom.
Some recent
experience, with the present regime, and the use of the media, apparently free
from state control, is worth discussion in this context. The fact that the
media took the nation for a ride celebrating the public spectacle of yoga on
June 21, 2015 is a case in point. Public institutions, including universities
and schools, were goaded to observe the International Yoga Day (not very
different from such other days as Valentines Day or the Mothers Day, etc.,) with
the media playing it up should remind us of one of the Emergency’s horror
stories: The Compulsory Sterilisation programme when hundreds of thousands of
young men and women were herded into camps by the cheer leaders of the
Emergency regime.
The point is
that it cannot be denied that even four decades after the Emergency, there is
no institutional mechanism to resist such designs by a regime to impose a
certain idea upon the people; if the compulsory sterilization programme thus
pushed during the Emergency was bad, the manner in which the people are told
about the virtues of yoga (let it be clarified that this writer has no issues against
yoga and has practiced it at various points of time) and forced institutions
across the country to organize events on one day where its members are goaded
to fall in line is indeed undemocratic. That the media industry earned
substantial amounts of money by carrying advertisements of this and even turned
the event at the India Gate into a spectacle is certainly something that
reminds one of the Emergency.
Here are links to my books where I have discussed the Emergency in detaile:
posted by Krishna Ananth at
6:46 PM
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