A hammerblow to democracy: June 25, 1975: A look back

ALMOST every American of a certain age remembers what he or she was doing on the fateful Friday when the sudden, and shocking, news of President John F. Kennedy's assassination had come in. In this country the same is true about the infamous Emergency with which Indira Gandhi stunned India and the world 25 years ago this day. It was a defining, and infinitely depressing, moment. With a single stroke of the President's pen, the largest democracy on earth was shoved down to the level of tin-pot dictatorships then so ubiquitous in the Third World. Indian democracy was "suspended" though not yet abolished. However, no one knew or could foresee what would follow.

Ironically, most Indians first heard of what was afoot well after the heavy lid of repression had been slammed on the country and half an hour before Indira Gandhi took to the radio to announce that the President "has declared a state of Emergency. There is no need to panic". It was a BBC World Service broadcast at seven- thirty on the morning of June 26 that informed them of large- scale arrests during the night. The most prominent of those taken into custody were Jayaprakash Narayan, better known as J.P., who had become the rallying point of a powerful, nationwide movement for Indira Gandhi's removal from office, and Morarji Desai, her main rival and, at one time, Deputy Prime Minister in her Cabinet.

To the Indian listeners of the BBC, this seemed a traumatic anti- climax. For, the J.P. movement, as it was called, had apparently gained great momentum in preceding months. This was so, partly because of the Prime Minister's style of governance, especially her intolerance of any dissent, and partly because of massive economic discontent, caused by drought, inflation and mismanagment on the one hand and by a four-fold increase in world oil prices on the other. Above all, the political and moral authority of Mrs. Gandhi, at its peak after the liberation of Bangladesh, had slumped precipitately. Principally because of the burgeoning corruption and abuse of authority by her acolytes in a party that had turned into an "inverted pyramid" - totally dependent on her, undisturbed by the complete absence of inner- party democracy and happy to wallow in crass, competitive sycophancy of "The Leader".

After the Allahabad High Court's judgment on June 12, accompanied by the Congress party's defeat in the Gujarat Assembly elections (which a reluctant Indira Gandhi had held only because of a protest fast by Desai), her delirious critics were convinced that her legal authority, too, had collapsed. For the court had convicted her of "corrupt electoral practices" and debarred her from elective office for six years. J.P. and his gleeful colleagues were confident that she had no option but to resign. When she gave no indication of doing so, they stepped up their ongoing agitation against her steeply.

On June 24, the Supreme Court, going by established precedents, gave the Prime Minister only conditional stay of the Allahabad verdict, not the unconditional one she had sought. J.P., his cohorts and countless followers were now elated. The next day at an exuberant mass rally in New Delhi's Ramlila Grounds, he announced a plan of daily demonstrations in not merely Delhi but also every State capital and district headquarters until Indira Gandhi threw in the towel. He then renewed his appeal to the Army, the police and the bureaucracy "to refuse to obey Indira" and "abide by the Constitution instead". Morarji Desai went much further and told the Italian journalist, Ms. Oriana Fallaci: "we intend to overthrow her, to force her to resign. For good ... Thousands of us will surround her house and prevent her from going out ... night and day."

Only hours later J.P., Desai and thousands of their followers were hit by the counter-stroke of the Emergency that Indira Gandhi had planned and honed in rigorous secrecy, with the help of only a few trusted aides, bypassing ministers and bureaucrats concerned, and executed across the country with rare efficiency. Interestingly, opposition leaders were not the only ones to be hauled to jail. So were several prominent figures in Indira's Gandhi own party, such as Mr. Chandra Shekhar, Mr. Krishan Kant, now Vice-President, Mr. Ram Dhan et al. She suspected that they were part of the J.P.-led "conspiracy" against her.

The perpetrators of the Emergency, with the Prime Minister's second, and favourite, son, Sanjay, in the lead, also saw to it that the news of the midnight knocks and mass arrests did not appear in the morning newspapers. This they did by the simple expedient of cutting off electric supply to New Delhi's Fleet Street. The rest, as the saying goes, is history.

Numerous issues relating to the 19-month nightmare of the Emergency haunt the nation still. These include the shabby manoeuvre of presenting the Emergency to the Cabinet as a fait accompli and the acceptance of this dubious procedure by a pliant President. Unfortunately, available space does not permit a discussion of all of them. Only the more essential ones can be taken up.

The first of these is whether Indira Gandhi imposed the Emergency for self-serving reasons or whether this drastic and disastrous event was the inevitable outcome of grave social, economic and political crises resulting in "systemic failure". There are quite a few votaries of the latter view. This has indeed been argued, assiduously and persuasively, by Professor P.N. Dhar, Secretary to the Prime Minister (1970-77), and then Indira Gandhi's chief official adviser through the relevant period. Ironically, he himself had been kept out of the loop and learnt of the impending proclamation virtually at Zero Hour. Even so, the points he has made in his recent book, Indira Gandhi, the 'Emergency', And Indian Democracy (Oxford University Press) cannot be dismissed out of hand. Overall, however, his case is fatally flawed and smacks of special pleading.

In any case, stark facts speak loudly for themselves. No matter what the intensity of the crisis confronting the country, Indira Gandhi and her Government had ample means in their legal armoury to deal with it. This was underscored by the ruthlessness with which she crushed the railway strike masterminded by Mr. George Fernandes with the avowed objective of "paralysing" and "starving" the country. Nor did she have any difficulty in cracking down comprehensively on smugglers and underworld dons when she chose to. Unfortunately for her, these remedies could not work in the case of the Allahabad judgment.

After this verdict, particularly after the conditional stay granted by the apex court, the best course open to her was gracefully to step down temporarily and return to her high office after winning her appeal against the judgment. There was hardly any chance of the apex court upholding the High Court verdict because the offences of which she was "convicted" were trivial and technical. According to James Cameron in The Guardian, it was "as though a head of government should go to the block for a parking ticket". Back home, however, hardly anyone was willing to concede this. Anti-Indira sentiment was at a crescendo. The cry across the land was that she must quit.

For her part, Indira Gandhi was not ready to give up power even for a few days, leave alone a few months needed by the Supreme Court to pronounce on her appeal. All those anxious to preserve their own perches in the power-structure resting solely on the pillar of Indira Gandhi's personality, begged of her not to leave even momentarily, arguing that this was precisely what her and the country's "enemies" wanted. Above all, Sanjay Gandhi, by now the second most powerful person in India, ordained that the "nonsensical" idea of temporary withdrawal must not even be mentioned.

It was this, not the system's fragility or failure, that made the imposition of the "internal" Emergency (in addition to the external Emergency proclaimed at the start of the 1971 war and then still in force) absolutely unavoidable. To cling to power and office, Indira Gandhi had to lock up opposition leaders and gag the Press, a large section of which had been attacking her as virulently as J.P. and Desai. At that time there was no electronic media other than the wholly Government-controlled All India Radio and Doordarshan.

The proposition, being heard to this day, that Indira Gandhi was justified in clamping the Emergency but wrong to subject the Press to censorship is absurd. For, an Emergency without Press censorship was not what Indira Gandhi needed or wanted. As Mr. Khushwant Singh has recorded, she had tersely told him, in response to his plea for lifting the curbs on the Press while keeping the Emergency alive: "There can be no Emergency without censorship".

In this context the voice of dispassionate but competent, foreign observers of the Indian scene should also be heeded. For instance, Granville Austin, in his much acclaimed book, Working A Democratic Constitution: The Indian Experience, (OUP, 2000) has summed up the situation succinctly. The imposition of the Emergency, he says, "was not utterly without justification. Opposition parties' frustration ... had boiled over. The two sides' behaviour had combined to stretch democracy until it snapped ... (However), the Emergency's purposes were shown not to be those claimed for it. It was not to preserve democracy but to stop it in its tracks. It was proclaimed to protect the political office of one individual." (Emphasis mine).

The unabashedly personal motivation behind the Emergency's imposition had a symbiotic relationship with an equally unashamed drive to ensure dynastic succession. Within a few months of the June 25 hammer blow, Sanjay Gandhi had been well and truly anointed as the "heir apparent". It is arguable that this would not have been possible without the Emergency. His ways were rude and crude. He had a knack of attracting riff-raff and roughnecks to him. But none of this prevented Congressmen, high and low, from fawning on him and swearing "eternal loyalty" to his mother and her family. No wonder, Prof. Rajni Kothari wrote that for Indira Gandhi, the Emergency was "an instrument for personal survival and family aggrandisement". Sanjay died within months of his mother's triumphant return to power in 1980, but the cult of the dynasty lives on.

The second major question about the Emergency, to which no satisfactory answer is available even a quarter of a century later, revolves around the immediate reaction to Emergency or rather the utter lack of it. For over a year, India had reverberated with the war cries of those who said that since Indira Gandhi was "destroying democracy", they were determined to "fight her to the finish". But when the blow actually fell and it looked as if democracy had been destroyed, there was not even a squeak, leave alone resistance, anywhere in this vast land.

As they say, not a dog barked. The Emergency's apparent acceptance was no less stunning than its abrupt proclamation. Many people were, of course, sullen. In private, they expressed their frustration and anger, but in public they went about their jobs as if nothing had happened. On the other hand, there was no dearth of those only too happy to jump on the Emergency's bandwagon. Some of these worthies had only a few weeks earlier ostentatiously joined J.P.'s famous "march on Parliament".

According to Mr. Surendra Mohan, socialist leader and one of J.P.'s confidants, the supremo of the anti-Indira movement was constantly telling leaders of the opposition parties to "unite immediately or you will have to unite in jail". When some of them demurred, J.P. told them that it was Indira Gandhi who had advised the founder-president of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, to set up a one-party state in his country (which he had done in February 1975) and she was quite capable of repeating the experiment herself. Evidently, J.P. had lost confidence in Indira Gandhi's good faith as completely as she had lost in his.

In fact, at a conclave, presided over by J.P. and attended by Mr. Mohan, the idea of starting a "jail bharo (fill the jails") agitation, with a view to forestalling any unexpected move by the Prime Minister, was mooted. It was dropped partly because of the feeling that not many might want to go to prison needlessly and partly because of the complacent belief that Indira Gandhi was at the end of her tether already.

Not only did the J.P. movement turn into a pricked balloon as soon as Indira Gandhi did act, but also a surprisingly large number of people, not particularly sympathetic to the Prime Minister, welcomed the Emergency during its initial phase at least. Their relief over the return of normal life after the almost daily chaos caused by unending marches, rallies, strikes, sit-ins and so on was genuine. This feeling was reinforced when Government employees started taking their work seriously and fewer tea breaks. The more foolish of Indira Gandhi's spin doctors, anxious to publicise the "gains of the Emergency", even started bragging that the trains were running on time!

Things, of course, changed after a while. Word about the excesses of the Emergency began to circulate; in the absence of authentic information, the wildest of rumours were believed. There was nothing wild or exaggerated, however, about what the bush telegraph said concerning the police firing at Delhi's Turkman Gate where slums were demolished and those living in them "relocated". Soon thereafter, gunfire was heard also at Muzaffarnagar, a town in Uttar Pradesh, 100 km away from the national capital. Above all, forced vasectomies, in pursuance of one of the five points in Sanjay's personal agenda, were to spread both fear and revulsion across North India. I will return to this subject presently but first it is necessary to review what Indira Gandhi tried to do with the Emergency and how the various institutions of the Indian State behaved during those troubled and agonising times.

Indira Gandhi's father and grandfather were both lawyers, Motilal Nehru greatly more eminent than his son, Jawaharlal Nehru. But she was totally innocent of matters legal and constitutional, and was content to go by the advice of "trusted experts". On the issue of Emergency, Mr. Siddhartha Shankar Ray, then Chief Minister of West Bengal, was her only legal "guide". From all accounts, he never told her that something that may be technically legal could yet be illegitimate. Why her legendary political instinct failed to warn her of this is more surprising. Maybe the objective of staying on in power was so overriding that nothing else mattered.

It is all the more remarkable, therefore, that all through those 19 months, she was very particular that everything she did was seen to be within the Constitution. At the same time, she recklessly amended the Constitution itself to suit her purpose of building protective walls around herself and her office. She made the Emergency proclamation and concomitant ordinances immune from judicial review. She amended the Representation of the People Act and two other laws with retrospective effect to ensure that the Supreme Court was left with no option but to overturn the Allahabad verdict. For, the future, she took away from the Supreme Court the authority to adjudicate election disputes relating to the President, the Vice-President, the Prime Minister and the Speaker of the Lok Sabha and transferred it to "a body to be appointed by Parliament". As Nayantara Sahgal commented later, the inclusion of the three other dignitaries was akin to "light musical accompaniment to the sombre theme of Prime Minister power".

Mercifully, a profoundly more shocking amendment, though approved by the Rajya Sabha as soon as it was placed before it on August 9, 1975, was allowed to lapse. Had it been enacted, anyone holding the offices of President, Prime Minister and Governor of a State would have been granted total immunity from criminal and civil proceedings for any act committed in official or personal capacity, whether before assuming the relevant office or while holding it! Quite clearly, the decision to quietly drop this measure, the Fortieth Amendment, could have been taken by Indira Gandhi alone. But there is evidence to show that she was influenced by the argument of Mr. C. Subramaniam and some others that the public might think she had "some skeletons in her cupboard". She was also conscious that foreign reaction to this measure would be extremely negative.

To divert attention from the monstrosity that she had perpetrated, Indira Gandhi made the most of her Twenty-Point Programme, to which Sanjay added his five points, and never stopped talking of how the Emergency would become an engine of social justice and change, indeed a boon for the poor. At the end of the day nothing much happened, however. On the contrary, the credibility of her programme and her own took a sharp knock because of her constantly shifting positions and claims.

For example, she at first advertised the existence of non- Congress(I) Governments in Tamil Nadu and Gujarat as proof that the Emergency did not mean her dictatorship, only an attempt to "put back on the track" the Indian democracy that had got "derailed". Within months she declared that these States were the "two islands of indiscipline" that needed to be sorted out. She imposed President's rule in Tamil Nadu and brought down the Janata Front ministry in Ahmedabad by the time-honoured technique of effecting defections from it.

A quick glance now on the performance of the various institutions that underpin Indian democracy, uphold the Constitution and provide the republic with its infra-structure. The Press can be dealt with tersely. For, there is no need to add to Mr. L. K. Advani's famous taunt to pen-pushers: "You were asked only to bend, but you chose to crawl". That Mr. Advani's Home Ministry now wants the media, on pain of imprisonment, to forsake professional ethics and toe the Government's line on terrorism is a different matter.

With all due respect, it must also be recorded that the highest Judiciary, too, disappointed the country. Some High Courts showed courage, most notably in releasing detenus, despite the suspension of fundamental rights including the right of habeas corpus. But when all the habeas corpus cases were bunched together and transferred to a five-member bench of the Supreme Court, things changed.

The Emergency regime's contention was simple, if also brutal. There was absolutely no remedy available, under Article 21 or any other, to those in preventive detention even if they were put behind bars through an order made in bad faith because all fundamental rights were suspended for the duration. When told that in addition to the Constitutional provisions, there was such a thing as the "rule of law", the Attorney-General, Niren De, argued that the rule of law existed "only within the four corners of the Constitution; natural rights did not exist outside it".

Thereupon Mr. Justice H. R. Khanna put it to him that since Article 21 guaranteed both life and liberty, surely it could not be suggested that there would be no remedy if a policeman chose to shoot a citizen. The Attorney-General replied: "Consistent with my position, My Lord, not so long as the Emergency lasts. It shocks my conscience, it may shock yours, but there is no remedy".

Despite this chilling exchange, four of the five judges upheld the Government's position; only Justice Khanna dissented. To add insult to injury, one of the four judges, Mr. M. H. Beg, made the oft-quoted remark that was as fatuous as it was gratuitous. "We understand," he wrote, "that the care and concern bestowed by the State authorities upon the welfare of the detenus who are well- housed, well-fed and well-treated, is almost maternal". Later, Mr. Beg became the Chief Justice.

Such distinguished and respected experts on Indian affairs as the late Myron Weiner have written that the Emergency was "popular" with the civil servants because it had greatly enhanced their powers. This is only partially true and basically a misreading of a rather complex situation. Another American scholar who has also studied the role of the civil service during the Emergency, Dr. Stanley H. Heginbotham, has come to the contrary conclusion that the "new regime struck more directly at the interests of the civil service". About "early retirements" of civil servants, especially in Andhra Pradesh, he noted that those "forced out because of inefficiency and dubious integrity" were, in fact, "singled out because of their lack of enthusiasm for the Emergency regime".

To be sure, there was no death of civil servants, senior and junior, who bent over backwards to do the bidding of the Emergency regime with even greater zeal than was expected of them. With an eye on the main chance, many of them ingratiated themselves with Sanjay Gandhi, accurately perceived as the fountainhead of authority. But the number of these zealots, proportionate to the size of the bureaucracy, was relatively small, perhaps 15 to 20 per cent.

An equal percentage of civil servants, resentful of the Emergency and conscious of the standards expected of them, quietly tried to mitigate the Emergency's crudities as best they could. The mass of bureaucrats in between was content to coast along with the prevailing wind, rationalising its attitude by invoking the bureaucratic imperative of obeying the law and lawful orders.

There is no doubt, however, that the Emergency had the most damaging and dangerous, effect of politicising the civil services down the line and destroying whatever cohesion and esprit de corps had existed earlier. Sadly, this malaise, like several other pernicious legacies of the Emergency era such as arbitrary arrests, torture, custodial deaths, has worsened since then. The situation in the States may be more appalling but it is bad enough at the Centre. Nor is anyone trying to do anything about it.

Politicisation and degeneration of the police and para-military forces have surpassed even the havoc played with the civil services. These, particularly the Border Security Force (BSF), and the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) were Indira Gandhi's main instruments for making the Emergency tick. But as a result of the "accountability" that followed during the Janata regime and subsequent developments, including the prolonged involvement of the Central Police Organisations in countering insurgency, they are very badly run down. If the present or any future Government is foolish enough to want to take recourse to Emergency, it will find that it has no instrument left to enforce it.

And this brings me to a critically important, though usually ignored, fact about the Emergency: the total aloofness from it of the Army and the other two armed forces. Regrettably, the Army did become an issue in the Emergency, thanks to J.P.'s unwise appeals to it "disobey" Indira Gandhi. She and her supporters made full use of this to defend her indefensible action. However, at no stage, and in no way, did the Army become a participant in anything to do with the Emergency or politics. Thus, if it disappointed those who expected it to heed J.P.'s call, it also disappointed others who were hoping that it would be supportive of Indira Gandhi's Emergency. This admirably apolitical character of the Indian military has to be cherished and preserved.

The excesses of the Emergency are well known. Over 1,00,000 were jailed without trial. This was twice the number of arrests during the 1942 Quit India movement throughout the subcontinent. Twenty custodial deaths took place; a Kerala detenu, Rajan, disappeared without a trace. In the name of beautification of cities and towns, poor people were uprooted from their dwellings. A fear psychosis took over the country. Since authoritarianism breeds arrogance, those clothed in temporary authority settled many a personal score. Corruption increased by leaps and bounds. It was the terror unleashed by vasectomies that became Indira Gandhi's Nemesis and contributed the most to her humiliating defeat in the 1977 elections.

Mr. Justice J. C. Shah, who was asked to inquire into the Emergency, has painstakingly recorded all this and more. However, the trouble with the Shah Commission's three reports is best described in the words of Mr. Arun Shourie, the well-known crusading journalist who has never been an admirer of Indira Gandhi's and is now a Minister of State in Mr. Vajpayee's Government. When the Shah Commission was about to submit its third and final report, Mr. Shourie wrote that it "was ending its tenure on a sad note. By now it has become an embarrassment - not to Mrs. Gandhi but to the Janata Government."

To cut a long story short, it was the Janata Government that, because of its incompetence, constant internecine quarrels that eventually led to its ignominious collapse, and its manic persecution of Indira Gandhi, that made the country forget the Emergency and start praying for her return to power. And return to power she did in just about a 1,000 days after she was supposed to have been, in Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee's words, "consigned to the dustbin of history".

In a biography of Indira Gandhi's that I wrote in the Eighties (Hodder & Stoughton, 1989), I had taken full note of her many services to the country during her dominance of the national scene for 20 years. On the Emergency, however, I had concluded that its imposition was "her worst and most catastrophic mistake, indeed her cardinal sin". Eleven years on I see no reason to revise this view, if only because the poison the Emergency had injected into the Indian system has not yet been fully flushed out of the body politic. Indeed, some of the Emergency's dangerous fall-out - bitter polarisation, often along personal lines; politics of vendetta and even hatred; and authoritarian control of most of the political parties that run the world's most populous democracy - has got aggravated rather than mitigated over the years.

Even so, in a 25-year perspective it should be possible to take a more objective view of the rather limited peculiarly Indian nature of the Emergency than was the case earlier, especially during its immediate aftermath. For while the Emergency was doubtless cruel, it was also clumsy. It had many twist and turns, some of them bizarre.

On the tenth anniversary of the event in June 1985, in a special issue of Sunday, the late Nikhil Chakravartty, one of the most respected journalists of our times and uncompromising opponent of the Emergency, wrote an illuminating article that merits recalling. In it, he emphasised that terrible things did happen during the Emergency, when democracy was suspended. But, he added, "they did not shake the foundations" of Indian democracy or the Constitution. He also took note of the virtual absence of any resistance worth the name to this outrage, and debunked the tall claims to anti-Emergency "heroism" then being made. "The Baroda dynamite case was only a propaganda dynamite". The Emergency era, Chakravartty added, was not an "interlude of fascism".

Ugly and revolting the Emergency unquestionably was. But surely New Delhi in 1976 could not be compared to Berlin under Hitler, Moscow under Stalin, Beijing under Mao, Santiago under Pinochet and Islamabad under Zia Ul Huq.

Indira Gandhi deserves all the obloquy that has been heaped on her for tormenting India through her Emergency for the sake of personal power. But shouldn't she be given credit for holding elections when she did though she was under no visible compulsion to do so? On predictably losing the poll, she surrendered power gracefully, only to stage a spectacular comeback less than three years later. That is the stuff democracy with Indian characteristic seems to be made of.

INDER MALHOTRA

Inder Malhotra is a syndicated columnist and Nehru Fellow.

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