Thick in the midst of it, as a 14-year-old I did not immediately sense the political and cultural disaster that was the declaration of a National Emergency by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on this day 42 years ago.
The most it meant for us in that ballpark age group was that buses and trains ran on time which by itself had no personal impact either because when you are in your teens what did matter whether anything was on time?
The most enduring, almost Orwellian slogan that I remember even today from the time was the Gujarati version of the possibly original in Hindi that said, “Athaag parishram no koi vikalp nathi.” (There is no alternative to hard (relentless) work.) It was somewhat reminiscent of Jawaharlal Nehru’s user-friendly “Aram haram hai” (Leisure is abhorrent). Of course, Nehru’s exhortation had a noble context considering that it was his way to inspire a recently freedom country.
The emergency as a political menace, intimidation and imprisonment was not something that reached the teenage shores. One vaguely remembers adults discussing in its implications in dark tones but, like I said, it had no personal consequence for me and others of my age.
It was only a little later that one began to get a measure of what a terrible development it was in India’s early history that a leader drunk on power and paranoia had chosen to suspend basic civil liberties and jail opponents. If the declaration of a national emergency was one bookend, for me the second bookend came five years almost to the day later when on June 23, 1980 Sanjay Gandhi, the embodiment of all that was terrible in the emergency, died in a plane crash after an aerobatic maneuver. I distinctly remember I was in a shop in Ahmedabad with my uncle Bhaskerray and brother Manoj when a radio announcement came. Bhaskerray was asking the shop-owner whether the “sopari’ (betel nut) he was offering was “genuine Sevardhani”, which was apparently the best variety. Before the shop-owner could answer the broadcast interrupted the flow of that rather banal conversation.
It strikes me how extreme political actions such as an Emergency can be age and demographic-specific in terms of their importance and impact. The adults then were deeply worried about its implications while teenagers like me were only marginally affected, if at all. Snatches of conversations about how bank clerks scrambled to show up at sharp 9 a.m. were a source of much amusement for us even though one never went to a bank. It was only in retrospect that one paid attention to what a sinister turn it represented in India’s modern history. Buses and trains running on time and bank clerks showing up sharp at 9 a.m. and behaving with unprecedented politeness were just misleading manifestations of the broader and deeper motive of the leadership.
Even as I was concluding this little post, I remembered having written one two years ago to mark the 40th anniversary of Emergency. I might as well republish it even though it contains much of the same thing as today.
The Emergency in India happened so long ago that some people now remember it with fond nostalgia. It was yesterday, 40 years ago (June 25, 1975) that then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, feeling besieged by perceived and real threats to her power, imposed it.
I was 14 then and remember it vividly albeit mostly as billboards full of lofty big brotherly exhortations. One of them, which I remember even now, was in the Gujarati language and went “Athaag parishram no koi vikalp nathi. (There is no alternative to hard (relentless) work.”
The effects of Gandhi’s brazen political excess on the ground were rather useful. Although I had no bank account then because I had no money (I have a bank account now but still no money), I remember that the otherwise lazy bank employees came to work at sharp 9 a.m. and actually worked. I also remember the local post office and its staff in Sharda Nagar, Ahmedabad, becoming courteous to the point of being obsequious. Buses and trains were cleaner and ran on time and bus conductors returned precise change while train ticket black marketers disappeared.
If one uses only these trivial and unintended consequences, then the Emergency was a good thing and deserves to cherished with fondness. The problem is it was not and it never is. It was the response of a deeply paranoid leader who thought the rest of the country was ganging up against her. Political opponents were jailed, dissent ruthlessly stifled, newspapers shockingly censored and political power grabbed and concentrated in a handful of, well, hands of those close to Prime Minister Gandhi, predominantly her out-of-control son, Sanjay. Sanjay Gandhi became a notorious symbol of a mass and forced sterilization campaign. “Nasbandhi” (Vasectomy) became the most widely understood and dreaded word of the era across India. Coercive vasectomies became the order of the day. The imposition the Emergency seemed to resoundingly prove Western doomsayers that India was incapable of and undeserving of democracy.
Tragically and as it inevitably happens during such times, large sections of the Indian middle class seemed to have taken to the Emergency rather well because in their limited world things appeared to have improved dramatically. So what if a few politicians were picked up during midnight raids and dumped in prison and newspapers were censored as long buses and train ran on time and police constables stopped asking for bribes? I am speculating here but I think Indira Gandhi sensed that the Emergency would work well, even if it for a limited period, within the middle class.
For Indians of my age then, the Emergency meant something distant and of next to no consequence. I sensed things were wrong but couldn’t quite put my finger on it. The billboards, or hoardings are they are called, in Ahmedabad that carried portraits of Sanjay Gandhi and Indira Gandhi did not seem particularly ominous. I vaguely recall some neighbor using the declaration of the Emergency as an effective child-disciplining tactic. It was a version of “Tofan karish to Sanjay Gandhi pakdi jashe (If you misbehave, Sanjay Gandhi will arrest you).” The Emergency came handy for the middle class parents and as if getting arrested by Sanjay Gandhi’s goons was a picnic.
To mark the anniversary there has been a debate in India whether an emergency can be declared again. Lal Krishna Advani, the deeply slighted grandee of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), who was a prominent opponent of the Emergency and was in fact jailed, thinks so. Of course, it is always possible that a power-drunk paranoid leader might do so but I think it would be infinitely more difficult to make it effective even if someone was a dick enough to impose it.
For the record there is nothing even remotely redeeming about such an imposition even if it means buses and trains run on time because all it means that you are reaching on time a place where there is no freedom and civil liberties are severely curtailed. So stop looking for ways to mitigate it. There are none.