By Indranil Banerjea
Thirty-eight Junes ago was a midnight landmark in Indian history. Prime minister Indira Gandhi after the Allahabad High Court found her guilty of misusing government machinery during her election campaign — declared the Emergency. It is named the darkest period in India’s democracy. Civil liberties were shut down. The media was censored. Forcible population control and demolition of illegal tenements — in retrospect sensible moves as seen in China — as state policy stoked public anger.
With what is widely seen as the visual metaphor that describes the Emergency best — the Abu Abraham cartoon in the Indian Express of a naked president Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed signing the proclamation of the Emergency in his bathtub; rubber stamp politics and sycophancy became public part of Indian politics. The state became a definite hardcore entity, signalling the end of Nehru’s dreamy democracy. Re-examining the Emergency nearly four decades later, it is obvious that more than what happened during the time, it is what happened afterwards that is more enlightening.
The politics of protest, the first large scale national movement seen since Independence, became an accepted language in the Indian gestalt. Jayprakash Narayan filled the gap for a new Gandhi; only this time, the enemy was within. This defined the nature of all agitations to come; mass protest like the ones initiated by the gone-with-the-wind Anna Hazare caught middle class public opinion.
In Indira’s time, the middle class was a feeble force. The Emergency changed all that. Its end marked the beginning of a new social leadership, which is most visible today — the middle class as an influencer now leads the Modi charge against the Congress. Arvind Kejriwal, with his toothbrush moustache and auto rickshaw slogans, may be a caricature of individual protest, but he marks the beginning of a new age to come in Indian politics — the lone individual who takes on the state and is perceived as a gadfly with a sting, one that cannot be ignored.
With the Emergency, the Opposition came of age. It created many prime ministers of the future, from Morarji Desai, Chandra Shekhar to Atal Behari Vajpayee as their stature grew in Indira’s jails. The Emergency was Vajpayee’s baptism by fire; after his arrest and release, he started the ascent to statesmanship.
He was the only leader to achieve political success denied to his contemporaries: Desai was a cartoon who drank piss; Jagjivan Ram was the eternal prime minister in waiting; Charan Singh the kulak archipelago that crumbled and Chandra Shekhar, a puppet prime minister. Vajpayee merged the Jana Sangh with the Janata Party in 1977. The aftermath of the Emergency portend the blatantly opportunistic politics that would dominate the start of the 21st century; of grand alliances such as the NDA and UPA.
The Emergency changed the media, too. Sedate, sermonising editorialisation and ivory tower journalism were to give way for a new breed of journalists, who were aggressive, virulently irreverent and often personally provocative. The high decibel “nation wants to know” journalism was a delayed reaction by a stifled media to the Emergency. There are no holy cows anymore, and any attempts at censorship of even the social media are met with howls of protest. For the first time, the government fears the people.
The Emergency was a product of its times. In bed with socialism, the ethos of the Soviet Union was one of unmitigated state terror, which shaped Indira’s world view briefly. The USSR was the world’s scariest dictatorship in which millions perished and millions more were incarcerated in Lubyanka and Siberian labour camps. The Warsaw Pact was a confederacy of tyrants from East Europe to the Baltic states.
Today, RTI has also come technology that facilitates the same violations the Emergency was demonised for: the government snoops on phone calls of ministers and opponents, emails are intercepted and read, satellites monitor troop movements and encounter killings continue. The biggest irony is that as the wheel turns full circle, weak coalitions and political and economic drift engenders the yearning for a centralist figure like Indira Gandhi; a comparison now being made with ideological opposite Narendra Modi. After a great storm comes rebuilding. In the comedy of reconstruction lie the seeds of old tragedies. INAV