President Pranab Mukherjee’s book, ‘The Dramatic Decade: The Indira Gandhi Years’ opens a debate about the infamous Emergency of 1975. It is blasphemous among academicians, writers and political activists to say remotely anything in defence of the Emergency. These opinion-makers take for granted that the Emergency was ‘the darkest period’ in post-independent India. An attempt is made here to understand the circumstances leading to the proclamation of Emergency.
It is indeed ironic that Indira Gandhi – the ‘Iron Lady’- was showered with the choicest abuses in political parlance for this imposition. What is conveniently ignored is that, after all, it was she who lifted the Emergency, ordered the general election and accepted the crushing defeat, losing her own seat Rae Bareli, in 1977. Her critics – a legion of them — try to erase from history her otherwise remarkable achievements. She was, inter alia, responsible for the Green Revolution, the abolition of privy purses for princely states and the nationalisation of banks. It is on account of the sound financial system backed by public sector banks that India has been spared the economic recession that the US and the rest of the West have suffered. We also forget the extraordinary political leadership and courage that she had displayed in handing a humiliating defeat to Pakistan in 1971 war.
But why was the Emergency imposed in the first place? Indira Gandhi, while proclaiming it on the midnight of June 25, 1975, said in her broadcast to the nation that it was necessary to foil “the plot to negate the very functioning of democracy.” On June 12, 1975, the Allahabad High Court judge, Justice Jagmohan Lal Saxena, declared her election to the Lok Sabha in 1971 null and void on technical grounds, and granted her three week-stay to enable her to go in appeal to the Supreme Court. Justice V R Krishna Iyer, the Supreme Court judge, had granted a conditional stay on the HC judgment on June 24 and allowed Mrs Gandhi to continue as Prime Minister. A legal luminary of the stature of Nani Palkhivala was defending her.
Jayprakash Narayan played into the hands of a motley, desperate conglomerate of opposition leaders. His call for the ‘total revolution’ was misconceived. On June 25, at Ram Leela Maidan, he gave a call for the army, the police and the civil servants to disobey the orders of the illegal government of Indira Gandhi. The opposition leaders had declared that they would carry on agitations all over the country till she resigned. It was a ‘wave of horror spread throughout the country.’
What was the verdict of the Allahabad High Court against Mrs Gandhi? The Court held her guilty of the charges “…using the state police to build a dais, availing the services of a government officer Yashpal Kapoor and using electricity from the state electricity department.” She was absolved of all other serious charges of bribing the voters and the electoral malpractices. It was the BLD Government of Charan Singh in UP that provided police and the security protection to Mrs Gandhi, as per the protocol, since she was the Prime Minister contesting the election. If this norm is applied today, the election campaigns of Narendra Modi in Maharashtra and Haryana and the results could be declared null and void. Yashpal Kapoor, OSD in the PMO, had resigned before campaigning for Mrs Gandhi, but the government notification came later.
Nevertheless, when Mrs Gandhi went in appeal to the Supreme Court, the rule of law, which is available even to the man on the street, was denied to her. There are many politicians with criminal backgrounds serving as ministers both at the centre and the state. We say they should be given the benefit of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ by the final court of appeal. But this was not given to Mrs Gandhi. We also fail to understand the political dimension of the post-Emergency period. Consider this: The very people in her cabinet who advised her to impose the Emergency turned against her after she lifted it. Jagjivan Ram, H N Bahuguna and Nandini Satpathy left the party on the eve of the election and formed a splinter group, called Congress for Democracy. Siddhartha Shankar Ray, who advised her to declare the Emergency deposed against her before the Shah Commission. Swaran Singh and V C Shukla – the I&B Minister responsible for press censorship and the excesses during the Emergency — turned hostile. All of them wanted to save their own skins. She was totally isolated and betrayed by her own party colleagues. That explains her deep distrust of her party colleagues post-Emergency. Have we been unfair to Indira Gandhi!
The writer is author of ‘Nehru And World Peace’, Professor of Political Science and retired Principal, Kandivali Education Society’s College, Mumbai and founder-secretary, Association of Indian College Principals.
G Ramachandram
