New Delhi, June 24
Fifty years ago, the night of June 25, an attempt was made to murder democracy, but ultimately, people's power prevailed, saving India.
The Congress party that screams the loudest about democracy was the perpetrator of the heinous crime, throwing opposition politicians, both national and local, into jails, imposing physical censorship on the media and arresting editors, stifling public opinion and strong-arming the judiciary.
It was 1975, when the summer of discontent over corruption and high-handedness gave rise to waves of fury against Indira Gandhi, whose legitimacy had been shattered by an Allahabad High Court verdict unseating her from Parliament for violations of the election laws.
Riding the crest of a mass movement that began in Gujarat and rolled across the northern plains, Jayaprakash Narayan – JP as he was known – brought the spirit of the rebellion to the citadels of power in Delhi on June 25.
At the Ramlila Maidan, a spot hallowed by the annual enactment of the drama of victory of good over evil, before a crowd of 100,000, JP thundered, "Singhasan Khaali Karo Ke Janata Aaati Hai, Leave Your Throne, the People Have Come."
It was his call for Indira Gandhi to leave the prime ministership that she was clinging to with a temporary stay of the court verdict banning her from parliament.
Presciently, he also called on the police and the Army to follow their conscience and not obey illegal orders.
This writer, then a sub-editor with barely three years' experience on the overnight desk of the United News of India (UNI) news agency, witnessed firsthand the attack on democracy.
The reporters and senior editors wrapped up the story of the day and headed home, leaving the desk to this writer, Arul Louis, the founding executive editor of IANS and now its correspondent in New York, and colleague Tarun Basu, a former chief editor of IANS.
Just after midnight, ominous dispatches clacked on the teleprinter machines – the electrically driven typewriter-like machine linked through telephone lines -- in the pre-digital age.
Reports dribbled in from Haryana, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, and Himachal Pradesh that trucks delivering newspapers were being stopped by police, and power was going out at newspaper offices and printing plants, while some local opposition politicians were being rounded up for unclear reasons.
A Madhya Pradesh bureau passed on a rumour among local officials that "martial law" was coming. Unbeknownst to a sleeping nation, the Emergency had been declared.
Sometime after 2 a.m., this writer picked up a ringing landline. The caller cryptically narrated what would shock the nation and change the course of modern Indian history: "JP giraftar ho gaye (JP has been arrested)”.
A 10-letter bulletin went out on the wire service teleprinter network: F L A S H J P ARRESTED that marked the long night of fascist terror, 21 months marked by lathis and bullets, censorship, cowardice and despair – but also heroism, faith in democracy, unbending commitments, idealism and hope.
This writer, called Myron L Belkind, the bureau chief of the Associated Press, to get the word out to the world before censorship struck and shut down communications. This writer and colleague ran to the nearby Parliament Street Police Station.
In the dimly lit exterior of the colonnade building, the cops hadn't yet grasped the near-infinite power the Emergency had conferred on them and said politely that nothing was happening and to go away.
Suddenly, there was a bustle, and the frail JP was brought out.
Asked through the cordon of police in uniform and plain clothes around him what was happening, he gave a look of sadness, but behind it was a glint of steeliness.
He said feebly: "Vinaashakaale Viparita Buddhi." Krishna Kant, a Congress party dissident and supporter of JP's movement who was under arrest alongside him, repeated louder for all to hear the Sanskrit saying that translates as, "Madness takes hold at the moment of disaster."
JP was put in one of the white Ambassador tourist taxis and driven away. His kidneys failed during the harsh imprisonment.
Back to the UNI office, a story was filed with his quote that became a motif of the opposition to the Emergency.
GG Mirchandani, the fearless general manager of UNI, ordered that reports of the arrests and intimidation flow through the wires without being cowed down. Every ring of the phones brought news of more arrests – Morarji Desai, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Jyotirmoy Basu and many others, across the swath of politics. But two names were missing from the list of arrested: George Fernandes and Subramanian Swamy. Both had staged strategic disappearances to lead the resistance.
Editors and reporters poured into the office as the night was fading, to write the first draft of a tragic history in the making.
The UNI had been spared electricity and communications cuts that many media offices suffered that morning, as it shared the grid with many government offices and Parliament. The machines spewed rolls of copy on arrests and interdictions from the bureaus across the country, and some lapsed into silence when power or communications lines were cut.
At around 7 a.m., Indira Gandhi came on the All India Radio, then a government-run monopoly on the airwaves, to proclaim the rules of dictatorship.
Two government censors, drafted from the government's Press Information Bureau, burst in with two rubber stamps, one for stories censored and another for those approved, and imperiously took seats on the news desk.
Later, they marched into other newspaper offices and overpowered journalism.
Mirchandani defiantly kept the reports flowing till the censors delivered an ultimatum: Submit to censorship or the agency will be shut down permanently.
Mirchandani deferred, but with an order to the staff to continue to cover the news professionally and never to self-censor, anticipating censorship.
That was the censors' job, not the reporters', he said.
The censors slashed reports to meaninglessness or stamped them "Not for publication". But the reports secretly made their way to the proliferating samizdat, the underground bulletins crudely printed or run on cyclostyle machines, the inky predecessor of copying machines.
Some journalists associated with or loyal to the Congress Party or the pro-Mosow Communist Party strutted around giving advice – and veiled threats – to colleagues about the dawning of the new era of Indira Gandhi and there would be no more indiscipline.
Outside, a line soon formed of politicians, businessmen, trade unionists, and self-styled civic activists with press releases swearing fealty to the dictator.
And in the media, as in all other sectors, many lived up to BJP leader L. K. Advani's pessimistic deecription: "Some who were asked to bend, chose to crawl."
Among the editors arrested were Kuldip Nayar, the resident editor of The Statesman, and KR Malkani, the editor of The Motherland, an English-language daily newspaper associated with the Jan Sangh, the precursor of the BJP.
A journalist from UNI, SS Prakash, died after he was found with head injuries near the house of the dictator, his scooter with underground tracts. That was the time of fascism – the real fascism, not the fake term flung glibly like foul epithets, often by the intellectual and political progeny of those who put the yoke of fascism on the nation.
Those who have sat across from censors on the news desks, watched colleagues in the media and from universities arrested, or saw people snitch on others, know what fascism is like. That was the time in the name of socialism and secularism, the people in the hinterlands were hauled off buses to be sterilised, houses of the poor were demolished for no reason but the aesthetic whims of wielders of power, films were seized and burnt, when upstarts with connections became what were known as “extra-constitutions authorities”.
Let no one, least of all the Congress party, talk of fascism. Except for the BJP, the Marxists, the assorted socialists now scattered in different parties, the DMK and the courageous independents, the others lost their moral ground that day 50 years ago.
Yet some of them, like the DMK, are now aligned with the Congress that had imprisoned their leaders.
The power of the people and their commitment to democracy had boiled like a river of magma beneath the surface of the facade of untruth to erupt like a volcano searing through the fascism when elections were held by the oblivious dictator.
The nation breathed free again after 21 months on March 21, 1977. "Vinaashakaale Viparita Buddhi" is the epitaph for that era of infamy.
(The writer, Arul Louis, who witnessed first-hand the dawn of a failed dictatorship, was the founding executive editor of IANS and is now its correspondent in New York.)
