In the summer of 1975, the anger against corruption and high-handedness
that rippled across the northern half of India had built into waves of
fury against a prime minister whose legitimacy had been shattered by an
Allahabad High Court verdict unseating her.
Riding the crest of a
mass movement that began in Gujarat and rolled across the northern
plains, Jayaprakash Narayan - JP as he was popularly 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, JP thundered 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.
The
reporters and senior editors of the United News of India (UNI) news
agency wrapped up the story of the day and headed home, leaving the desk
to me and to Tarun Basu, now the chief editor of Indo-Asian News
Service - both of us sub-editors with barely three years' experience.
Just
after midnight, disjointed, but ominous, dispatches from across
Haryana, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh dribbled in. Police
were stopping trucks out to deliver newspapers; power was going out at
newspaper offices and plants. And some local opposition politicians were
being rounded up.
A bureau chief from Chandigarh phoned in
saying that police sources had told him that they had been asked to stop
the printing and distribution of newspapers. A tip came from a Madhya
Pradesh bureau, passing a rumour that "martial law" was coming.
We
called the late G.G. Mirchandani, the fearless general manager and
chief editor of UNI. He told us not to be intimidated and keep the
dispatches flowing.
Sometime after 2 a.m. came the cryptic call, "JP giraftar ho gaye (JP has been arrested)".
Our 10-letter bulletin went out:
F L A S H J P ARRESTED. UNI
Thus
began the long night of the lathis and bullets; the 21 months of
fascist terror, of censorship, of craven cowardice, of despair - and
also of heroism, of faith in democracy, of unbending commitments, of
idealism and hope.
I called Myron L. Belkind, the bureau chief of the Associated Press, and he got word out to the world before censorship struck.
We
quickly wrote up a story while getting more calls of arrests before
sprinting off from UNI's office on Rafi Marg to the Parliament Street
Police Station a few hundred yards away.
Outside the collonaded
building, the cops said nothing was happening and we should go. They
hadn't yet grasped the powers bestowed on them. Suddenly there was a
bustle, and we saw the frail figure of JP being brought to one of the
waiting cars. I asked him what was happening.
His bespectacled
eyes, sad but not despairing, looked at us, his hands made slight wave
of resignation, and 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 us the Sanskrit proverb
which can be translated as, "Madness takes hold at the moment of
disaster."
JP was put in one of the tourist taxis and driven away.
We headed back to the UNI offices and filed a story with his quote that became a motif of the opposition to the Emergency.
The phones began ringing with news of more arrests - Morarji Desai, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Jyotirmoy Basu and many others.
But
two names were missing from the arrested list: George Fernandes and
Subramanian Swamy. Both had staged strategic disappearances to lead the
resistance.
Answering our SOS, editors and reporters poured into
the office in the middle of the night, to report on a tragic history in
the making.
The office had been spared electricity and
communications cuts as it shared the grid with many government offices
and Parliament. In the cacophonous teleprinter room, the machines spewed
copy on arrests and interdictions from the bureaus across the country,
and some went silent when power was turned off or communications lines
cut.
At around 7 a.m., Indira Gandhi came on the air to proclaim her Emergency and the rules of dictatorship.
Two
government censors, drafted from the government's Press Information
Bureau marched in with rubber stamps, one for stories censored and
approved for publication and the other for stories banned.
Mirchandani
defiantly kept the reports flowing, till the censors, after hasty phone
consultations with their higher-ups, delivered an ultimatum: Submit to
censorship or the agency will be forthwith 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.
Therefore, many of the censored reports secretly made their way to underground bulletins.
Soon,
assorted spineless politicians, businessmen, trade unionists and
self-styled civic activists lined up with press releases swearing fealty
to the dictator and denouncing the people's movement.
And in the
media, as in all other sectors, many lived up to BJP leader L. K.
Advani's description of their cravenness: "Some who were asked to bend,
chose to crawl."
That was a time when fascism tried to rule
India. Let no one, least of all the Congress party, now 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 40 years ago.
The long
night of the Emergency was undone 19 months later only by the hubris of
the Gandhi family that believed their censored untruth.
"Vinaashakaale Viparita Buddhi" is its fitting epitaph.
(Arul
Louis is a New York-based correspondent for IANS. The opinions
expressed here are his own. He can be contacted at [email protected])
