The Shah Commission Report: Edited and Compiled by Era Sezhiyan
Publisher: Aazhi, Chennai
Pages: 640
Price: Rs 950
On June 13, 1975, all the 983 buses that comprised the Delhi Transport Corporation’s fleet were taken off their routes and diverted to ferry people to then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s residence. This happened day after day until June 25. Buses were commandeered from across Punjab, Haryana, Rajastan and Uttar Pradesh, too, for similar reasons. Just a minor abuse of power to protect the Prime Minister whose election to Parliament was held void by the Allahabad High Court on June 12, 1975.
B N Malhotra, then general manager of the Delhi Electric Supply Undertaking, on oral instructions from Kishen Chand, Lt Governor of Delhi, switched off power to the newspaper offices on Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg. As a result, major newspapers did not get printed on the night of June 25, 1975. The oral order emanated from Indira Gandhi’s official residence.
As many as 16 judges in the various high courts were transferred to different destinations. The reason for that was that the judges issued writs of Habeas Corpus involving persons detained without charges. K R Puri was appointed chairman of the Reserve Bank of India despite opposition from then finance minister C Subramaniam. Puri helped Sanjay Gandhi in building the Maruti factory (even though cars were not yet manufactured there) and Subramaniam did not demur then. He swore on an oath, later, that the appointment was an instance of Sanjay Gandhi’s clout.
A total of 1,10,806 persons were detained without charges under the provisions of MISA and DIR, both preventive detention laws during the 19 months between June 25, 1975 and March 21, 1977. All of the people were detained without any specific charge.
Over 81 lakh men underwent sterilisation in 1976. This was more than three times the number in 1975. And that was because Sanjay Gandhi was enthusiastic about the programme. About 1.5 lakh structures were demolished during the 19 months of the Emergency in Delhi alone, because Sanjay Gandhi wanted it that way to make Delhi a beautiful city. And when those whose houses were demolished rose up in protest, police fired at them and even killed some of them without the necessary orders. There was no record kept of the number of bullets expended in those instances.
These are facts embedded in the memory of those who grew up during the 19 months when democracy was suspended in India by Indira Gandhi in the name of protecting democracy. But as the years went by and a new generation grew up in post-Emergency India, it is necessary that books are published recalling those times. The Shah Commission Report is indeed the most important document of those times and Era Sezhiyan, who lived through those times, has intervened to fill a yawning gap. The three volumes that Justice J C Shah presented to the Janata government are documentary evidence of the instances of abuse and misuse of power by Indira Gandhi and those around her, and should serve as a record to remind generations to come that the Constitution that we have was reduced to a plaything by the very people who had sworn to protect it.
Sezhiyan, among the few opposition MPs not arrested during the Emergency, also played an important role in gathering the various Opposition leaders, some out on parole and others released unconditionally, into some activity that would lead to a consolidation of the Opposition parties. A meeting of leaders at No 12, Dr Bishambar Das Road, New Delhi (his official residence) on December 15, 1976, was one such occasion. The meeting was organised at the instance of DMK leader M Karunanidhi to discuss the possibility of a dialogue with Indira Gandhi. Sezhiyan was a DMK MP then. He could have informed us about what happened at that meeting in his introduction to this volume. He could do that when a second edition of the book is published.
As for the provocation for bringing out this volume, Sezhiyan and the publisher have stated that copies of the report were withdrawn from across the country and destroyed after Indira Gandhi returned to power in January 1980. They also cite reports that copies could be located only in a couple of places; in libraries in Britain and Australia. This assertion, however, is not true. And even if Indira Gandhi had done what many including her biographer Katherine Frank assert — that all copies of the Shah Commission Report were destroyed — she had left a copy of the report in the Parliament House Library. Both the interim reports (Acc No RC 50207) and the final report (Acc No RC 50839) along with the Memorandum of Action Taken Report (Acc No RC 50209) are available at the Parliament House Library.
To point this out is not to belittle the publication of the report in book form. The copy at the Parliament House Library, after all, could not be accessed by many. And Sezhiyan has made that possible now. But it would also make a lot of difference if the editor and the publishers decide to revise the next edition and include the ATR that was tabled in Parliament by the Janata government along with the interim reports. In the same way, the story of the Shah Commission Report and the tragedy that it met with in the hands of the rulers will be complete only if the narrative about the special courts that the Janata government so reluctantly constituted is also told.
The demand for a special court to try Indira Gandhi was voiced from inside Morarji Desai’s cabinet in May 1978, after the first and the second interim reports of the commission were submitted. Desai, however, procrastinated. It was only on May 8, 1979 that Parliament passed an Act, providing for the setting up of special courts to ensure speedy trial of the cases relating to the Emergency. Two such courts, headed by Justice M S Joshi and Justice M L Jain (both of the Delhi High Court) were set up on May 31, 1979. Justice Jain, who had been conducting the trials since June 1979, realised (after Indira Gandhi’s return on January 14, 1980) that the establishment of that court (special court number 2) was unconstitutional and that the cases before it be returned to the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate, Delhi. Justice Joshi (constituting special court 1) followed suit soon after.
The grounds cited by Jain were that the law ministry and the home ministry had assigned prosecutions to the special court even before these two ministries were assigned the responsibility for these courts by the Transaction of Business Rules. Rather than correct that anomaly, P Shiv Shankar, law minister in Indira’s Cabinet, informed Parliament on January 30, 1980, that the special courts were a device that the previous government had hit upon to harass its political opponents. Subsequently, the law ministry wrote to the Registrar of the Special Courts to wind them up before March 31, 1980. The cases pending there, as well as those before the different magistrates across the country, involving illegal acts committed during the Emergency were dropped.
And that is how all the hard work by the Shah Commission and its findings was reduced to a joke by Indira Gandhi and her son, Sanjay.
— Krishna Ananth is an advocate.
krishnananth@gmail.com