Next week, it will be 50 years since the Emergency was proclaimed by Indira Gandhi. Like last year, when the new parliament was constituted, it is bound to generate a lot of rhetoric, blame, counter-blame and also false moral equivalences with the present.
When it comes to documenting the brutalities of the Emergency, a good majority of the literature falls under the genre of memoir, which captures emotion, heroics and suffering. These came much after the Emergency was lifted, and after many cubic feet of water had passed under the arches of Indian politics. But equally or more fascinating was the vigorous real-time pamphleteering that happened during the Emergency.
It is pamphlets, both anonymous and signed, that characterised the Emergency and scarred the Congress and the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty permanently. They constructed an enduring perception of the time.
It may be instructive to revisit the very first underground pamphlet that was smuggled out of India via London during this time, and published in faraway United States by a diaspora group called Indians for Democracy (IFD). The pamphlet was provocative, polemical and plain angry, with colourful phrases of personal attack on Indira Gandhi.
The pamphlet’s ideological position was clear and the international references it made not just automatically created a wider appeal, but looked like a deliberate effort to seek a bigger audience. It invoked the historical context of Nazi Germany to drive home the emerging situation in India rather effectively. In parts, it was also an instruction manual on how to build resistance while underground.
The words ‘fascist’ and ‘dictator’ was liberally sprinkled for Indira Gandhi in almost every paragraph of the long document, which was roughly over 5,000 words long. Indira Gandhi was all through referred to with ‘Nehru’ as her middle name—‘Indira Nehru Gandhi’.
The author of the ‘historical document’ was George Fernandes, chairman of the Socialist Party of India. It was datelined June 26, 1975, at Gopalpur-by-sea, where his wife Leila Kabir’s family had a bungalow, and from where he had escaped arrest. The IFD publication date was July 1, 1975. This meant it had travelled across the seas with remarkable speed, within a week of it being penned.
There was a short covering letter to the pamphlet, which said that all the firepower of the British army and all the repressive measures of the imperialists had come to nothing before Mahatma Gandhi’s movement of non-violence. Therefore, the response to “this violent war on the people” of India should remain peaceful and non-violent. “Of course, Mrs Gandhi and her sycophants lack the conscience and sense of history that the British possessed… She will go like all the despots have gone before her—into the dustbin of history,” it proclaimed.
The beginning had three quotes on democracy and dictatorship by Mahatma Gandhi, Jayaprakash Narayan and Rammanohar Lohia. Then, it said, that Nehru’s daughter presenting herself as a “dictator” was not surprising because one saw it coming. It had become evident when Indira Gandhi had started filling up her party with “defectors, opportunists, time-servers, sycophants, with a large sprinkling of riffraff and other scum of our society”.
Fernandes calls the proclamation of the Emergency the “blackest day yet” in the nation’s torturous history. He says Indira Gandhi had administered the coup de grace to whatever remained of Indian democracy. It was about “evil’s triumph over good” and all that was “decent in our society”. There is a clear binary in the pamphlet, which portrays Indira Gandhi as a personification of evil, while Jayaprakash Narayan as a symbol of good around whom the society should rally.
On the propaganda that the state-owned media had unleashed, it said: “Madam Indira Hitler is her own Goebbels, and her every utterance is a damned perverted lie which is broadcast to a nation a hundred times over in true Goebbelian style… lying, deceit and blackmail have been Mrs Nehru Gandhi’s principal political weapons… even Idi Amin of Uganda looks an amateur when weighed against the actions and utterances of Mrs Nehru Gandhi.”
Fernandes laments that nobody saw the nation’s transition so quickly into “fascist dictatorship” and no party, including the Congress, had anticipated this turn. Even the “radical phrase-mongers” who said ‘India was Indira and Indira was India’ did it for crumbs of power and personal gains. But he says he somewhat had a hunch about how this was panning out, and had precociously stated in 1971 after the general election results were out that the picture of Indira Gandhi on election posters “bore resemblance to Hitler’s pictures sans the moustache”.
Further recalling the violence from the 1971 election, especially in West Bengal, Fernandes charged that the ruffians of Indira Gandhi’s party had ensured the physical liquidation of opposition party workers, with the CPI(M) and the Socialists suffering the maximum with the takeover of hundreds of trade union offices. Preventing opposition parties from conducting legitimate political activity meant the slow rise of fascism.
He recalls how the May 1974 railway strike that he led was crushed, and adds to his lament: “We failed to see the coiled cobra of fascism even while it kept hissing and biting… Mrs Nehru Gandhi had mastered her Mein Kampf, while the opposition parties did not even know what their democracy meant.”
Fernandes, in the pamphlet, thinks that Indira Gandhi was genuinely worried that once out of power, she would be investigated for nepotism, corruption and political murders. After listing the various charges of corruption against her, he says: “Investigations by a new government into the Lalit Narain Mishra murder mystery (the railway minister who was killed in a bomb blast in January 1975) and the dud bombs thrown into the car of the chief justice of the Supreme Court will bring about startling disclosures that could shock the world. The time capsule… of the lives and times of the Nehru dynasty will be unearthed to show in all their naked ugliness the vanity and obsession of a small woman.”
The final section of the pamphlet is about how one should handle the Emergency. How does one resist it and fight back? What strategies can be built? Among the interesting action points is included creating “whispering campaigns”. Surprisingly, the pamphlet does not remain a period piece; it speaks to the present.
Sugata Srinivasaraju is a senior journalist and author of The Conscience Network: A Chronicle of Resistance to a Dictatorship
(Views are personal)
(sugatasriraju@gmail.com)