Emergency was imposed in the country on June 25, 1975.
Ramnath Goenka's Express was one of the very few papers that resisted and refused to be intimidated throughout the Emergency, which lasted till March 21, 1977.
The musty odour of fear-induced sweat pervaded the Emergency. At the Express offices in Delhi, there was the smell of dust but no odour of fear, or perhaps, only a whiff.
Fear is more infectious than a virus, but this disease-ridden vector was missing at the Express. Its proprietor Ramnath Goenka and many of its key staff showed no fear or, at least, hid it successfully from their colleagues.
The autocratic regime used its full bag of underhand tricks to try and bring the Express down to its knees: cutting off electricity, withdrawing all government and public-sector advertising, cutting all credit from financial institutions, threatening its proprietor and editors, creating newsprint shortages and snapping news agency wires.
From our archives:
There remained one puzzle. Why did Indira Gandhi not use the ultimate weapon and arrest Ramnath Goenka whose bold leadership of the Express group was such a major thorn in the flesh?
One day just after the Emergency was over and Ramnath Goenka was in a relaxed and expansive mood, I asked him this very question. He gave an interesting explanation. At one time, much before the Emergency, he had employed Feroze Gandhi, the estranged husband of Indira Gandhi, in the Express group. At that time, both Feroze and Indira Gandhi had been fairly close to him and regarded him as a sort of father figure.
They were going through a difficult patch in their tempestuous marriage and each of them wrote a bunch of letters to him accusing each other of a range of personal misdemeanours. Ramnath Goenka had filed away these intensely personal letters. According to Ramnath Goenka, Indira Gandhi had convinced herself that if she had arrested him, these personal letters would have immediately been published worldwide in the foreign press.
Ramnath Goenka, whose fearless legacy The New Indian Express carries forward, told me that Indira Gandhi's perception had been totally wrong. He would have never published these letters, come what may, as he could not even consider such an act of grave personal betrayal.
Led by Ramnath Goenka, Express men and women displayed rare fighting spirit and professional pride in their work. BD Goenka, S Mulgaokar, VK Narasimhan, Kuldip Nayar, Ajit Bhattacharjea, Virendra Kapoor, HK Dua, 'Piloo' Saxena, SK Verma, Abdul Rehman, BM Sinha, Rajendra Bajpai, Coomi Kapoor, Bharati Bhargava and many others in Delhi and in Express offices all over the country, especially S Krishnamoorthy in Bombay, defied the Emergency.
With such unruffled and steady companions, most correspondents, reporters, sub-editors, clerks, peons and also the business and managerial staff began to feel an esprit de corps, a sense of mission to counter an evil and autocratic regime. Express men and women used little tricks and put in snide or subtle anti-establishment reports and comments, which could be picked up by discerning readers.
We played down the glorious and glowing propaganda reports put out by the domestic news agencies, and played up foreign reports that pointed out the gross failures of dictatorships and ruling dynasties abroad.
When one morning, the Government abruptly cut off access to all news agency wires, the Express relied on its own network of correspondents all over the country and its two or three foreign correspondents to fill the gap. The foreign news gap was, however, too wide to be adequately filled. The solution was simple and effective.
I remember staying up till two in the morning for about three weeks, monitoring broadcasts from all over the world on Ramnath Goenka’s massive old shortwave radio set in his guest suite. The noise of static often disrupted hearing but the reports we were able to publish the same morning, datelined Moscow, Washington, Peking (now Beijing) and London, were all from the old man's guest room at Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, New Delhi.
When Indira Gandhi announced on January 18, 1977, that there was going to be an election, I went off to interview Morarji Desai the same wintry night. He had just been released from isolated captivity in a Government guest house in Haryana and driven down to his old residence on what was then Dupleix Road.
Desai's cheeks were as rosy and fresh as a baby's. I naively asked him if he would be forming a united opposition. His reply was characteristic: "How can I think of uniting the opposition when I have not even had the time to go to the bathroom?"
I persisted and got an interesting interview from him that the Express published next morning on the front page. Most other newspapers continued to remain fearful and were reluctant to publish news about the opposition as the Emergency continued to be in force till the election results were announced on March 20 and 21, 1977.
Bharati Bhargava, a colleague at Express, and I asked to be sent to cover the beginning of Sanjay Gandhi's election campaign in Amethi that he had nurtured during the Emergency. Express promptly packed us off to Amethi and to Rae Bareli, Indira Gandhi’s constituency. The first person we met at the railway station near Amethi, a rickshaw-puller, told us angrily that he would not even think of voting for Sanjay Gandhi or his party as the district administration had treated people brutally during the Emergency months, pushing them out of their homes and arbitrarily picking up old men and young boys and dragging them to be forcibly sterilised.
Sanjay kicked off his campaign with a sneer on his face, referring in his first election speech at Amethi to the opposition leaders as "keedhas" (insects) who should be crushed. All this was reported in the Express.
We then boarded a local bus to Allahabad (now Prayagraj) and took a boat ride to the holy Sangam. The boatmen were wary but we coaxed them into talking about what they had heard from the hundreds of pilgrims from all over the country who thronged the confluence of the Ganga and Yamuna. The boatmen reluctantly divulged that most of the pilgrims, especially those from the northern states, were angry with the excesses of the Emergency and would not vote for the Congress.
During my subsequent election tours in March in UP and from what I learned from Express colleagues covering other states, it became apparent that the Congress and Indira Gandhi would lose the election. I sent an urgent press telegram (there were no e-mails or I-pads then) from Varanasi to our news desk in Delhi stating: "With the great majority of a big chunk of seats going over to the opposition the overall defeat of the Congress in the country may be around the corner." This report was published in the Express on March 14, 1977.
As the election results came in, large cheering crowds gathered around the big election board outside the Express building on Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg on the evening of March 20, 1977. The results showed that the Congress was decisively defeated and Indira and Sanjay had lost their seats at Rae Bareli and Amethi.
There were other figures of the same mould as Ramnath Goenka whose journals defied the Emergency despite threats and harassment. Those who come to mind from the English language press are CR Irani of The Statesman, AD Gorwala of Opinion, Romesh and Raj Thapar of Seminar and Krishna Raj of Economic and Political Weekly. This is by no means an exhaustive list. There were many journalists in the Hindi and regional language press who courageously defied the Emergency.
The Emergency regime was rough with the press but was much more nasty and brutish to the general populace of the poor and underprivileged in northern India. Oppression of the poor was mostly uniform without overt communal and caste bias. The result was a short period of genuine emotional harmony between communities and castes during and immediately after the Emergency.
The sad part of what followed the Emergency was that many of the victims of that period remained uncompensated and some of its real heroes remained unsung while many who had obsequiously bowed and scraped before the dictatorial regime fraudulently claimed to be defiant heroes.
(Jawid Laiq was a special correspondent with the Express group in New Delhi from 1975 to 1978. He is a Delhi-based independent journalist.)
