Freedom was the first casualty in 1975

FIFTY years later, the strangeness of that first week of the Emergency is still vivid. That is perhaps because no one — not even very elderly people — had any experience of that kind. Nor did anyone imagine it to be what it became within a short while.

Why it was imposed has been quite clear, but why it was withdrawn 21 months later continues to be a matter of speculation. It is hard to separate the Emergency from its architect, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Her own enigmatic personality can be seen reflected in the path she chose. In the social sciences, especially history, students are told that dramatic events should be examined independently of the protagonist. It is hard to do this in the case of the Emergency.

In those days, the summer months of May and June were sacrosanct. They brought relief to the young and their teachers from routine life and studies. The college where I was teaching closed on May 1, but I didn’t go home. I had an interesting travel assignment. I used to write for Dinman, a Hindi news weekly. Its editor, Raghuvir Sahay, asked me to travel to Bihar and send my write-ups on the student movement led by Jayaprakash Narayan. I returned from Bihar in early June and headed home. Nothing I had seen in Bihar presaged something ominous coming soon.

At home in my small town, a friend suggested that we should stage a play involving the children in our neighbourhood. I had recently purchased and read The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. It was a short, highly imaginative novel, and its allegorical narration seemed suitable for children. It was full of easy dialogues, so it posed no difficulty in preparing a quick script for performance. We had no resources apart from the great enthusiasm in our team to pick up different roles — pilot, prince, soldier, snake and so on — and memorise their lines. Within two weeks, we were ready to set up a poster for a single-evening performance. Then, suddenly on the morning of June 26, we learnt that something called the ‘Emergency’ had been declared.

What it might mean for the nation was one thing, but it seemed irrelevant for our play, scheduled for June 28. A senior resident of our neighbourhood told us that for a public gathering we must take prior permission from the police. My parents thought we should cancel the play. All this sounded bizarre, but my friend and I decided to go to the superintendent of police (SP). We had absolutely no idea how our little play had anything to do with the Emergency.

It puzzles me to this day, but the SP looked serious and somewhat grim when he asked me to summarise Saint-Exupery’s novel. While doing so, my naïve thoughts vanished and I realised in a flash that the allegory could have political connotations for a police officer. I did my best, but when the officer said, “Let me read your script,” I was worried. There was no photocopying in those days. All we had was a handwritten copy. I hesitated to part with it, but I had no choice. The officer saw my hesitation and said, “You can collect it in the evening today.”

We had a sizeable gathering of parents, and among them, I was later told there were two policemen. Our play went well, but on my return to Delhi, I realised that the world had changed. The most visible difference was in the newspapers. No one had imagined how a crude regime of censorship could begin at such a speed. Legendary cartoonist Shankar Pillai declared the closure of his magazine, Shankar’s Weekly. In his farewell editorial, Shankar wrote that humour can’t exist without freedom.

Sycophancy, on the other hand, needed no encouragement. The declaration of the Emergency was wrapped in obvious subterfuge, but even the boldest voices could not point this out, thanks to censorship. Ways to justify were invented without any concern for plausibility. Respectable author and journalist Khushwant Singh wrote that trains were now running on time. How that could justify the abrogation of basic rights, no one could ask.

While Jayaprakash Narayan was in jail, his senior Gandhian counterpart, Vinoba Bhave, said the Emergency was like the ‘anushasan parv’ (the chapter on discipline) of the Mahabharata.

University life went through a sudden “climate change”. Sitting in coffee houses with friends, you felt tense that one of them might turn into an informer, so it was better to stay quiet. But lack of enthusiasm for the Emergency was also considered bad. It felt a bit like how Soviet ethos was depicted by dissident novelists. Teachers’ arrests were part of a pervasive drive to suppress dissent. The atmosphere was heavy with rumours.

The point Shankar Pillai had made about humour was proved just as relevant for academic life. It demands freedom and confidence to think and argue. Both had diminished within days. Pedagogic relations require a fear-free environment. Neither teachers nor students could afford it. The Emergency broke the tacit bond between the state and the campus. The latter was no longer a space to think and exchange ideas with ease.

It is hard to explain why the pre-Emergency ethos did not return afterwards. One possible answer is that intellectual freedom was already fragile; its disappearance was not missed. In the media, too, a new sense of caution became the norm.

Sharp polarisation and fragmentation of political life became an enduring legacy of the Emergency. Its withdrawal ushered in an era of volatility and unpreparedness to assess the damage suffered by political ethics. The state apparatus had helped maintain the odious Emergency norms. The apparatus, especially the civil servant class, found no reason to reflect on its role afterwards. Many continued to believe that it had been a positive role. The chief of police in my hometown had allowed a children’s play to proceed. He could have stopped it. The fact that he could have stopped it meant he had an extended role in public life. A colonial legacy was reinstated.

Krishna Kumar is former director, NCERT.

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