#ICYMI TheTribuneOpinion: Reflections on the Emergency, Iran-Israel war and New York mayoral poll

As the nation marks 50 years of the imposition of the Emergency, The Tribune’s Edit and Op-ed articles take a look back at that dark chapter of our democracy. Indira Gandhi chose the path of political expediency rather than what was ethically and morally right, writes former JNU professor Gurpreet Mahajan in her Edit piece, ‘50 years after Emergency, our democracy still fragile’. What history has shown us is that democracy stays on track only when governments take note of the concerns raised by the Opposition, she writes.

Here is an important analogy between Indira’s internal Emergency and Modi’s undeclared Emergency. Senior journalist R Jagannathan avers that the power of the PMO under Modi is reminiscent of what it was like under Indira Gandhi’s rule. But, while Indira could send the Army to the Golden Temple, though not during the Emergency, Modi has seldom used brute force to get his way politically. However, the actions of the Modi government that smack of Emergency-like situation include the extensive use of ED or the CBI to target Opposition leaders, he writes in his Op-ed piece ‘An undeclared Emergency today? Not quite’.

Recollecting memories of the Emergency days, former NCERT director Krishna Kumar writes in the Edit piece, ‘Freedom was the first casualty in 1975′, that he, despite being a teacher, had to seek permission for holding a small play in his neighbourhood in his hometown. None less than the Superintendent of Police read the script and then gave it a go-ahead.

On the other side of the spectrum was the unchecked administrative power of the state during the Emergency, which tried to forcibly impose Sanjay Gandhi’s campaign of nasbandi. Rajkumar Siwach, professor at the Chaudhary Devi Lal University, writes in his Op-ed piece, ‘How Pipli women resisted coercive sterilisations’, that the village women, along with the khaps, clashed with the police to prevent their men from being taken away in buses for sterilisation.

Yet another example that too at the highest levels of power of not succumbing to the powers-that-be was the lone voice of dissent from Justice HR Khanna. In her Op-ed piece, ‘Justice HR Khanna, lone sentinel of liberty during Emergency’, The Tribune Assistant Editor Harvinder Khetal writes that Justice HR Khanna’s example shows that it is possible, and necessary, to uphold the rule of law and fundamental freedoms, even in the face of overwhelming power and personal cost. In the landmark case of 1976, Additional District Magistrate, Jabalpur vs Shivkant Shukla, the Supreme Court delivered a judgment that remains a blemish on India’s constitutional history. The central question before the five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court was “Could a citizen, detained without trial during the Emergency, approach the court for enforcement of their fundamental right to life and personal liberty under Article 21 of the Constitution?” Acquiescing in to the State, the other judges said no; Justice Khanna dissented and held that the right to life and personal liberty is not merely a creature of Article 21, but it is a basic human right derived from the principles of natural justice and the common law tradition. To dissent in solitude requires far greater strength than to concur in chorus, she writes.

And then, finally, the fateful March 1977 election — 21 months after the imposition of Emergency — vindicated democratic traditions and proved the triumph of freedom over bread, writes former IANS director and chief editor Tarun Basu in his Op-ed piece, ‘50 years of Emergency: Have any lessons been learnt?’ He gives vivid details of how on June 25, as a rookie sub-editor, he and his colleague reached the nearby Parliament Street police station, where they saw JP Narayan being arrested with his prophetic words, ‘vinash kale viprit buddhi’.

Let’s shift our focus from New Delhi to New York. The 33-year-old Democrat candidate for New York mayor, Zohran Kwame Mamdani, whose full name is clearly more than a sum of its parts — the middle reference to the Marxist Socialist first PM of Ghana; the last to his father, a Gujarati-Muslim scholar from Uganda; the first to an Arabic word that means ‘a ray of light’. Above all, what is of most interest to us Indians is his Hindu-Punjabi film-maker mother Mira Nair. Zohran reminds us that the possibilities are endless, writes The Tribune Editor-in-Chief Jyoti Malhotra in her Edit piece ‘There’s something about Zohran K’. He’s simply not embarrassed to be a bit of this and a bit of that; that’s what’s so charming about Zohran. He clearly likes to break down the walls and likes to open the windows and let the air come in, she writes.

In the Middle East, the Israel-Iran conflict ended after a fragile ceasefire. It appears Israel controlled the US completely, with Trump agreeing to do Netanyahu’s bidding, bypassing Tulsi Gabbard’s testimony before the US Congress. Navdeep Suri writes in his Edit piece, ‘When the tail wags the dog’ that Trump likes to position himself as the big dog. His behaviour in recent conflicts, whether it was Iran-Israel or India-Pakistan proves that he can still bear self-defeat. The Arab countries, who were more than happy to sign big arms deals and business contracts with the US, too got a reality check. They now face a belligerent regional hegemon Israel and a wounded Iran, he writes.

In his Edit piece, ‘US pushes West Asia deeper into chaos’, C Uday Bhaskar writes that the impetuous action is being justified on the ground that Israel and the US do not want Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon; paradoxically, there is no credible evidence that Tehran is close to acquiring a nuke.

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