JOHN DAYAL, a renowned social and human rights activist, is Member of the National Integration Council and former President of All India Catholic Union. He is also the founder secretary-general of the All India Christian Council. Former Foreign Correspondent in the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia and Europe, Dayal later became Editor and CEO of the Delhi Mid-Day and served as a treasurer of the Editors’ Guild of India. In an interview with MOHAMMAD NAUSHAD KHAN, he said, the Emergency did show that the Constitution was exceedingly vulnerable to the whims of a dictator, and basic fights were fragile. This threat remains even to this day.
As a young journalist you covered Emergency. How difficult was it then to report?
On 25th June 1975, we woke up without electricity. Sanjay Gandhi had switched on the Emergency. My firstborn child was three months old, and I was a young newspaper reporter. By the time we reached our office, the sun was high, the hush was loud. Blissfully, the ignorance of what lay ahead was total, from Editor in Chief down to the youngest on the Crime Beat.
Our offices were on what we grandiosely called Fleet Street, which was not a very wide road, just a kilometre-long link connecting the Walled City and New Delhi, via a large Muslim graveyard, a former jail with a hangman’s noose, and a ruin where the British had shot dead the sons of the last Emperor of North India. Ominous, but in later months, a sort of a regular “beat” for correspondents. It was the bodies that were brought in which told us of what had happened somewhere in town. Much as now.
Every graveyard, or cremation ground, has a “normal” day’s business, changing perhaps with season. An influx speaks of disaster, violence, police firing perhaps, or, as now, Covid’s strike. That is how reporters such as Jawaid Laiq, Ajoy Bose and some other colleagues, broke stories of Turkman Gate, for instance, iconic and historic memories of the State of Internal Emergency Indira Gandhi imposed when her membership of the Lok Sabha, and therefore her premiership, was struck down by a high court judge in Allahabad.
How do you think Emergency impacted India and her institutions?
Prime ministers are dictatorial. The post gives huge powers. Even the urine-drinking, his own, not a cow’s I may add, Morarji Desai, who came after the Emergency had been lifted in over two years, was imperious. And his successor Charan Singh. But Indira was an empress, no doubt about it. In those days without security concerns, young reporters could stand within inches of her, taking notes of what she told hired, and I suppose a little frightened, crowd brought to her house by her chamchas or by tycoons seeking favours. She could smile. But we took no selfies.
This is not about what led to the Emergency, and made Indira so afraid of her own shadow. Even month, the final word is yet to be written. People who were involved have not written the honest biographies they should. The Left has been left with much guilt that it helped legitimise the Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh. The scraps have come from people who also wrote notes of apology. The senior editors became complicit in the shenanigans of the rapid succession of prime ministers and short-lived governments. The good ones passed away.
The process is now complete. The media is owned by corporations which have grown on government favours. The journalists are contractual labour, whipped into a screaming frenzy both by job insecurity and transmitted orders. But satellite television, 4-G Internet and Apps which can be read even by the illiterate, have enormously multiplied their power, especially their power for evil. In retrospect, two things emerge out of the emergence.
The first is the Concentration of Power, and with it its accompaniments of one or two Extra-constitutional Centres of Authority and their sub-agendas. The suspension of human rights, constitutional rights and civil liberties becomes a mere mechanism or instrument, just as the intuitive subservience of Constitutional offices, police and the justice system. The second is the salesmanship, the selling of the Grand Lie that the State of Emergency is Good for You, good for the nation, good for the future generations, good for the majority religion, and good for the minorities. The bitter pill to ward off illness, the Chloroquine of governance, so to say.
Today in 2021 how would you like to recall the Emergency in India?
One cannot undo the past, nor airbrush all the details. No apology will change the situation of the men and women who were sterilised, whose homes were destroyed and who were then relocated far away from their places of work. Tens of thousands were jailed. They were not politicians who in a later regime capitalised on their suffering. For most of the victims of the Emergency, the damage done was permanent.
Mrs. Gandhi did apologise, as Mr. Rajiv Gandhi and Mrs. Sonia Gandhi were to later apologise to the Sikhs for Mrs. Indira Gandhi sending the army into the Golden Temple, and then the massacre of the Sikhs in Delhi and some other cities. Mrs. Gandhi had lost in the 1977 general elections, but the wipe-out was in the north Indian “cow belt” which had borne the brunt if the excesses of the coterie led by her second son, Sanjay Gandhi, the extra-constitutional centre of authority.
In south India, the impact of the Emergency was less severe, and Mrs. Gandhi had retained her hold in most of the constituencies. Her return to power in 1980 was more complex. The ham-handed manner in which the Morarji Desai government had handled her arrest after her defeat, the Shah Commission of Enquiry and other acts of the Janata government helped her win back a critical mass of sympathy across the country. The split in the Janata Party over the RSS dual membership of the former Jana Sangh men and women, the nature of the Charan Singh government which dared not face Parliament, made a pretty large number of people yearn for stability.
Emergency could be the most hated term but one cannot simply ignore it because it is a historical fact. How do you think India has evolved after the Emergency?
Perhaps it is important to look at the political leadership that emerged during the Emergency. The entire Opposition was in jail. So were the most important dissidents in the Congress Party, including leaders of the Yung Turks group such as Mr. Chandrasekhar. This allowed a string of opportunists to take over under the patronage of Sanjay Gandhi. Among them were people such as Vidya Charan Shukla, who supervised the press censorship in a very personal way and the men and women of the youth Congress.
After the Emergency had been lifted and the Janata party came to power, two sets of leaders emerged. Within the losing Congress was Sanjay Gandhi, then a legitimate politician. He however died soon after. Mr. Rajiv Gandhi came to the aid of his mother, first as general secretary of the Congress and then the unelected Prime Minister when she was assassinated in 1984.
The advent of Rajiv Gandhi also brought people such as Arun Singh, Arun Nehru and VP Singh to centre stage. Each one of them was to play a critical role in the unfolding of the history of the 1980s. Arun Nehru must take the blame for triggering the Babri Masjid spiral as he was the person instrumental in the opening of the locks of the mosque, which the Hindu groups wanted for a Ram temple. Arun Nehru and VP Singh precipitated the Bofors controversy involving charges of corruption in defence deals, which led to the downfall of Rajiv Gandhi. Bofors has cast a shadow from which Mrs. Sonia Gandhi too had never really been able to fully emerge.
Outside the Congress, the national politics witnessed the unexpected rise of Morarji Desai to the prime minister-ship of India. Jagjivan Ram, many felt, had been denied the opportunity of becoming the first Dalit prime minister of India. Hemwati Nandan Bahuguna too had his day in the sun.
But it was the rise of two men, Atal Behari Vajpayee and Lal Krishan Advani, which would leave a lasting impact on the post-Emergency India. The formation of the Janata Party, and the support given to it by the Marxists whose leaders had shared jails with RSS and Lohiaite stalwarts, in a manner gave political acceptability to the RSS. Mr. Vajpayee and Mr. Advani, as Ministers for External Affairs and Information and Broadcasting respectively, gained national and international prominence. The Bharatiya Janata party they formed after the break of the Janata Party, would eventually go on to form governments from 1998 to 2004, and now bring Mr. Narendra Modi to power.
How do you think the judiciary and the media emerged after Emergency?
The Jury is out on this question. The days before the Emergency saw a brave face of the judiciary. She was a popular Prime minister after the defeat of Pakistan and the emergence of Bangladesh in 1971, but her election was set aside by the Allahabad High Court on a technical interpretation of the rules barring government servants from handling election campaigns of leaders. But during the Emergency, a captive judiciary largely did her bidding, assisting her de facto suspension of most human rights. The Emergency did show that the Constitution was exceedingly vulnerable to the whims of a dictator, and basic fights were fragile. This threat remains even to this day.
Would you like to make any kind of comparison between Mr. Modi and Mrs. Gandhi?
Indira Gandhi and Narendra Modi cannot be, and should not be, compared to each other either to assess their strengths or to highlight their negative qualities. Both are very different persona, each the product of very different family and political inheritance and training. Mrs. Indira Gandhi had a million faults, among them being very vulnerable to the hold Sanjay Gandhi seemed to have on her. This is still to be explained or unravelled. She depended on kitchen cabinets, and later allowed the Sanjay Coterie to run the government on a day-to-day basis, especially in Delhi and other cities.
But she as Jawaharlal Nehru’s daughter and the product of the freedom struggle. Her decisions did lead to the Emergency, but they had earlier led to the freedom for Bangladesh. Narendra Modi is a child of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. No child can change its DNA. At a superficial level, he shares with Indira Gandhi certain contempt for collective leadership and decision-making, a centralisation of power, and perhaps a whimsy that can endanger the liberty and rights of the citizens.