How do you relate the emergency imposed some 36 years ago this week to the new generation? I have been asked this question many a time. The Congress government will not talk about it as long as the Indira Gandhi-Sonia Gandhi dynasty is in power. It considers the attack on Indira Gandhi's autocratic rule during that period an affront to the family.
The BJP which too went through the rigours of the autocratic rule then does not understand the ethos of liberalism. The party's religious identity is an anti-thesis of what India stands for. Scholars of Indira Gandhi's munificence are not objective enough to tell the truth. Some interpret the emergency as a measure to tackle anti-left forces. What happened during the emergency, which lasted from June 1975 to January 1977, is a shameful story of a takeover by a prime minister to save power and her skin. Indira Gandhi suspended the constitution, gagged the press and imposed personal rule to overcome the handicap of disqualification from parliament. The Allahabad High Court had debarred her from the Lok Sabha membership for six years. She had used the government machinery in her election.
Leftist Supreme Court judge Krishna Iyer gave her reprieve through a stay order on the high court's judgement. Once she was off the hook, she showed her hand and extinguished the lights of democracy that had distinguished India from the other Third World countries. With the help of her son, Sanjay Gandhi, an extra-constitutional authority, she changed laws and destroyed the institutions, carefully and methodically built by her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, over the years.
Autocratic governance
First she detained more than 100,000 people without trial. They were her critics. Then she broke the steel frame of civil service so as to reduce it to a mere rubber stamp to endorse her illegal orders. She created so much fear in the minds of people that they stopped differentiating right from wrong and moral from immoral. There were no limits to which Indira Gandhi did not go to serve her ends. Fear stalked the land. So much so, even the judiciary dared not pronounce a judgement which the government would not like. And the media became more loyal than the censors.
The institutions never got back their original vigour or sanctity. The rulers coming after the emergency concentrated more on undoing Indira Gandhi than correcting her misdoings. Most of them, even state chief ministers, adopted her autocratic way of governance. They found it easy and convenient to deal with the opposition. Since then, the hapless civil service and the battered police have begun to obey whoever comes to power, notwithstanding the service rules or the age-old traditions. Both have fitted themselves in a new mould where the requirement is obedience, not integrity which the rulers lack. The lower judiciary has still not got out of the emergency hangover when magistrates signed blank warrants of arrest.
The new generation must understand that today's non-governance or mis-governance is the fallout of what Indira Gandhi did by destroying the established order, a natural corollary. Scams from the Bofors guns to 2G Spectrum are only a tip of the iceberg. Many more scandals are going to come out in the open.
It all started with a by-election in Orissa in 1972. Nandini Satpathy was elected to the state assembly after spending hundreds of thousands of rupees. Gandhian Jayaprakash Narayan raised the matter of corruption with the prime minister. Her defence was that the Congress had no money even to run the party office. When he found no response, he took the issue to the nation. One thing led to another until JP gave the call that the battle was between the people who wanted the government accountable and the government which was not willing to come clean.
The same problem has returned after 36 years. The entire debate before the country is on corruption. The government wants to do little to eliminate it. The public is determined to end corruption once and for all, particularly when one minister after another is found involved in either the 2G spectrum scandal or some other like the Krishna-Godavari basin gas scam. The Comptroller and Auditor General has indicted the Union Petroleum and Natural Gas Ministry for allowing ‘irregularities and bending rules' to ‘oblige' Reliance Industries Ltd, resulting in an ‘unquantifiable' loss to the exchequer. This shows how powerful politically the corporate sector has become. People want more and more transparency while the government sees to it that the avenues for public knowledge are lessened.
To pay homage to JP, who launched a movement to challenge the central government on issues relating to corruption, I went to Patna. June 5 was the day when he gave the call to bring about Sampurna Kranti (Total Revolution). There were only a handful of people at the JP house, where he lived and died, to hark back on the memory of that day. There was not even a meeting called by the government to talk about the Sampurna Kranti or fight for transparency. Karl Marx correctly said: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point however is to change it."
Kuldip Nayar is a former Indian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom and a former Rajya Sabha member.
