Emergency And The Nation’s Current Travails: Comparing
The Circumstances
Saeed Naqvi
“Globalization”
may not have been part of the discourse 45 years ago when Indira Gandhi shelved
Civil Liberties after declaring the Emergency but it is not possible to sketch
that bleak episode on a wide enough canvas without touching such disparate
points on the world atlas as Latin America and India’s cow belt. There was,
after all, an external and an internal context to the Emergency as, indeed,
there is to the erosion of civil liberties in India today.
The coup in 1973
which ousted and killed Salvador Allende, the world’s first communist leader to
come to power through the ballot box, had a ripple effect on the communist
movements in Europe. The counterpunch from the Right caused Enrico Berlinguer,
leader of the powerful Italian Communist party to nimbly distance himself from
the Soviet Union, invent Eurocommunism and seek a “Historic compromise” with
the Christian Democrats. This was roughly the trajectory of all European
Communist parties. True, Communists had come to power in Angola in 1975, but
White South Africa was full square behind Jonas Swimbi’s relentless guerilla
war against the Angolan regime.
This was the
state of play between the power blocks, when Indira Gandhi, weakened by defeat
in eight states in 1967, sought to consolidate her power by splitting the
Congress party in 1969 and seeking support of the Left, specially the Communist
of India (CPI) which attached itself to Congress (I) – (I) stood for Indira –
as a sort of ideological motor. “Unite and Struggle” was how Sripat Dange,
party chairman, described the arrangement – unite with the Congress but
“struggle” against its “anti people” policies.
India’s
Principal party, the Congress, in such apparent dalliance with the Left,
against the backdrop of the global Left-Right contest touched upon earlier, had
to invite a counter punch. A group to administer such a counterpunch was readily
at hand: the “syndicate”, the Congress regional power brokers, placed by the split on the Right of the political spectrum –
C.B, Gupta, Atulya Ghosh, S. Nijalingappa, Morarji Desai, etcetera. The RSS,
Socialists and sundry, anti communist forces began to hold a meeting here, a
seminar there and plan.
At
this stage, Jayaprakash Narayan had more or less given up his socialist party
work. He had become a heavy duty Gandhian attaching himself to Acharya Vinoba
Bhave’s Bhudaan, or land gift movement. Then a series of Youth movements began
to look for a leader and typical of the Indian mind, a father figure to revere,
which is not the same thing as “respect”. It would be flawed to find links with
Kent State campus in the US, barricades in Paris, and Grosvenor Square pickets
in London, but it is uncanny that Navnirman Samiti in Ahmadabad which was
triggered by an agitation against increased hostel fees erupted at the same time.
JP, as he was
affectionately called, was now in the drill to lead the much more powerful
Bihar movement from the cozy comfort of his house in Patna’s Kadamkuan where he
accommodated me in a room on the ground floor. This gave me a ringside seat to
cover the story for The Statesman along with my partner in sin, the wonderful
photographer, Raghu Rai. Remember, there were no multiple channels then and Raghu’s
photographs amplified the movement sky high. The movement was primarily carried
on the shoulders of the RSS cadres, under Nanaji Deshmukh’s firm leadership.
Paradoxically, it also spawned caste leaders like Karpoori Thakur, Laloo Prasad
Yadav and Nitish Kumar.
1969, the year
of so much political upheaval, also happened to be Mahatma Gandhi’s birth
anniversary. To celebrate the occasion, Frontier Gandhi, Abdul Gaffar Khan was
invited for a tour of India. Indira Gandhi and JP (with RSS, Socialists,
Gandhians in tow) began to vie for favourable utterances from the Frontier
Gandhi. He collected shawls at every function, diligently counted them at night
and at every meeting next day, proceeded to chastise both the political
formations for having “betrayed Gandhi”.
All concerned
were in deep soup when the Frontier Gandhi arrived in Ahmadabad in September, a
few days short of the Gandhi centenary on October 2. He decided to put down
anchor in “Gandhi’s and Sardar Patel’s city”. This to witness firsthand the
fiercest Hindu-Muslim riots in which the hand of the Gujarat Congress was discernable.
The Khan docketed all these details which became inputs for the hundreds of
public speeches he delivered across the country during that tour.
According to the
Jaganmohan Reddy Committee the death toll was 660 of which 430 were Muslims.
Unofficial figures exceed thousands. That the great singer Rasoolan Bai’s house
was burnt is a detail etched on my memory. These were the first riots where I
heard the terrible slogan for the first time: “Musalmaan ke do sthan; Pakistan
ya Qabrustan”, (There are two destinations for Muslims; Pakistan or the graveyard).
This was the
beginning of the series of riots climaxing with the macabre pictures that
Gujarat yielded in February 2002. There is a major difference: an element of retaliatory
violence on the part of Muslims was on show in 1969; 2002 was a pogrom, a trend
inaugurated with the anti Sikh monstrosity of 1984.
In a nutshell,
the Emergency of 1975 was in an East-West, Left-Right context and it lasted 18
months. The East-West context disappeared in 1990, exactly when Manmohan Singh
embarked on economic policies which worldwide were creating inequalities. Lest
economic distress strengthen demands for social security nets, establishments
channelized popular discontent into identity politics which, in the Indian
context, translates into rank communalism. The global war on terror and
subsequent Islamophobia provided just the tailwind the Hindutva project
required. Now come the headwinds – a shattered economy, dismally mismanaged
pandemic, China hovering like Banquo’s ghost, unknown fate of the millions who
walked in distress, and, FIRs upon FIRs as a preemptive strategy to cope with
the gathering storm on the horizon. Will the storm materialize given such a stale,
limp Opposition at the Centre? The Jury is still out.
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