07-08-2005, 03:07 PM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->What the Emergency revealed about Congress
BY Amulya Ganguli
Every party carries an albatross round its neck a traumatic event which exposes its negative features. For the BJP, it is the Babri masjid demolition. For the Congress, it is the Emergency. In the foreseeable future, the two parties will constantly have to defend themselves on questions relating to the two events, especially when they try to climb up to the moral high ground.
The reason is that the two episodes underline crucial but unflattering aspect of their outlook in the BJPâs case, it is antipathy towards the minorities, especially the Muslims, and in the Congressâs case, it is the streak of authoritarianism in the partyâs mental make-up.
It is instructive that neither of the two parties has offered a genuine apology for what happened on December 6, 1992, and on June 26, 1975. L.K.Advani has described December 6 as the âsaddest dayâ of his life, but no one is sure whether he was sad because the mosque was demolished or because the incident revealed a previously unsuspected lack of discipline among the cadres of the Sangh parivar and the BJP.
Similarly, the Congress has been ambivalent about the Emergency, only saying that it will not happen again. But it continues to give the impression that it is not too sorry for the suppression of liberties that occurred at the time.
In fact, this is exactly what one of Indira Gandhiâs aides, <b>R.K.Dhawan, who is now a Rajya Sabha M.P., has said. In an article in the Hindustan Times, he has reiterated the old line that the Emergency was unavoidable because of the anarchic conditions created by the opposition led by Jayaprakash Narayan with his call to the police to disobey orders.</b>
But as is common in the case of all distortions and half-truths, he has, perhaps unwittingly, demolished his own argument when he wrote: âI reiterate that there was no effective political threat to Mrs Gandhi. She was the unquestioned leader of the Congress. The Opposition was decisively beaten in the general election of 1971 and was deep down with frustrationâ.
If this claim is true, why were such draconian powers necessary? Does a leader who faces âno effective political threatâ call for the snuffing out of all liberties, including the right to life, as the judiciary acknowledged at the time, surreptitiously in the middle of the night? <b>If Indira Gandhi was the âunquestioned leader of the Congressâ, why were leading Congressmen like Chandra Shekhar, Mohan Dharia and Krishan Kant arrested along with the opposition leaders like Jayaprakash Narayan? </b>
If she was the âunquestioned leaderâ, why wasnât the Union cabinet called to discuss the proclamation of the Emergency ? She did expect that her patently uncalled for act would meet with some resistance from the senior members of the party like Swaran Singh and Jagjivan Ram?
Clearly, the glib explanations offered by Dhawan are unconvincing. Instead, what is obvious that the midnight proclamation was the act of a person who knew that she was in the wrong and, therefore, wanted the Emergency to be a fait accompli before presenting her party members with her decision signed by the President.
Continuing with his game of being economical with the truth, Dhawan writes that the âcountry was paralysed because of the railway strike, students were told to boycott their classes, civil servants were told to disobeyâ.
The railway strike took place in 1974 and was over well before the Emergency was declared in 1975. The students may have been told to boycott classes and the civil servants to disobey, but were they actually doing so ? Were there any instances of empty classrooms in colleges and universities and of civil servants actually refusing to follow orders?
These are the kinds of wild allegations that are made when politicians play hide and seek with the truth. Far more relevant than these totally unsubstantiated charges is what a PTI reporter, R.C.Rajamani, has written in The Statesman one of the two English newspapers (other than The Indian Express) which had the courage to oppose the Emergency.
<b>âHardly a month after she imposed the infamous Emergency on the midnight of June 25/26, 1975â, Rajamani has written, âIndira Gandhi told Parliament, presumably in the heat of the moment, `You have been calling me a dictator, when I was not. Now, I amâ. This was on July 22. </b>
The story sent out by the Press Trust of India was killed five minutes later by the censorâ. This is closer to the truth than Dhawanâs garbled account. Indira Gandhi needed to be the dictator because she had been found guilty of electoral malpractice by the Allahabad High Court, a judgment which was partially upheld by the Supreme Court.
To overturn these verdicts, she needed the fiction of âanarchyâ, as propounded by Dhawan.<b> Since there was no anarchy, she had to act virtually alone and impose the Emergency without consulting the Union cabinet, waking up President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, an old Congress party loyalist, at the dead of night to sign the proclamation</b>.
All of this is known, but what is noteworthy three decades after the event is that the Congress is still basically unapologetic about this blatant attempt to stifle democracy for the first time in the countryâs history and, hopefully, for the last time.
It is Indiaâs good fortune that the attempt did not succeed. But its failure was not due to any realization on Indira Gandhiâs part that she had acted wrongly. Instead, it was a miscalculation on her part to call for elections because she was unaware of the rebellious popular mood as a result of the press censorship.
So, when the voters got a chance to exercise their will, they threw out the dictator. As a party, the Congress apparently has no option but to continue to peddle untruths about that period because the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty remains the partyâs mascot.
Even Sanjay Gandhi, the enfant terrible of the Emergency, cannot be criticized by the party because he belongs to the family after all. If his son, Feroze Varun, joins the Congress, as has occasionally been suggested, the party will have to tread even more carefully when referring to those days.
However, no matter how hard it tries, the taint will not go away. Like Bofors, the Emergency will continue to haunt the party because it reflects one of its inherent traits.
If Bofors points to the reputation of corruption which Congress earned during its days in power in the first two decades after Independence when it had no worthwhile opponents, <b>the subversion of democracy during the Emergency reflected two aspects of the party and its leadership.</b>
<b>The first is Indira Gandhiâs personal failing her contempt for democratic norms which she first exhibited as Congress president in 1959 when she orchestrated the removal of the first elected communist government of Kerala</b>. In 1975, her dictatorial ambitions may have been accentuated by the thoughts of establishing a dynastic line, evident in her turning first to Sanjay and then to Rajiv, rather than leave the matter of succession to the party.
<b>The second is the Congressâs lack of spine, born of the decades in office which made its leaders hanker for power at the expense of principles</b>. The principled people at the time were former Congressmen like Jayaprakash Narayan and Acharya Kripalani. Few were in the Congress.
Only <b>Swaran Singh is believed to have demurred slightly when Indira Gandhi informed the cabinet at dawn on June 26, 1975, that an Emergency was already in force and that she wanted post facto approval</b>.
All the others, including heavyweights like <b>Jagjivan Ram, kept quiet, evidently because they did not want to lose the perquisites of office while sycophants like Congress president Devkant âIndira is Indiaâ Borooah and Siddhartha Shankar Ray were happy to bow their heads.</b>
But they had all reckoned without the wisdom of the people of India who could sift the fiction of âanarchyâ from the fact of tyranny.
Send in your comments on this article to samachareditor@sify.com
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
BY Amulya Ganguli
Every party carries an albatross round its neck a traumatic event which exposes its negative features. For the BJP, it is the Babri masjid demolition. For the Congress, it is the Emergency. In the foreseeable future, the two parties will constantly have to defend themselves on questions relating to the two events, especially when they try to climb up to the moral high ground.
The reason is that the two episodes underline crucial but unflattering aspect of their outlook in the BJPâs case, it is antipathy towards the minorities, especially the Muslims, and in the Congressâs case, it is the streak of authoritarianism in the partyâs mental make-up.
It is instructive that neither of the two parties has offered a genuine apology for what happened on December 6, 1992, and on June 26, 1975. L.K.Advani has described December 6 as the âsaddest dayâ of his life, but no one is sure whether he was sad because the mosque was demolished or because the incident revealed a previously unsuspected lack of discipline among the cadres of the Sangh parivar and the BJP.
Similarly, the Congress has been ambivalent about the Emergency, only saying that it will not happen again. But it continues to give the impression that it is not too sorry for the suppression of liberties that occurred at the time.
In fact, this is exactly what one of Indira Gandhiâs aides, <b>R.K.Dhawan, who is now a Rajya Sabha M.P., has said. In an article in the Hindustan Times, he has reiterated the old line that the Emergency was unavoidable because of the anarchic conditions created by the opposition led by Jayaprakash Narayan with his call to the police to disobey orders.</b>
But as is common in the case of all distortions and half-truths, he has, perhaps unwittingly, demolished his own argument when he wrote: âI reiterate that there was no effective political threat to Mrs Gandhi. She was the unquestioned leader of the Congress. The Opposition was decisively beaten in the general election of 1971 and was deep down with frustrationâ.
If this claim is true, why were such draconian powers necessary? Does a leader who faces âno effective political threatâ call for the snuffing out of all liberties, including the right to life, as the judiciary acknowledged at the time, surreptitiously in the middle of the night? <b>If Indira Gandhi was the âunquestioned leader of the Congressâ, why were leading Congressmen like Chandra Shekhar, Mohan Dharia and Krishan Kant arrested along with the opposition leaders like Jayaprakash Narayan? </b>
If she was the âunquestioned leaderâ, why wasnât the Union cabinet called to discuss the proclamation of the Emergency ? She did expect that her patently uncalled for act would meet with some resistance from the senior members of the party like Swaran Singh and Jagjivan Ram?
Clearly, the glib explanations offered by Dhawan are unconvincing. Instead, what is obvious that the midnight proclamation was the act of a person who knew that she was in the wrong and, therefore, wanted the Emergency to be a fait accompli before presenting her party members with her decision signed by the President.
Continuing with his game of being economical with the truth, Dhawan writes that the âcountry was paralysed because of the railway strike, students were told to boycott their classes, civil servants were told to disobeyâ.
The railway strike took place in 1974 and was over well before the Emergency was declared in 1975. The students may have been told to boycott classes and the civil servants to disobey, but were they actually doing so ? Were there any instances of empty classrooms in colleges and universities and of civil servants actually refusing to follow orders?
These are the kinds of wild allegations that are made when politicians play hide and seek with the truth. Far more relevant than these totally unsubstantiated charges is what a PTI reporter, R.C.Rajamani, has written in The Statesman one of the two English newspapers (other than The Indian Express) which had the courage to oppose the Emergency.
<b>âHardly a month after she imposed the infamous Emergency on the midnight of June 25/26, 1975â, Rajamani has written, âIndira Gandhi told Parliament, presumably in the heat of the moment, `You have been calling me a dictator, when I was not. Now, I amâ. This was on July 22. </b>
The story sent out by the Press Trust of India was killed five minutes later by the censorâ. This is closer to the truth than Dhawanâs garbled account. Indira Gandhi needed to be the dictator because she had been found guilty of electoral malpractice by the Allahabad High Court, a judgment which was partially upheld by the Supreme Court.
To overturn these verdicts, she needed the fiction of âanarchyâ, as propounded by Dhawan.<b> Since there was no anarchy, she had to act virtually alone and impose the Emergency without consulting the Union cabinet, waking up President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, an old Congress party loyalist, at the dead of night to sign the proclamation</b>.
All of this is known, but what is noteworthy three decades after the event is that the Congress is still basically unapologetic about this blatant attempt to stifle democracy for the first time in the countryâs history and, hopefully, for the last time.
It is Indiaâs good fortune that the attempt did not succeed. But its failure was not due to any realization on Indira Gandhiâs part that she had acted wrongly. Instead, it was a miscalculation on her part to call for elections because she was unaware of the rebellious popular mood as a result of the press censorship.
So, when the voters got a chance to exercise their will, they threw out the dictator. As a party, the Congress apparently has no option but to continue to peddle untruths about that period because the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty remains the partyâs mascot.
Even Sanjay Gandhi, the enfant terrible of the Emergency, cannot be criticized by the party because he belongs to the family after all. If his son, Feroze Varun, joins the Congress, as has occasionally been suggested, the party will have to tread even more carefully when referring to those days.
However, no matter how hard it tries, the taint will not go away. Like Bofors, the Emergency will continue to haunt the party because it reflects one of its inherent traits.
If Bofors points to the reputation of corruption which Congress earned during its days in power in the first two decades after Independence when it had no worthwhile opponents, <b>the subversion of democracy during the Emergency reflected two aspects of the party and its leadership.</b>
<b>The first is Indira Gandhiâs personal failing her contempt for democratic norms which she first exhibited as Congress president in 1959 when she orchestrated the removal of the first elected communist government of Kerala</b>. In 1975, her dictatorial ambitions may have been accentuated by the thoughts of establishing a dynastic line, evident in her turning first to Sanjay and then to Rajiv, rather than leave the matter of succession to the party.
<b>The second is the Congressâs lack of spine, born of the decades in office which made its leaders hanker for power at the expense of principles</b>. The principled people at the time were former Congressmen like Jayaprakash Narayan and Acharya Kripalani. Few were in the Congress.
Only <b>Swaran Singh is believed to have demurred slightly when Indira Gandhi informed the cabinet at dawn on June 26, 1975, that an Emergency was already in force and that she wanted post facto approval</b>.
All the others, including heavyweights like <b>Jagjivan Ram, kept quiet, evidently because they did not want to lose the perquisites of office while sycophants like Congress president Devkant âIndira is Indiaâ Borooah and Siddhartha Shankar Ray were happy to bow their heads.</b>
But they had all reckoned without the wisdom of the people of India who could sift the fiction of âanarchyâ from the fact of tyranny.
Send in your comments on this article to samachareditor@sify.com
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->