June 25, 2000

Yes, Prime Minister

KULDIP NAYAR narrates how a motley crowd of bureaucrats and politicians aided Indira Gandhi to impose the Emergency in 1975 and turn India into a banana republic for 19 months

Jagjivan Ram, popularly known as Babuji, was accessible to journalists. On the morning of June 26, when the Emergency was 12 hours old, I went to his house to know more. Many other journalists were already talking to him. As a minister, he had attended the Cabinet meeting Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had convened at six in the morning. He was reluctant to say anything on the subject. He gave us tea but no news. Disgusted, all of us left his room. His personal assistant followed me and said that Babuji wanted to talk to me alone and when I entered his room, he asked me to close the door. He removed the receiver from the instrument. He said his telephone was tapped. He began talking in a whisper as if he was still afraid of being recorded. He did not want to talk about the Emergency. There was a possibility, he said, that Kamlapati Tripathi, then a union minister, could be appointed as interim prime minister. It would be till the disposal of appeal by Mrs Gandhi against her unseating on the ground of corrupt election practices.

Ram wanted The Indian Express, the multi-edition daily for which I worked, to project the claim of Tripathi. ``We will all support him,'' he said. This was the time when Mrs Gandhi was a bit confused after the Allahabad High Court judgment. But she never approached either Tripathi or anyone else to step in temporarily.

Sanjay Gandhi, her younger son, made up her mind. He gave her all the strength and confidence to rule by herself and reject the legitimate compulsion of a judicial verdict against her. In it he saw his opportunity to take power from a person who dawdled at times. All at once he became the authority because of his proximity to the seat of power.

Siddharth Sankar Ray, then the West Bengal chief minister, who proposed to Mrs Gandhi to impose `internal emergency' was cast aside quickly. His repugnant role was over once he showed that liberty, freedom and democracy, all such sinews of the nation could be suspended while remaining within the ambit of the Constitution. He is the one who drafted a letter for the President to issue the proclamation on the basis of information Mrs Gandhi had received that ``there is an imminent danger to the security of India being threatened by internal disturbances''.

``Once the constitutional obligation was over, Sanjay became the Government. He ran it with a coterie of ministers and officials drawn from different parts of the administration. He had Bansi Lal, shifted from the Haryana chief ministership to the Defence Ministry, Pranab Mukherjee from Revenue and Banking, Om Mehta from Home Affairs, V.C. Shukla from Information and Broadcasting and Kamal Nath, a friend, from Commerce. They constituted the instruments in the hands of Sanjay. There was also the like-minded public functionaries. Among them were Kishan Chand, the Delhi Lt. Governor, Gopi Arora of the PMO, N. K. Singh, now in the PMO but then in the Commerce Ministry, Jagmohan, the then DDA Chairman, D. P. Nayar in the Home Affairs, R. K. Dhawan, Mrs Gandhi's private secretary, P. S. Bhinder, DIG police, Navin Chawla, Secretary, to Lt. Governor Kishan Chand and K. N. Prasad of the Information Ministry. ``Anxiety to survive at any cost formed the key-note of approach to the problems that came before many of them,'' says the Shah Commission which went into the excesses committed during the Emergency. ``The ethical considerations inherent in public behaviour became generally dim and in many cases beyond the mental grasp of many of the public functionaries.''

The modus operandi of the coterie and the picked officials was to spread fear through arrests of political opponents and critics, motivated raids on the houses and offices of industrialists and businessmen and arbitrry actions against those who could raise their head. Press was the first to be gagged and then the news agencies _ Press Trust of India and United News of India _ were amalgamated into one news agency, Samachar, to facilitate control. In the scheme of Sanjay Gandhi's things, the high courts were to be closed and the electricity connection to newspapers cut off. Before the guidelines of censorship were finalised _ it took three days _ newspapers did get electricity, high courts were not closed. Ray took credit for it. According to him, he persuaded Mrs Gandhi not to do so, although Sanjay, according to him, told him quite rudely and offensively that he did not know how to rule the country. It was important that the States obeyed what the Centre would order. The general message given on June 24 was that ``having regard to the prevailing conditions and the contemplated country-wide agitation, it had been decided to take strong and deterrent action...''

The word Emergency was used in a subsequent message after June 25. Vengal Rao, the then Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister, was flown to Bangalore in an IAF plane and assigned the task of telling the Karnataka Chief Minister that a stringent rule was in the offing. P. C. Sethi, then Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, was told by Om Mehta at the residence of the Prime Minister that he would have to take into custody certain persons who were capable of creating disturbances. Since Harideo Joshi, the Rajasthan Chief Minister, was not available on the phone, Sethi was sent by an IAF aircraft to Banswara where Joshi was camping. Incidentally, no payments were made by anyone for the use of Air Force planes.

Bansi Lal was still the Haryana Chief Minister when the Emergency was imposed. He was in Delhi. He asked his principal secretary to alert the Deputy Commissioners to stay at their headquarters and be available on the telephone. The Bihar Chief Minister was at Darbhanga. Its deputy commissioner was asked to tell the CM to contact the Prime Minister's house. The Chief Minister phoned the house on January 26 and took orders from Sanjay.

Among the abuses of authority by the administration, the most serious one was the manner in which powers assigned by the Government to detain persons under MISA (Maintenance of Internal Security Act) were misused by the officials at various levels. Many did so on orders from above and some settled their personal scores. Sanjay enjoyed the personal rule he introduced. The coterie and officials had the vicarious satisfaction of being rulers.'' That some of them are now at key places shows that the nation cannot be kept safe for working a democratic system unless there is realisation that those who misused power or maladministered cannot be part of the Government.

The writer, a renowned journalist and author was Editor, Express News Service, during the Emergency. He was detained then for protesting against censorship.

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