Emergency: A Personal History by Coomi Kapoor

Emergency: A Personal History by Coomi Kapoor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

With shades of 1984 and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, this memoir is a must-read for every democracy-loving Indian. There is an onimous sense of déjà vu nowadays when the tables have been turned

In Gujrat the RSS often sent a young pracharak to pick him (a fugitive Subramaniam Swamy) from the station and take him to (Morarji) Desai’s house. This humble pracharak was Narendra Modi…

Indira Gandhi rode roughshod over any kind of dissenting voice while ensconced in her ivory tower

At the start of the Emergency the director general of AIR ventured to suggest to Mrs Gandhi that she would destroy the credibility of AIR if the government did away with AIR’s code of objectivity. She responded angrily, ‘What credibility? We are the government!'

Clever journalists circumvented the draconian censorship rules by this sly obituary notice in the Times of India

the demise of D’Ocracy, DEM beloved husband of T.Ruth, loving father of L I Bertie, brother of Faith, Hope, Justice who expired on 26 June

Sycophancy knew no bounds with the famous quote by D.K. Barooah Indira is India and India is Indira

All India Radio came to be jokingly referred to as All Indira Radio as, following government directions, it played up every speech by Indira and Sanjay

How free speech was throttled

…the electricity on Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg kept flickering on and off. By afternoon there was a newsflash from the agencies, declaring that censorship had been imposed and nothing could be printed without prior official clearance. By evening, electricity to Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg was disconnected for the whole night so that the Times of India, Indian Express, Navbharat Times, Patriot, National Herald, Daily Pratap, and Veer Arjun could not bring out their editions. The newspapers would not be printed for another two days.

The paranoid dictator-in-the-making silenced the opposition and any dissenting voices

After arresting the top leaders, the police had started cracking down on the lower rungs of the dissidents, including student union activists, trade unionists, municipal corporators and members of Delhi Metropolitan Council affiliated to the opposition parties. On 4 July the government banned twenty-six organizations, including the RSS, the Anand Marg, the Jamaat-e-Islami and the Naxalites…Nobody took the Anand Marg seriously except for Mrs Gandhi

Parliament was throttled and the Constitution made inconsequential

Mrs Gandhi convened and emergency session of Parliament on 21 July to get the official stamp of approval for her proclamation of the Emergency. MPs from the treasury benches dutifully endorsed everything they were told to. There was not a murmur of dissent. To the left of the Speaker there were a large number of empty spaces since the leading lights of the Opposition were mostly behind bars…Even before the Emergency Mrs Gandhi had aired her views that government departments unnecessarily wasted time answering questions raised by MPs during Parliament’s Question Hour… She now decreed that only urgent and important government business should be transacted in a Parliament session. Question Hour, Calling Attention motions and other parliamentary business initiated by private members were dispensed with

Kafkaesque draconian measures were instituted

An arrest under MISA, unlike an arrest under DIR, had an air of finality about it. There was no scope for intervention by the courts, no provision for bail

A very well presented account of those dark days.

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