Turbulent history: lessons from the dark days of Emergency

The Hindu

2 days ago

April 1976 was a month with long nights and no dawns. Fear hung in the air. There had been reports of an impending doom in Delhi, when a bulldozer would arrive at people's doorstep, demolishing all that they had earned, nursed and nurtured for generations. The worst apprehensions soon came true. 'Early on the morning of 13 April 1976, a rusty old bulldozer wheezed and creaked down Asaf Ali Road towards Turkman Gate...', John Dayal and Ajoy Bose documents in For Reasons of State: Delhi Under Emergency (India Viking/2018).
Kalan Mahal, Turkman Gate, Dujana House all bore the brunt of the machine that spared no brick and mortar structure in its way. As the bulldozer demolished houses that had stood there for generations, a million dreams were crushed. Clearly shaken, women and children soon climbed on to the waiting trucks as commanded by a lower level functionary of the DDA to literally start life from scratch in Nand Nagri, Trilokpuri, Seelampur, and Ranjit Nagar — places they did not know existed. The men protested, some loudly, most feebly.
Many held Jagmohan, the DDA chairman, to be the villain. Others felt Rukhsana Sultana, the enthusiastic proponent of coercive family planning programme to be responsible. She, after all, had Sanjay Gandhi's ear. A few turned to Subhadra Joshi, the local MP of the Congress. Most knew it was the doing of one man: Sanjay Gandhi. No one had the courage to say so. Finally, a thousand residents signed a memorandum addressed to the Gandhi scion, pleading for the bulldozer action to be halted.
Mountain of complaints
Dayal and Bose wrote: 'A small band of Youth Congress workers...met the prince himself. Sanjay Gandhi greeted them coldly when he heard what they had to say. They presented him with a memorandum signed by more than 1,000 people of Turkman Gate demanding the end of the demolition drive. The prince...nodded once and the meeting was over. After they left, the prince tore up the memorandum into little shreds. He had little time for the rabble. He had to catch a plane to Simla.' Delhi, apparently, was too hot. For him. And for the unfortunate bulldozer victims, now left to pick up the pieces of their life again. They were among the less unfortunate ones.
The victims of police brutality were worse off. The Justice Shah Commission received a multitude of complaints about police excesses. Seasoned politician-lawyer and Governor of Goa, P.S. Sreedharan Pillai, who was a first year law student at Kozhikode Law College at that time, has written in detail about it in Democracy Enchained Nation Disgraced: Dark Days of India's Emergency (Konark Publishers/2025). 'Hundreds of pieces of evidence were presented before the Justice Shah Commission, clearly implicating Sanjay Gandhi and his coteries in the brutal actions in Turkman Gate and other areas across Delhi....The infamous and brutal torture method known as uruttal (rolling) was implemented in most police stations.'
Pillai goes on to write of other torture methods, including 'fanning' where the victim's hands were tied to the blades of a fan which was then turned on. All along he seeks to highlight how the common citizen was dispossessed of all rights, even the basic dignity of food and clothing. Understandably, as Pillai writes, 'Foreign nations began to question whether India still deserved to be called a 'civilised community'.' Of course, there were Indians abroad whose heart beat for the nation. This is written in much greater detail by Sugata Srinivasaraju in The Conscience Network: A Chronicle of Resistance to a Dictatorship (Vintage/2025).
International pressure
Srinivasaraju undertakes a painstaking exercise to chronicle the two years when India was under Emergency rule where the author's scholarship and vast experience comes to the fore. While focussing on many of the international developments around Emergency, he makes space to talk of the challenges and the troubles of the likes of Indians for Democracy founder Anand Kumar who was threatened with deportation for raising his voice against Emergency.
He also writes about Anand Patwardhan, documentary filmmaker who hailed from a family of freedom fighters, and whose film Waves of Revolution became an effective means of protest against the Emergency, and Subramanian Swamy, the 'maverick academic' who had disguised himself as a Sikh driver of Nanaji Deshmukh in India, and then on a lecture tour across the U.S. stated, 'It was completely false to suggest that only a handful of Western -educated elite were complaining about the Emergency.'
Defiance at home
By November 1975, there was resistance in 300 districts across India, Swamy revealed. In the U.S., there were posters highlighting the ongoing wrongs in India, seeking the help of common citizens with posters like, 'Support Political Freedom in India' and 'Support Human Rights in India'.
Meanwhile, the government in India alternated between using its long arm of pliant diplomats and the inevitable recognition that the move had failure written all over. People could not be silenced forever. Writes M.A. Baby in his foreword to Sebastian Joseph's The Emergency: Twenty-One Months of Draconian Rule (Konark Publishing/2025), translated from the Malayalam by Radhika P. Menon, 'It was a dark chapter in Indian democracy as fundamental rights were suspended, the press was censored, and thousands of political opponents were detained without trial.' Then the seasoned politician has a word of caution for contemporary times, writing, 'Today, even though there is no formal suspension of civil liberties or censorship of the press, we are witnessing a disturbing trend: people exercising their liberties are often attacked — physically and digitally. The mainstream media, by and large, appears reluctant to question the powers that be.'
It reminds us of L.K. Advani's words in 1975, and reproduced in Pillai's book about the media then, 'You were merely asked to bend but you chose to crawl.' The Emergency's lessons remain valuable.