50 years on, Emergency lingers as memory and metaphor in Mumbai

Hindustan Times

20-06-2025

June 25, 1975. Bombay woke up to an announcement on All India Radio that Emergency had been clamped across India in view of 'internal disturbances.' Heavy rains darkened the city's bleak mood.
'There was a blanket of fear over Bombay in the first few weeks. No authentic information was available thanks to press censorship. I was 23 and scared as the future suddenly seemed grim and uncertain,' said music critic and writer Amarendra Nandu Dhaneshwar, who would go on to spend two years in prison as a class 'A' detainee as political prisoners were then termed.
But initially, there were also some people, especially among the city's middle class, who were happy to see government officials with their noses to the desk and suburban trains arriving on time, said Gujarati writer Ramesh Oza. But very soon the reality of the Emergency started to bite and the protest movement began, he added.
Oza recalls sneaking into the ward at Jaslok Hospital where Jayaprakash Narayan, helmsman of the anti-Emergency stir, was undergoing treatment for kidney ailment. 'I was 21 and hugely nervous. I told JP-ji that I was keen on doing my bit to restore democracy. From his hospital bed he put me on to a senior Sarvodaya functionary, and got me inducted into the Bombay Sarvoday Mandal, a hub of civil rights activists.'
Over the next two years, it was the city's socialists and Gandhians who kept the embers of the anti-Emergency crusade burning. Several of them were arrested under the draconian Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA), while many others went underground.
'The Gandhian-Socialist brigade dubbed it doosri aazadi ki ladai [second war of independence],' said Dhaneshwar. But every act of resistance was met by greater repression. Young men were randomly picked up from their homes for vasectomy. 'Aapression' (operation) became a dirty word across Maharashtra's rural heartland.
On October 14, 1975, popular Sarvodaya leader Prabhakar Sharma's death by self-immolation at Wardha stunned the city. But it also fired up a whole new generation of protestors, most remarkably a slew of fiery women leaders. They included the writer-scholar Durga Bhagwat, Gandhian academics Usha Mehta and Aloo Dastoor, Socialist firebrand leader Mrinal Gore, Pushpa Bhave, Rohini Gavankar, Sudha Warde, and Jana Sangh leader Jayawantiben Mehta.
Under Bhave's leadership, a small group of volunteers would plaster anti-Emergency posters in railway compartments after the last train had chugged out of Churchgate station. The police were constantly on Bhave's trail, but she always managed to give them a slip. As did Mrinal Gore, who dodged the cops for a year by changing homes and hair styles, said her friend and poet Usha Mehta.
Gore once tip-toed into Usha Mehta's Shivaji Park residence at mid-night, unrecognisable because of her closely cropped hair and'modern' look. 'Mrinaltai would help us in household chores, even as she kept an eye on the window to check if a CID official was hovering around,' recalled Mehta, who memorialised the Emergency in a book titled 'Aanibaani Aani Aapan' (Emergency And We).
Their comrade-in-arms Durga Bhagwat was arrested in June, 1976. The police entered the Royal (now Mumbai) Asiatic Society, her second home, even as she was sitting down to lunch. The cops were embarrassed when Bhagwat offered them food, said noted writer-translator Ashok Shahane. There were others such as Minoo Masani, the editor of 'Freedom First' who contested censorship orders while publisher-writer Ramdas Bhatkal of Popular Prakashan which would go on to publish JP's Emergency memoirs, and Usha Mehta and academic DV Deshpande floated the 'Group of 1977' to provide financial relief and legal aid to Emergency victims.
When the state department for publicity objected to the publication of a coruscating translated essay by Sunil Gangopadhyay in the literary magazine 'Satyakatha', the editor Ram Patwardhan chose to keep the page blank rather than lop off of a few paragraphs from Gangopadhyay's piece, said Sunil Karnik, who was then a sub-editor on the magazine.
Long incarceration brought some sections of the Socialists and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh closer. RSS members Wamanrao Parab and Swaroopchand Goel, among others, were Dhaneshwar's cell-mates at the Arthur Road prison. Sudhir Joglekar, a senior Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad member, shared the Yerawada prison cell in Pune with Sadanand Varde and Jagannath Jadhav (both Socialists), and Datta Patil and Prabhakar Patil (both Peasants' and Workers' Party). However, the camaraderie forged in jail did not quite dissolve ideological differences, which eventually brought down the Morarji Desai -led Janata government in 1979.
Fifty years on, Emergency continues to flicker on Mumbai's grey horizon both as memory and metaphor.