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India Gazette
04-07-2025
- Health
- India Gazette
Congress insulting scientists who developed indigenous COVID vaccines: Union Minister Pralhad Joshi
Bengaluru (Karnataka) [India], July 4 (ANI): Union Minister Pralhad Joshi on Friday accused the Congress party of 'insulting India's scientific achievements' by questioning the efficacy of indigenous COVID-19 vaccines, demanding an apology from Chief Minister Siddaramaiah. Speaking to reporters in Bengaluru, Joshi condemned Congress leaders for 'baselessly doubting the vaccines that saved crores of lives.' 'They oppose Modi politically but are now undermining the very scientists who protected India and the world during the pandemic,' Joshi said. 'This is an insult to our nation's achievements,' he added. Joshi challenged Siddaramaiah to clarify whether the state government links COVID-19 vaccines to recent heart attack cases. 'The CM must apologise to scientists and the public for this irresponsible narrative,' he said. Highlighting India's vaccine milestones, he noted: 'Congress ruled for 60 years but didn't develop a single indigenous vaccine. Under Modi, we produced 240 crore doses, vaccinated 120 crore Indians, and supplied vaccines to 150 countries.' Joshi also targeted the Siddaramaiah-led government over infighting, citing MLAs who allegedly exposed 'corruption and zero development.' 'An anti-Congress wave is brewing within their party,' he said, referencing MLAs B.R. Patil and Basavaraj Rayareddy's corruption allegations. Responding to Karnataka's demand for central aid, Joshi stated: 'We'll fund development, not corruption. Let them submit a proper plan.' (ANI)
Hindustan Times
30-06-2025
- Politics
- Hindustan Times
How Emergency Brewed in Bihar
Sinhasan Khali Karo Ki Janata Aati Hai! When Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan roared with these lines of legendary Hindi poet Ramdhari Singh 'Dinkar' from the stage of Delhi's iconic Ram Leela Maidan, the janata (public) of the country rose with their echo. It however unnerved Prime Minister Indira Gandhi who was facing salvos of public anger. Out of despair, she imposed what historians now recall as the dark chapter in Indian history – the Emergency, declared on June 25, 1975. Lok Nayak Jayaprakash Narayan addressing a rally just before the Emergency was declared at Ramlila Ground in New Delhi. (HT Photo.) It was a paradox that Dinkar, who was revered and exalted to Rashtrakavi (national poet) status by Indira's father, Pt Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, for his poetry of rebellion, turned out to be a weapon in the hands of Indira's bete noire. JP was a political honcho who was moulded in the grind of Bihar. Dinkar was a bard of Bihar. So, the embers of political pirouette in the leadership of JP had to be most glowing in Bihar. The state in fact soon turned into the epicentre of anti-Congress and anti-Indira temblor. JP evolved into a principal of all those clamouring 'Total Revolution' – total change of system. Patna university would be its seminary, its students its knights and Bihar its hothouse. And Dinkar's poetry will be its song. Till it was lifted in 1977, many acts of the Emergency unfolded in Bihar. Early build-up in Bihar It was on June 5, 1974 that JP gave a call for 'Total Revolution' against the 'corrupt Congress regime, price rise and other forms of misgovernance from Patna's historic Gandhi Maidan, and gradually his movement became pan-India, seeking resignation of Indira Gandhi. Indira was enduring but as the Allahabad high Court annulled her election from Rae Bareli, she went draconian. And the country was introduced to the Emergency. Actually it was an incident in Bihar that is believed to have seeded the idea of Emergency in Indira's mind. It was the assassination of then Union minister Lalit Narayan Mishra that took place in a blast in Samastipur in January 1974. Once the Emergency was in place, the state turned into a battle ground and both the Indira machinery and the Opposition leaders tested each other's guts. In Bihar, the main action was in Patna, the State Capital, where the proclamation of Emergency suddenly put the onus of compliance of everything on the administration. Vijay Shankar Dubey, a 1966 batch IAS officer and then district magistrate of Patna, recalls a chain of events that unveils how events shaped the history of that pivotal time. He says the roots of the emergency had been laid long before Indira Gandhi made the big announcement. He lists a number of factors, including the poor financial condition of the country after the 1971 war, rising prices, shortage and black marketing of essential commodities like sugar and kerosene and the students' agitations in various parts of the country. He says that as soon as students mobilised all over, a large-scale arson and violence broke out. In Patna alone, 13 lives were lost in police firing. In order to rein in chaos and streamline the agitation, JP took over the leadership in his hands. 'It was March 18, 1974 when the. Then Patna University Students' Union (PUSU), comprising the likes of Lalu Prasad Yadav as president, Sushil Kumar Modi as general secretary and many others, announced to gherao the Bihar Assembly during the session, seeking resignation of CM Abdul Ghafoor and his cabinet over price rise and corruption. It led to stone pelting and violence. Many important buildings were set on fire, including the Searchlight and Pradeep newspaper office on Buddha Marg, which now houses Hindustan Times and Hindustan, Kotwali police station, Assembly secretary's house, Circuit House, education minister's residence, fire station, etc. Had I not ordered firing, things would have spiralled out of control and the entire city would have burnt,' he recalls. Students' agitation Dubey's tenure as DM of Patna was from March 1974 to June 1977. He was witness to all – from student agitation, large-scale arrests, imposition of myriad kinds of restrictions, suspension of fundamental rights and all other 'excesses' that define the Emergency era. He recollected that JP was in Patna those days after having witnessed another students' movement in Gujarat,and saw in it an opportunity to take it forward under his leadership in a different way. 'On April 2, 1974, he led a silent procession from Kadamkuan in Patna with barely around 500-600 persons -- all with hands and mouth cuffed, against police action, price rise and for seeking resignation of CM and his cabinet, etc. but swelled into 50,000 plus by the time it reached the then Bailey Road. It further boosted JP's confidence that the people were desperate for change. CM Ghafoor was, however, not ready to resign nor did Indira Gandhi want an elected government to go under pressure,' he reminisces. However, he said that April 2, 1974 onwards, agitation in Bihar became a routine affair and spread across the state. 'Be it rendition of poems, speeches on the roadside, pamphlet distribution or dharna, something or the other was always on, with youth and students always at the top of JP's scheme of things. JP appealed to the people to send postcards and inland letters voicing their opinions on the government and with widely guessed 50-lakh of them loaded on a truck marched towards the Raj Bhawan on June 5, 1974 to submit it and later hundreds of thousands people gathered at the Gandhi Maidan, where he gave the call for Total Revolution and shifted his target from Bihar government to Central government for systemic change to end corruption, political and administrative reforms, right to recall and eradication of the caste system. As the long procession moved, there was firing at the tail end at a point on Bailey Road allegedly by activists of an organisation called Indira Brigade, but it was soon controlled and the accused were arrested,' he says. On November 4, 1974, JP again took the agitation route, under which the activists were to gherao Assembly and force ministers and MLAs to resign, though the administration did not allow the procession to swell by dispersing them through use of 'mild force', Dubey says, adding that he contemplates writing a book reflecting the exact turn of events during his eventful tenure as Patna DM when the country witnessed the biggest political churning. 'The procession was stopped near Revenue Building with barricades. There was also lathicharge there, in which it was alleged that JP was also hit and a picture went viral, but it was wrong. I still have two medical reports – one from JP's family doctor – indicating that he was not injured in lathicharge, though some other leaders did receive some blows. When some people later asked JP if he was hit that day, the socialist leader said that the question was not about being hit, but the larger question was why there was lathicharge. I will elaborate this in my upcoming book why there was lathicharge that day,' Dubey says, adding that after November 4, 1974, JP shifted his focus entirely on Delhi to seek the ouster of Indira Gandhi, as the discontent had spread across the country by then. Roar from Delhi and Sudden Enforcement 'I was around 35 kms away from Patna camping in Masaurhi in connection with some land settlement issue for the landless. Those days, the only means of communication was landline phone or wireless system available to senior officials. As the Emergency was imposed at midnight, I had no idea immediately. Next morning, my then PA sent a messenger to inform me about it so that I could immediately return. I reached the next morning to understand that emergency had been imposed under Article 352 and the Maintenance of Internal Security Act, 1971 and the British era Defence of India Rules had been invoked, which gave powers to the administration to detain any person/persons for up to two years without FIR or trial if there was convincing evidence against them about indulgence in unlawful activities, participating in agitation or violence,' he said. The Allahabad High Court's June 12, 1975 verdict setting aside the election of Indira Gandhi as MP, even though she was given 15 days time to move the Supreme Court, gave further fillip to the movement against her and when the Apex Court also upheld the order on June 24, 1974, refusing to interfere with the HC order, JP pressed the peddle to seek her resignation, as she would have remained the PM for six months even without being a member of either House. On June 25, 1975 in his historic speech at Delhi's Ramleela Maidan, he exhorted the police and government officials not to obey illegal and immoral orders, which became another trigger for Indira Gandhi, who was already grappling with the surcharged atmosphere. And from Ram Leela Maidan, JP roared with Dinkar's 'Sinhasan Khali Karo…' The throne shook. But it was not vacated until 1977 when janata voted out its occupant.
The Hindu
26-06-2025
- Politics
- The Hindu
Revisiting Emergency through images
It has been 50 years since the Emergency was imposed on June 25, 1975. It lasted all of 21 months, coming to an end on March 21, 1977. Its impact, however, has lasted longer. The Emergency era remains fresh in the minds of the public, with politicians and academics invested in the constitution and polity of the nation. 'The long 1970s were the hinge on which the contemporary history of India turned, transforming the young postcolonial country into today's India,' author Srinath Raghavan said in a recent interview with The Hindu. His book Indira Gandhi and the Years That Transformed India is only one of many recent works aiming to demystify these years and what transpired. Only recently, Coomi Kapoor's The Emergency: A Personal History received an uncertain Bollywood treatment in the form of Kangana Ranaut's similarly titled film, which received a lukewarm response. As several narratives exist — political, academic, imaginative — there exist some undeniable facts and turning points during this era. We take a look at some images published by The Hindu, which sought to capture the zeitgeist — before, during and after the Emergency era. Also read: Revisiting a dark chapter: 50th anniversary of Emergency declaration ARCHITECTS OF THE EMERGENCY: Prime Minister Indira Gandhi with President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, when she called on him on August 21, 1974. Mrs. Ahmed is at left. On her cabinet's advice, President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed proclaimed Emergency under Article 352 citing 'internal disturbances'. Photo: The Hindu Archives THE MARCH THAT SHOOK MRS. GANDHI: Socialist leader Jayaprakash Narayan is seen seated outside the locked gate of the Patna Secretariat while leading the anti-corruption movement in Bihar in October 1974. As JP began touring more states, he also united several anti-Congress parties and the protests against Indira Gandhi government grew, which was seen as a prime reason for her recommending the Emergency. Photo: The Hindu Archives JP's MOVEMENT: JP leading a 'march to Parliament' in Delhi in March 1975. His movement brought an end to the Congress rule at the Centre for the first time in 1977. Different political parties came together under the banner of his Janata Party to provide the country its first non-Congress government. Photo: The Hindu Archives GUJARAT REVOLT: Morarji Desai (centre) sat on an indefinite fast to press for early election in Gujarat. Elections were held in June and for the first time and the only time, Gujarat threw a hung Assembly verdict. Two weeks later, Emergency was imposed. RAILWAYS STRIKE: This image, which later became a symbol of the state of Emergency, was taken when trade union leader George Fernandes was arrested during the all India railway strike in May 1974. Fernandes led the agitation demanding pay revision and eight-hour work shifts for railway workers. Despite his arrest, about 70% of railway workers stayed off from work, bringing the country's largest PSU to a standstill. A LEGAL BATTLE LOST: Indira Gandhi lost the legal battle in the Allahabad High Court in a petition filed by Raj Narain (in picture), challenging her election in 1971 from Rae Bareli in Uttar Pradesh. The conviction meant she ceases to be an MP. EMERGENCY IMPOSED: The first page of The Hindu dated June 26, 1975, reports President proclaiming Emergency, on its front page. WHEN A CM PROTESTED: Karunanidhi, then the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, distributes handmade pamphlets to public near Anna Statue in Mount Road to protest press censorship during Emergency. On July 12, 1975, he addressed a mass meeting on the Marina Beach in Madras, declaring there was neither an internal nor external threat to India and called upon the vast concourse to take a pledge to defend their freedoms. His government was subsequently dismissed. This image was taken from a photo display at Kalaignar Karuvoolam. Photo: M. Vedhan THE STORY OF THE UNSEEN: When JP was addressing a meeting in Vijayawada against the Emergency in 1975, three three youngsters - Yalamanchali Sivaji, Yarlagadda Lakshmi Prasad and Kambhampati Hari Babu - can be seen. All of them became MPs subsequently. Sitting in the audience, but missed in the click is a young man who was among several people arrested for opposing the Emergency. It was M. Venkaiah Naidu, who went on to be the Vice-president of India. This picture was shared with The Hindu by Dr. Sivaji. Photo: Special Arrangement DMK FACES THE WRATH: Young DMK leaders M.K. Stalin, Arcot Veerasamy, Murasoli Maran were among those detained in MISA. C. Chittibab, former Mayor of Madras, died in custody while trying to protect Stalin. Photo shows the cell at the erstwhile Madras Central Prison where Chief Minister M.K. Stalin was detained under the Maintenance of Internal Security Act during the Emergency. THE GOVERNMENT NARRATIVE: In this image shared by the Press Information Bureau, some of the members of the Indian community in London, called on Indira Gandhi, in New Delhi on September 15, 1975. They had participated in the massive demonstration in support of Emergency measures and against the distortions by the British press and BBC. Photo: Special Arrangement THE JANATA GOVERNMENT: Morarji Desai (left) talking to L.K. Advani (right) while Jayaprakash Narayan watching them, in New Delhi on January 22, 1977. This photograph wouldn't have been possible prior the Emergency given their political views. But the anti-Congress leaders joined hands to form the Janata government, handing out Congress its first defeat at the Centre. Moraji Desai became the Prime Minister, L.K. Advani, the I&B Minister, while JP chose to stay away from electoral politics. Photo: The Hindu Archives ENDING EMERGENCY: Indira Gandhi called for fresh elections in March 1977 and released all political prisoners. The picture shows Ms. Gandhi meeting leaders of the Opposition parties in New Delhi on January 28, 1977. NEW LEADERS RISE: The Emergency gave birth to a new wave of politicians, Chandra Shekhar being a prominent face. He and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who were ministers in the Janata Government, eventually became prime ministers.
Time of India
18-06-2025
- Politics
- Time of India
Tamil by roots, Punjabi by nature: How Jan Sangh's A Vishwanathan, a man with roots to a village near Kaveri river, won elections twice from Ludhiana seats
1 2 3 4 5 6 Ludhiana: The political chorus these days has been assuming a hatred-laced regionalist fervour, but there was a time when Ludhiana West assembly segment was represented by a man who traced his roots to a village in Tamil Nadu, located on the southern bank of Kaveri. A bypoll is scheduled to be held in Ludhiana West on Thursday. When A Vishwanathan was elected MLA on a Bharatiya Jan Sangh (precursor of Bharatiya Janata Party) ticket from Ludhiana South in 1967 and on a Janata Party ticket from Ludhiana West in 1977, the city was almost exclusively inhabited by Punjabi Hindus and Sikhs. His election was not just by chance or through parachuting tricks that parties employ these days. Vishwanathan had chosen to spend all his professional and political life in Ludhiana, where he worked as lawyer and assumed a leading role in the political activities of Bharatiya Jan Sangh (precursor of Bharatiya Janata Party) and served as its president for Ludhiana district. During the emergency, Vishwanathan spent 19 months in jail for opposing the clampdown. He was a fluent Punjabi speaker, who quit professorship of economics and emerged as an eminent lawyer. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Giao dịch vàng CFDs với mức chênh lệch giá thấp nhất IC Markets Đăng ký Undo "Such was the impact of his personality and socio-political work he had done that when I campaigned in Ludhiana West in 2007, while contesting assembly elections on a SAD-BJP ticket, BJP's old guards would cry while recalling his commitments and contributions. This was long after he died. It shows how deeply people of Ludhiana West respected him," recalled former Ludhiana West MLA Harish Rai Dhanda. In 1967 elections, the first to be held after the reorganisation of Punjab, Vishwanathan won the election from Ludhiana South on the BJS symbol. By 1977, the Ludhiana West seat was carved out following delimitation. That year, he won by trouncing the popular Congress leader Joginder Pal Pandey and secured over 51 % votes. In 1977, he contested elections on the symbol of Janata Party, the conglomerate of major anti-Congress political parties, after emergency was lifted in 1977. But how did a Tamil man, whose family hailed from Palamaneri village of Thanjavur district, came to Ludhiana? The story dates to pre-Partition years. "It all started with my great-grandfather, who, during the British period, moved to Dehradun to serve as headmaster in Col Brown Cambridge School, along with his family. My grandfather was born in Delhi. Later, my grandfather A Vishwanathan and his two sisters shifted to Jalandhar to attain higher education. He studied at DAV, Jalandhar, from 1946 to 1951 and settled in Ludhiana to practise law. One of his sisters became the principal of Kanya Maha Vidyalya, Jalandhar," said Chandigarh-based lawyer R Kartikeya, Vishwanathan's grandson, who still manages the law firm with the same name that was once launched by Vishwanathan in 1950s in Ludhiana. Kartikeya said his grandfather embraced Punjabi culture by heart. "Although he was fluent in several Indian and foreign languages, he felt if one wanted to live and work among Punjabis, they should embrace Punjabi as their mother tongue. That was his commitment towards Punjabis," said Kartikeya. The citation of 'Roll of Honour of the Highest Order', conferred upon Vishwanathan by DAV College, Jalandhar, offered insight into his academic and political achievements. It mentions that after enrolling in the college in 1946, he first studied BSs (non-medical) and then earned MA (Economics). He even served as a professor of economics after his post-graduate degree. "Ever since his early childhood, Prof Vishwanathan had been closely associated with RSS and held many important offices in the organisation. He is an able organizer and founder member of Bharatiya Jan Sangh. He had been the president of the district unit of BJS. He was instrumental in arousing public opinion against the emergency," reads the citation. Vishwanathan passed away at PGIMER, Chandigarh, in 1980 after suffering a heart attack. He was in his 70s at the time.
Hindustan Times
17-06-2025
- Politics
- Hindustan Times
Politics, economics, social contracts:Why rerun of anger of '75 is unlikely
'History does nothing, it possesses no immense wealth, it wages no battles. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; history is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims,' Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote in their seminal 1845 book, The Holy Family. This is actually a good framework to look at the Emergency, 50 years after its imposition. The prelude, duration and aftermath of the Emergency have a lot of historical events across different realms that are worthy of being remembered and discussed in detail even today. However, it is useful to ask a simple, perhaps counter-intuitive, question to provoke a discussion on the issue : what led to the Emergency when it happened and can a similar thing happen today? If one were to give a simplistic account of what led to the Emergency, it can be done as follows: There was a surge of popular and militant protests against the Indira Gandhi government and her party's governments in various states. The reasons were primarily economic. When the Allahabad high court annulled Gandhi's election citing impropriety, which threatened the possibility of her continuing in office, she decided to put democracy in suspended animation. Ironic as it may sound, Parliament continued to function and the government pushed through whatever legislation it wanted, as the Congress had an overwhelming majority, not just in Parliament, but even in many state legislatures. The latter had to sign off on the flurry of constitutional amendments during this period to make them kosher. Two more questions are worth asking in the aftermath of the Emergency : have there not been episodes of popular anger on other occasions, like there was during the Emergency? And, what has been the State's response to these outbursts? Answering both questions requires making a distinction between the behaviour of the political elite and the people at large. The question concerning the political elite is easier to answer. The 1977 parliamentary elections that followed the Emergency established an important fact in the landscape of India's political competition: The Congress could be dislodged from power at the national level democratically. However, they also proved that it would take more than anti-Congress politics to provide a stable government. The Janata Party government, after all, was more a circus of warring factions than some radical political programme in action – contrary to what some glorious accounts of the resistance to the Emergency often suggest. Political scientists prefer to classify Indian politics into four eras of party systems: The first of absolute Congress dominance (1947-67), the second of the Congress losing control in states but largely retaining its position at the Centre (1967-89), the third of coalition politics (1989-2014) and the fourth of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) emerging as the new hegemon (2014 onwards). It needs to be underlined that the BJP's current electoral dominance does not come close to the Congress's popular support until the Indira Gandhi years, and the 1984 elections which followed her assassination. In the last three general elections, the BJP won a decent majority in one, a comfortable one in the second, and failed to win one in the third. To be sure, these performances are still stupendous in comparison with the contemporary political landscape and tower over those of other parties in the last three decades, largely owing to tailwinds of ideological advantage and Prime Minister Narendra Modi's charisma. Similarly, the BJP is far from having a majority of its own in many states. This appears to be the biggest reason why the BJP and its leadership have retained democratic sobriety and continue to court political elites from other parties even today. The BJP's tendency to share power rather than concentrate it completely, as is seen in political arrangements in states such as Maharashtra or Bihar clearly show that today's Caesarism – to borrow the term historian Srinath Raghavan uses to describe the concentration of political power and charisma in Indira Gandhi – is nowhere close to that in the 1970s. This sharing of power – despite the current Caesarian order – takes away any incentive for the political elite to seek an outright rebellion against the regime of the day. What about the economy? The Indian economy today is hardly a landscape of prosperity and opulence. Low poverty numbers notwithstanding, an overwhelming share of the Indian population is struggling to make ends meet and depends on various kinds of government hand-outs to avoid running into crisis and acute deprivation. However, it is equally important to accept that things are drastically different from what they were in the 1970s. The idealism around a planned economic transformation had dissipated and the Indian economy was battling supply constraints of various kinds then: Food, foreign exchange and industrial goods. These constraints would become extremely severe when there was a bad agricultural harvest or an exogenous shock to the economy. The prelude to the Emergency saw both of these. While the people at large, including the relatively privileged class, had no option but to struggle with unemployment and persistent shortages, capital (as a class) was extremely circumspect about the intentions of a Prime Minister who had pulled off things such as bank nationalisation and was talking about building socialism as a national agenda. Today's economic problem of quality employment generation and inequality notwithstanding, the Indian economy is almost completely immune from supply side shortages, has buried the ghosts of macroeconomic instability, and perfected a dialectic between capital and the State (at its various tiers) where the former is free to pursue profits in return for willingness to provide political finance. Labour, on the other hand, has been given the palliative of welfare in order to enable it to deal with the chronic pain due to lack of gainful employment and the heartburn of inequality. While this arrangement is far from perfect, it has significantly raised the threshold of economic misery that can trigger an all-out rebellion. None of this is to say that there are no popular and elite-driven conflicts with the State. But they are more in the realm of reworking social or ethnic contracts rather than a wider class conflict. It is the latter that was the primary fuel for mass unrest in the 1970s; even though it was intelligently deployed by all kinds of vested interests towards their political projects including those of caste and ethnicity, in the period before the Emergency. The biggest reason we do not have mass anger and protests driven by it – akin to what led to the Emergency – is that present-day politicians, fishing for ethnic and social mobilisations, do not have the bait of class anger to get their way. This is partly a result of the Indian State's improved economic fortunes from 50 years ago, but also a reflection of the fact that the Opposition and the government speak the same language, as far as class is concerned. The Emergency in 1975 was triggered primarily by the poverty of the country and a despotic leader crushing all protests against it. Today's placid phase in politics is more a reflection of a poverty of the political opposition's politics. The people at large know that when it comes to a class struggle, the Opposition has very little to differentiate itself, and there is no point in hitting the barricades in its pursuit.
