Ram Puniyani 
Om Birla, the speaker of Lok Sabha is mired in many controversies.
When he started his second term as Lok Sabha speaker, he read out a resolution against the Emergency which was imposed in 1975 by Indira Gandhi. The background of that emergency was the rising Sampoorna Kranti (Total Revolution) Movement, led by Jaya Prakash Narayan (JP). The movement of students of Gujarat which began to protest against the rise in canteen bills, was soon joined by the students of Bihar. This spiralled into students requesting JP to lead the movement at the national level. JP gave the call of gheraoing (encircling) the assemblies and parliament. On June 15, 1975, at a huge rally in Ramlila Maidan, Delhi, he called on the military and police to defy the orders of the government. Three days earlier, as part of an unconnected matter, the Allahabad high court had struck down Mrs. Gandhi’s 1971 election and disqualified her from holding elected office. The Supreme Court gave a stay on this on June 24.
In the face of mounting opposition to her regime, Indira Gandhi imposed an emergency using Article 352 of the Constitution on June 25, 1975. The suspension of civil liberties and the violation of human rights this involved lasted 21 months, until she lifted the emergency and held elections in 1977. Mrs. Gandhi regretted the excesses during this period in a speech in Yavatmal on January 24, 1978. Even Rahul Gandhi has offered apologies for the excesses during Emergency on behalf of his party. While many opposition leaders from Left to Right were arrested from 1975 to 1977, Lalu Prasad Yadav, who was in jail all through the emergency, wrote in a recent article along with journalist Nalin Verma that though the opposition was arrested it was treated with dignity by Indira Gandhi.
The BJP has been observing June 25 as a black day for Indian democracy but the Sangh parivar’s record during the emergency is a complex and contradictory one.
JP, who was one of the tall leaders of the freedom movement, was happy to include the RSS as a part of the agitation launched by him against Indira Gandhi. The RSS’s Nanaji Deshmukh, who has recently been awarded Bharat Ratna by the BJP regime, became a central organiser of the movement. This gave respectability to the RSS as it was still under a cloud due to its historical links to Nathuram Godse, the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi.
The RSS played an important role in the Sampoorna Kranti movement, which gave it credibility in people’s eyes. But after the imposition of Emergency, when many of its members were arrested, it started bowing to the Indira Gandhi regime. Many of its members signed mafinamas (mercy petitions) and got released.
The BJP’s effort is to project itself as the mainstay of resistance to the Emergency. Prabhash Joshi, the eminent journalist brought out the real truth in his article in Tehelka some years ago:
“Balasaheb Deoras, then RSS chief, wrote a letter to Indira Gandhi pledging to help implement the notorious 20-point programme of Sanjay Gandhi. This is the real character of the RSS…You can decipher a line of action, a pattern. Even during the Emergency, many among the RSS and Jana Sangh who came out of the jails gave mafinamas. They were the first to apologise. Only their leaders remained in jail: Atal Bihari Vajpayee [most of time in hospital], LK Advani, even Arun Jaitley. But the RSS did not fight the Emergency. So why is the BJP trying to appropriate that memory?”
Deoras’s letters were also published in a book, Hindu Sangthan aur Sattavadi Rajniti, authored by him and published by Jagruti Prakashan Noida. This was confirmed by T.V. Rajeswar who was deputy chief of the Intelligence Bureau at the time.
Press censorship and excesses on the issue of sterilisation and demolition of slums were painful parts of this period. But over the past ten years, we have been witnessing the arrest of public intellectuals, participants in peaceful struggles and journalists; the sordid spectacle of mainstream media bowing to the regime; the opponents of government policies being called anti-nationals; the suspension of 146 members of parliament, among others.
The violation of civil liberties which took place during this period are aided by the foot soldiers of the RSS. The situation for the past decade has in many way been been worse than the declared emergency. This is what prompted the critic of the 1975 Emergency, Nayantara Sahgal, to call the past decade an undeclared emergency:
“Well, we have an undeclared Emergency; there is no doubt about that. We have seen a huge, massive attack on the freedom of expression. We have seen innocent, helpless Indians killed because they did not fit into the RSS’s view of India. … So we have a horrendous situation, a nightmare which is worse than the Emergency… It is an absolutely nightmarish situation which has no equal. “
While we look back to the period of emergency 1975, we need to introspect and ward off the undeclared emergency which the country has been witnessing from the last decade.
Ram Puniyani is president of the Centre for Study of Society and Secularism.
This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.