If not anything else, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a compulsive rabble-rouser and he does not even spare the parliament. On the opening of the 18th Lok Sabha on June 24, he made this tall but untenable claim: “For the second time since independence, a government has got the opportunity to serve the country for the third time in a row. This opportunity has come after 60 years. When people have chosen a government for the third term, it means a stamp on its intent, a stamp on its policies and its dedication. I thank the people for this.” Nothing could be farther from the truth and he should instead be thankful to the Election Commission for conducting the most unfair election in India’s history.
Modi did not stop there. Referring to the Emergency imposed by the then Indira Gandhi government, he said, “Tomorrow marks 50 years of the black spot on Indian democracy. The new generation will not forget how the Indian Constitution was scrapped, how the country was turned into a jail and democracy was captured. In this 50th anniversary, the country will take a pledge that never again will it happen.” The prime minister’s remarks and swipes targeting the Congress drew a sharp response and its president Mallikarjun Kharge retorted, “You are warning the Opposition. You are talking about the 50-year-old Emergency, but have forgotten the undeclared Emergency in the last 10 years.” Kharge was talking about the prevailing neo-Emergency situation.
Let me reminisce a bit. Forty-nine years ago, around midnight on June 25-26, 1975, the president of India issued this proclamation: “In exercise of the powers conferred by clause (1) of Article 352 of the Constitution, I, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, President of India, by this Proclamation declare that a grave emergency exists whereby the security of India is threatened by internal disturbances.” I was then the district magistrate of Chandigarh Union Territory with Jayaprakash Narayan (JP), the Enemy No. 1 of the State, as my prisoner. Hence, I had a fair insight of the happenings.
This ‘National Emergency’ could be described as an instrument by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to govern a democratic polity through despotic means and in the process extinguish freedom and liberty. With the presidential proclamation, Fundamental Rights under Article 14, Article 21 and several clauses of Article 22 of the Constitution stood suspended. In short India lost its democracy. Maintenance of Internal Security Act and Rules were made harsh and courts were prohibited from reviewing them, leave alone giving any relief to the preventive detainees which numbered over 100,000!
Civil rights stalwart Rajni Kothari succinctly described Indira’s Emergency era thus: “It was a state off-limits, a government that hijacked the whole edifice of the state, a ruling party and leader who in effect treated the state as their personal estate. It was the imposition of a highly concentrated apparatus of power on a fundamentally federal society and the turning over of this centralized apparatus for personal survival and family aggrandisement. It was one big swoop overtaking the whole country spreading a psychosis of fear and terror…”
Under severe onslaught from the Emergency regime and its minions, India’s institutions and instruments of democratic governance-Legislative, Judicial, Executive-were running in panic. Individuals were moving in hushed silence traumatised by what was going on. Are things any better now when the country is being ruled by the self-acclaimed “heroes of Emergency” who say they made sacrifices for the restoration of democracy in India? Certainly not.
Even without any formal Emergency, institutions including the Election Commission have surrendered to government and party diktats. This did not happen during Emergency and the general election to parliament held in 1977. The Election Commission headed by T. Swaminathan functioned independently and the election was absolutely free and fair. As a result, the people’s mandate was not stolen and they could convincingly throw out autocracy and restore democracy in the country. This has not happened in 2024 due to obvious reasons.
Be that as it may, I have been a strident critic of the Emergency while in service and outside for subverting India’s precious asset of democracy. Yet I believe that the present ruling establishment has no shouting rights against that era. Let us take a closer look at the declared Emergency of June 1975 and the situation prevailing in the country for the last few years. There was no call for Muslim genocide, retaliatory “bulldozer injustice,” killing and assaults on Dalits, communal hate-mongering, Hindutva majoritarianism, targeted killing of liberal intellectuals and journalists, cow vigilantes roaming streets attacking and killing animal traders and meat eaters during Emergency as there is now.
There were also no religion-based Senas, Dals, Vahinis of goons, louts and street lumpens harassing, extorting, assaulting and killing defenceless citizens. There were no arms training to young innocent girls and boys in parks and institutions. There was no fear of majority community among minority communities. There were no hate crimes against fellow citizens. No pub attacks or private kitchen searches for beef. No restrictions on food and clothes of citizens. No moral policing in parks and public places. There was no forcible closure of NGOs and declaration of civil society as “the new frontier of fourth-generation warfare.” Full-fledged states were not torn apart and reduced to Union Territories. No doubt there was censorship of the media but not near-total enslavement and ownership!
We are living in times when bigotry and communal hate are no more an exception but have become an institutional norm and state project; when ‘democracy’ and ‘democratic values’ have become a farce. The ‘federal and plural structure’ ingrained in the Constitution is being cast away in favour of unitary authoritarianism with clarion calls for one religion, one language, one culture, one code and one election. Education policy and history lessons are being re-written to fit into the pre-fixed Hindutva agenda.
In effect, while the imposition of Emergency was brutal and sudden, the present processes are far more insidious, systematic and systemic that are likely to undermine our collective being as a society for a long time to come. The adverse effect on freedom, liberty and democracy is as bad, probably a lot worse, now. But the last nail on the coffin of India’s democratic fabric has been driven down when on December 25, 2023, the President of India gave assent to the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita 2023 (BNS), the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita 2023 (BNSS), and the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 (BSA). As notified by the Government of India, these new criminal laws are to take effect in a few days, on July 1.
This is what 109 former civil servants wrote to the President of India, Prime Minister, Home Minister, Presidents of National Parties, Presidents of State Parties and Members of Parliament (Lok Sabha/Rajya Sabha) on June 21:
“Wide concern has been expressed in great detail in public discourse over the last ten months since the drafts of these new laws were first introduced in August, 2023. However, the core issues raised have not been addressed by the Union Government. These fall into three broad areas. First, the concern is that the new laws enable governments of the day (whether at the Union or State levels) to immobilize the practice of democracy by over-broad criminalization of legitimate, non-violent dissent and opposition against the Governments, the ruling parties and the forces that back them. The second concern is that the new laws will terrorize innocent civilians and honest public servants because they put in the hands of the Government of the day unguided, arbitrary and virtually unlimited power to selectively arrest, detain, prosecute and convict practically anyone they choose, including by branding them as terrorists and as anti-national. Third, the concern is that the new laws in effect regularise extraordinary powers which should normally be available only in legitimate states of emergency as already provided in the Constitution. The effect of these laws, as currently approved, is that, once they come into effect, India will no longer be a functioning democracy.”
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This is a situation of ‘neo-Emergency’ wherein the proud citizens of a free nation will be reduced to dispirited subjects of the State. ‘Subject’ of a state is “one who is placed under authority or control such as vassal to a king/monarch and governed by the ruler’s law” and has no rights of his/her own. On the other hand, ‘citizens’ in a democratic republic have the supreme power and rights which they exercise by voting and electing representatives who enact the laws and govern on their behalf. This ‘sovereignty of the citizen’ was achieved on January 26, 1950 when India became a Sovereign, Socialist, Secular, Democratic, Republic with a written Constitution.
In a ‘neo-Emergency’ the very idea of sovereignty and citizenry are in dire danger. If the new criminal laws come into effect as planned, citizens will become headless chicken in a police raj. This neo-Emergency could persist and will be far worse than the half-century-old and transient constitutional Emergency that is being berated by the powers-that-be!
M.G. Devasahayam is a former Army and IAS officer and coordinator of the Citizen’s Commission on Elections.
