To this narrative of collective failure, Nayar adds the numerous details of people opposing the Emergency. The Civil Services found this a grand opportunity to reimpose a garrison state on India of the kind that only colonial India had seen. President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, beholden to Indira for his post, agreed as well. The short-circuiting of all democratic processes to ensure her continuation as Prime Minister. When the Allahabad High Court nullified her election on a technical ground that had been used to unseat many before her, she felt aggrieved. Indira, he says, always had an authoritarian streak. It is the story of takeover of power by the mother-and-son duo, Indira Gandhi and Sanjay, that forms the crux of Nayar's narrative. For, during the Emergency, sterilising humans had almost become an obsession with the Prime Minister's son and thence the government. Most of the information was about where the police was going to lay a naka for catching men to emasculate. In the plains of North India, most information was being carried much as it had been done during the Indian Mutiny of 1857: by word of mouth. For, in those poverty-struck days without television, telephonic connectivity and few newspapers, people were starved of information. But at least it whetted the public's appetite for information on what was going on in the then regal courts of Delhi. As with most quickies, it was short on details, high on rhetoric, low on logic and the author made no bones about the axe that he was trying to grind. Kuldip Nayar's version was called The Judgement. The end of the Emergency allowed for an opportunity to journalists to write many quickies. The subsequent elections resulted in the quondam ruling party being almost entirely wiped out. A year and a half later, in January 1977, the government withdrew the Emergency as suddenly much as it had imposed it. A façade of legality was maintained but soon enough the subordination of the rule of law to the executive was used by many in power to settle private scores and line their own pockets. The people looked on with mixed feelings. All those who had been charged with nurturing democracy and freedom - politicians, government officials, judges, and journalists - collectively contributed to the demise of democracy. This book, of four chapters, documents the manner in which that coup was organised, nurtured and finally ended.ĭemocracy that the people had begun to take for granted was curtailed by the imposition of the Emergency in June 1975.
A new noun entered the Indian political vocabulary as a result: Emergency. June 26, 1975, the Government of India organised a coup against the people of India. Kuldip Nayar: Addressing a dwindling crowd
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