June 25 marked the 43rd anniversary of the Emergency. On June 24, 1975, the Allahabad High Court found then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi guilty of electoral irregularities. Indira Gandhi had a few options. She could have resigned, appointed someone else from the Congress Party as Prime Minister and challenged the High Court verdict in the Supreme Court. Or she could have accepted the High Court verdict, stepped aside and come back to power after winning a by-election.
But she chose an option that ended up leaving an indelible scar on the country’s proud democratic credentials. She imposed the Emergency under the pretext that the opposition leaders were planning an armed insurrection against the government. Severe curbs were imposed on personal freedoms and the press. All major opposition leaders were put behind bars along with hundreds of political activists. It was indeed the darkest period in the history of independent India.
The excesses of the Emergency — the forced sterilisation camps, the incarceration of the government’s political opponents, custodial torture, the “disappearances” — are all well-documented. And the blame for all this must squarely be placed on Indira Gandhi and the Congress Party.
Odd comparison
In a blog post marking the anniversary of the Emergency, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley — who was himself arrested during those dark days — has compared Indira Gandhi to Hitler. He said, “Both Hitler and Mrs. Gandhi never abrogated the Constitution. They used a republican Constitution to transform democracy into dictatorship.” Needless to say, Jaitley’s views came in for fulsome praise from the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi.
Jaitley, of course, was trying to score political points and embarrass the Congress Party on the anniversary of the Emergency. But a comparison with Hitler stretches one’s credulity. Hitler’s fascist ideology was based on a virulent form of anti-semitic racism. His ideology literally tore Europe asunder and millions of Jews (and others) perished in concentration camps, gas chambers, and during World War II.
Indira Gandhi — whatever may be her faults, and she had plenty of them — always had unswerving faith in secularism and India’s plural ethos. That said, she did have an authoritarian streak, and systematically diminished the autonomy of public institutions so diligently nurtured by her father Jawaharlal Nehru. More damagingly, she brought in the “cult of personality” in Indian politics.
Congress leader DK Barooah’s “India is Indira and Indira is India” is one of the most cringe-worthy statements, one that the Congress will probably never live down. By bringing in both her sons, first Sanjay and later Rajiv, into politics she also firmly imposed a political dynasty on a democratic framework. There are, of course, plenty of regional parties that have diligently followed the dynastic model.
Despite all this, a comparison with Hitler beggars belief. As columnist Swaminathan Anklesaria Aiyar says in his recent column, Indira Gandhi perhaps had more in common with other Third World dictators such as Marcos, Suharto, Kenyatta and Nkrumah.
It is ironical indeed that that the BJP is accusing of Indira Gandhi of fascist leanings and this has not gone unnoticed. The BJP’s ideological mentor is the RSS and its second Sarsanghchalak, MS Golwalkar’s fascination for fascist ideology is also well-documented by social scientists. However, it must be added that the RSS now has repudiated some of Golwalkar’s earlier views.
People in glass houses...
Coming to more recent times, the BJP’s ally in Maharashtra is the Shiv Sena, whose founding father’s open admiration of Hitler is no secret. Also, the BJP had no qualms in accepting the late VC Shukla into its fold. Shukla was I&B Minister in Indira Gandhi’s Cabinet and earned notoriety for enforcing some of the Emergency’s most dreaded provisions on the media.
Apart from Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay, Shukla was perhaps the politician most deeply entrenched in the Emergency set-up. All this was forgotten by the BJP when it gave him and he was given a Lok Sabha ticket in the 2004 elections, which he lost. He left the BJP and eventually returned to the Congress fold. Shukla’s brief stint with the BJP is now carefully air-brushed by the party’s top brass.
The Emergency was a dark chapter in Indian democracy and, mercifully, a brief one. As the countdown for next year’s Lok Sabha election starts, and the ruling party has sounded the poll bugle, we are sure to witness more such mud-slinging by all parties in the months to come.