Emergency left and right

HER Emergency rule was two months old when Indira Gandhi was poring over a traditional speech she would deliver at the Mughal-era Red Fort. It was Aug 15, India’s Independence Day, an occasion to make everything seem normal while left-wing and right-wing opponents languished in her prisons. Just then she was handed the message of Mujibur Rahman’s assassination by Bangladesh military officers two hours ago. She remained calm at the turn of events and decided to strictly withhold the information in her nationwide broadcast.

To revisit the 21-month-long Emergency with the hindsight of 12 years of Narendra Modi’s rule, let’s loiter a little in the manner of today’s drones to reconnoitre the hotspots of the time. What we are likely to see is that the geopolitics of that decade was indeed notably fluid. The East-West chessboard was in flourish. In 1973, Salvador Allende was murdered in a CIA-sponsored military coup in Chile. The USSR got a leg up with the Arab oil embargo the same year targeting sympathisers of Israel and the US. In India, 1973 set off the start of a Maidan movement of sorts. In Gujarat, RSS-backed students went on a rampage known as the ‘Navnirman Andolan’. It would be joined soon by students in Bihar who included Lalu Yadav and Nitish Kumar. They formed a largely north India-based campaign under the stewardship of Jaiprakash Narayan, seen by many as a Gandhian pretender. He called on the military and police to disobey all “illegal orders” by Mrs Gandhi. This didn’t surprise her as it was happening two short years after she riled Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon over her 1971 stand-off with Pakistan.

Firmly in the Soviet camp now, and increasingly reviled in Western media, Mrs Gandhi was experiencing the unfolding of an all-too-familiar script. Matters came to a head when on June 12, 1975, a high court judge ordered her removal from power over a hitherto unheard of charge against a sitting prime minister — that she had used the services of the public works department of her government to erect a podium for an election rally four years ago. The bizarre court order arrived in the same year when Mujib would be murdered with his family. Also, on April 30, 1975, Vietnam inflicted one of America’s worst humiliations abroad as Americans flocked to the roof of the US embassy in Saigon in a melee to catch the last helicopter flying out from there. America’s humiliation in Saigon was not going to be taken lying down.

The chessboard was fraught. Even as Mrs Gandhi ended the Emergency and lost the April 1977 election she hoped to win, Gen Ziaul Haq was going to stage a coup across the border on July 5, 1977 against an Indira Gandhi-like populist leader to take charge of Pakistan. Indian rulers that succeeded Mrs Gandhi, including some RSS-groomed ministers, steadfastly refused to ask Zia to spare Z.A. Bhutto’s life. For that favour and more, Zia anointed Indian prime minister Morarji Desai with Pakistan’s highest civilian award.

It’s increasingly normal to hear of comparisons these days between Indira Gandhi’s Emergency and Narendra Modi’s 12 years in power.

It’s increasingly normal to hear of comparisons these days between Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, which marks its 51st anniversary on Thursday, and Narendra Modi’s 12 years in power he celebrated on June 9. A growing view sees the Modi era of “an undeclared emergency” as manifestly more stifling than the short-lived curbs on civil liberties Mrs Gandhi had imposed. Many leaders from the left to the right were jailed, while at least one right-wing party, the Shiv Sena, and one leftist group, the pro-Soviet Communist Party of India, supported the prime minister’s reasons for the measure she broadcast to the nation a day after suspending civil liberties and arresting many of her opponents. Modi, on the other hand, sees no need to explain anything to anyone.

Without getting into a ‘two legs bad, four legs good’ comparison of George Orwell’s animals, suffice it to say that Mrs Gandhi stood against the very forces that are in power today, including powerful businesses shoring up the Hindu revivalist government. Her ideological point of departure was born way before any judge sought to unseat her, however, and at least two years before her 1971 stand-off with Pakistan.

The split in the Indian National Congress in 1969 was witness to the left-right divide that continues to stalk India today. Her 10-point programme was in fact unveiled at a Congress summit in May 1967. That programme bears recall since the older, right-wing Congress leaders fiercely opposed her radical moves. The 10 points that catalysed the split were: social control of banks — bringing banking institutions under strict government regulation; nationalisation of general insurance thereby transferring the control of a key social asset to the state; nationalisation of export and import trade, implying state regulation and takeover of foreign trade; curbs on monopolies thereby limiting the concentration of economic power and business monopolies; limits on urban income and property, which set a ceiling on urban wealth to reduce economic disparities; public distribution of food grains to ensure the availability of basic food to the needy at reasonable prices; better implementation of land reforms to usher radical changes to agricultural land distribution; provision of house-sites to the rural poor, thus guaranteeing land for housing to marginalised rural communities; abolition of privy purses to end the special financial privileges and titles of former princely rulers; and removal of unearned increments in urban land values to prevent profiteering from urban real estate speculation.

These socialist policies earned her the support of an influential section of communists led by S.A. Dange, Mohan Kumara Mangalam and Mohit Sen. But another section of the left, at key moments of history, preferred to support Hindu nationalists as conduits against the Congress. Mrs Gandhi jailed the erring comrades for 21 months. Modi has uprooted them altogether, leaving them to tilt at the windmills, to see allies against fascism as foes.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, June 23rd, 2026