I moved to Delhi in the mid-sixties and expected it to be a metropolis. It did not take me long to find out that the city was a collection of townships and villages, pretending to be a metropolis. It was a time when, if you stayed back to have dinner at Connaught Place, you could see cots being pulled out after the shops closed in the evening by some tired workers and shop-owners preparing to sleep in the open. After 8 pm autorickshaws charged extra to take us home at Civil Lines, saying it was too late in the night to go that far. There was a public bus service, but the buses usually ran half empty. They stopped to pick up passengers only when their drivers and the conductors felt like it. I later found out that they were paid by the distances covered, not by the number of passengers they carried. It was supposedly an improvement on the earlier system that paid the crew by the number of passengers they carried. Then the buses came rarely, jam-packed.

Compared to Calcutta and Bombay, traffic on Delhi roads was chaotic but it observed a tacit hierarchy that defined one’s road rights. Cars enjoyed priority; they looked down on the two-wheelers and autorickshaws, which in turn considered pedestrians the scum of the city. Delhi at the time was not a big city, but its annual rate of road accidents was already one of the highest in the world. The cars, in turn, had their own hierarchy. At the bottom were the Indian cars – Ambassadors, Fiats and the now-forgotten Standard Herald. Above them were cars with a generic brand name called ‘foreign cars’, purchased second-hand from the diplomatic crowd or imported after paying penal duties. But the royalty on the roads were those in white Ambassadors flaunting the national flag, with or without a red light serving as a beacon.

In Calcutta, I remembered, different road conventions prevailed. Pedestrians there were kings and jaywalking was considered high art. Anyone running over a pedestrian was badly beaten up; an exception was made, it was said, only for hand pushed carts. If someone was run over by a cart, the victim was the one fined ten rupees and banished from Calcutta for five years.

It took me some time to get the point that Delhi was a power city and another twenty years to learn that a power city has problems becoming a metropolis. There are exceptions to the rule but usually, in a power city, the power hierarchy supersedes all other hierarchies, not to subvert them but to penetrate and monitor them. I have seen respected writers, scientists, artists, dancers, sports persons and actors obsequiously seeking political connections and patronage. It is perhaps better to have a political capital of the country that does not aspire to also be the country’s intellectual and science capital, the centre of its arts and literature, host to the major sports events and the country’s business capital.

National politics, like some other domains of life, has a dark underside that given half a chance contaminates every human endeavour that would be better off maintaining a healthy distance from high politics. A society must know not only what to put into politics, but also what not to put into politics. India has not yet learnt to do so. It is against this backdrop that we must look at that stormy decade called the 1970s.

 

Early 1970s was the time when Indian politics entered a new phase. It marked the first flashy entry of populism at the national level. This was not how it looked to most Indians, though a few did mumble about its long-term payoffs. Indeed, when Indira Gandhi found her way to the prime minister’s office – from being called a dumb doll and a weak, compromise candidate without a political base – to become one of India’s most popular prime ministers after defeating the powerful, if warring, regional leaders and discrediting them as a conservative, canny, untutored, rustic Syndicate, most found in it the stuff of an adventure story.

 

The new prime minister’s victory was also the triumph of an urbane, well groomed, upper-middle class India. To start with, she was a politically weak, not terribly articulate, national leader but one with direct access to the voter, though she did not seem comfortable with that access. Her imperious presence often looked like, what psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich calls, a character armour. It was P.N. Haksar and later P.N. Dhar, with some assistance from H.Y. Sharda Prasad, who projected her, using the power of her office and clever media management, as a charismatic figure and the depository of India’s soul.

Haksar was an ideologue but also bit of a visionary, for whom I later developed some fondness because of his scholarly attributes; Dhar I had known for years and admired his sharp political acuity. Both were highly intelligent but neither was sensitive to the larger implications of the changes they were initiating. Nor did they recognize that the so-called Syndicate comprised of deeply rooted, vernacular leaders who had risen through the ranks and had huge political bases. They were the ones who had traditionally – that is, since the time Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi converted the Indian National Congress into a mass organization – dutifully organized and delivered electoral support to the prime minister, whether the latter had any charismatic pull or not (Jawaharlal Nehru had it, Lal Bahadur Shastri and Gulzarilal Nanda did not). That left the prime ministers relatively free to devote their time to affairs of the state. Petty politics was handled by the underlings.

 

The new model of populism changed the face of Indian politics. Power did not come up any longer through the representational system; it went down from the Ultimate Leader to the states and, then, all the way to the districts. Electorally and organizationally, the new hub of Indian politics became the prime minister’s office. Formally the Westminster model remained but, in substance, became a crypto-presidential model that gave ample scope for unrestrained populism to thrive. Narendra Modi is now the most accomplished practitioner of the political technology of Indira Gandhi and can even be called her brainchild.

Indira Gandhi was to later expand her support base by winning the Bangladesh war and by exploding – I love that oxymoron – a ‘peaceful’ nuclear device. Both fitted her populist style and her propaganda machine made full use of them. Sycophants and hangers-on took care of the rest. When the Indian cricket team won a test in the West Indies, the Hindi commentator, I remember, began to cry audibly while mumbling that it was the victory of Indiraji and her India.

The maximum leader and her clever aides also failed to foresee one danger of her style. If you monopolize the full credit for not only your real achievements, but also for all individual and collective successes of the country, a day comes when all failures and even natural calamities in the country, too, will be traced to you. Few will believe that you are not omnipotent and omniscient, that anything can happen in the country without your permission or knowledge. The slogan of Garibi Hatao, which Indira Gandhi used as a war cry in her election campaigns, palled within less than three years for an impatient electorate. No regime could live up to that promise as quickly as voters were led to expect. Two new movements broke out, almost spontaneously at two corners of India, Sampurna Kranti in Bihar and Navnirman in Gujarat.

 

When the Emergency came, it was not as much of a surprise as many now claim. Somehow people sense that when populism begins to falter, populist leaders cannot but get desperate. Some of them even turn dangerous. It was the pettiness and crudity with which the Emergency was sought to be imposed that was more surprising. Though many spoke of fascism, they failed to mention that it was not its Teutonic version they had in mind, but the regime of petty bullies that Mussolini let loose in Italy that was being replicated in India. That regime and its pettiness were the lasting gifts of India’s first woman prime minister to Mother India. They have come out in the open again in the form of the private armies maintained by small-time political leaders; ruthless secret societies specializing in killing intellectuals; cow protectors operating as lynch mobs, scissors happy censors and the greedy zealotry of some fawning bureaucrats. As time passes, this populist prime minister too will find them difficult to control or disown.

My suspicion is that, since Indira Gandhi’s return to power, there was a subtle attempt to wipe out the memories and evidence of the atrocities, the arbitrary arrests, the coercive displacements, and the often comical use of censorship and surveillance. The Shah Commission report on the Emergency – a penetrating, impartial, legal document of the excesses committed during the period and a volume that should be in every law syllabus – vanished from most of the major libraries of Delhi, though it was everywhere earlier. I hope that its new edition, published from Chennai, will not meet a similar fate.

 

As I write these lines, I find in a newspaper interview Kirti Kulhari, who stars in a film on the Emergency, Indu Sarkar, saying that she knew nothing about the Emergency when she signed up for the film. Some of those associated with the research centre where I work played an important role during the Emergency; one was in jail for almost two years. Most of those working at the centre now, I suspect, do not know much about these things. Many key figures of the Emergency regime have also re-entered public life, claiming that they were opponents of the Emergency defamed by their political adversaries. And, oh yes, I should add that during the three decades following Emergency, when I used to be in closer touch with the university system, I could not persuade any doctoral student from any of the social sciences to do a serious, comprehensive study of the Emergency.

Everyone knows public memory is short but, in this instance, that has become a licence for a repeat performance that has already begun. The ongoing cuisine politics, the compulsory use of Aadhaar cards even for issuing death certificates (opening new possibilities of political blackmail and surveillance), and the public antics and private laws imposed by local goons are pointers.

 

Let me end this essay on a brief personal note, telling what the Emergency did to me intellectually. Perhaps it did so to many others too. The traumatic memories of such events do not die. Ultimately, they find a way to enter public consciousness in a new disguise. First, when the Emergency was declared, I was in my late 30s and I suddenly felt I had aged. This was something for which my generation was not intellectually prepared. Indian democracy had seemed secure and stable. It soon became obvious that to resist the Emergency we shall have to mobilize a new set of skills and shed some old baggage.

I occasionally wrote columns for newspapers and news magazines; now such columns acquired new significance. I began to identify myself more as an intellectual than an academic. Academics write only on subjects that can be handled within the confines of academic knowledge; intellectuals write on vital issues of their times and consider their writings as interventions in public life. I probably picked up this conceptual difference from my friend Rajni Kothari who believed that intellectuals were always public. One did not have to coronate them by calling them public intellectuals.

Second, my relationship with many of my friends, acquaintances and relatives thinned. I found them compromised or mealy-mouthed in their reaction to the new controlled democracy in India. I also found new friends. For instance, I met Arun Shourie through Romesh and Raj Thapar. I had then only read one of Shourie’s long essays on fascism in Seminar, which during the Emergency became a major hub of dissent. That friendship has lasted a lifetime, surviving all ideological and political differences. My relationship with the world of NGOs too deepened, many of them belonging to the far left. The Leninist left, never hostile to censorship and suspension of civil rights, lest the hostility rubbed off on the Soviet Union, was reduced to being a fawning adjutant of the Emergency regime. When, after months of hesitation, Jyoti Basu once called the Emergency ‘almost fascist’, George Fernandes said something like, ‘What are you waiting for Comrade, the gas chambers?’

 

Third, I found that under a regime of fear, secrecy and censorship, words themselves get vitiated. Particularly the ones that promise political and moral certitude. I became suspicious of even slogans like ‘scientific temper’ and ‘scientific rationality’. It was safer to presume that all human constructions were fallible and, hence, open to criticism. Perfection and permanent truths were given to gods, not to human beings. As it happened, when a visiting journalist asked Mrs Gandhi during the Emergency why the intellectuals were against her regime, she said that only the social scientists and those belonging to the humanities were against her; the scientists were all with her. Indeed, it became my principle to look all gift horses in the mouth and look at all official slogans with deep suspicion.

I remain immensely proud of the counter-statement I published in response to a collective testimonial to scientific temper released soon after the Emergency. In it, I stuck to my belief that there were elements in the socialization of science students and in the philosophy of modern science that left most scientists ill-equipped to handle ethical issues and prone to compromise with authoritarianism. But that is another story.

 

Finally, I also rediscovered old friends and began to see some of them in a new a light. I had always been fond of Romesh and Raj, and admired their friendly warmth tinged with a touch of nurture when in the company of young scholars, writers and journalists. Both were also firmly committed to intellectual autonomy. But I also had found Romesh a bit of a spoilt brat, held in leash by his eminently sane, gentle, caring wife. Now my relationship with the intrepid founder-editors of Seminar suddenly acquired a new dimension. When they went a few years later, they took something of me with them.

My memories of the Emergency are also inextricably linked to the memories of hundreds of unsung, forgotten people who had the courage to take a position when freedom itself was under threat, when some had already started saying that the United States was the world’s largest democracy. Someday I shall perhaps get a chance to tell that story too. That is probably a reasonably pleasant note on which end this meandering essay.