Author: Virendra Kapoor
Publication: Sunday-guardian.com
Date: June 29, 2015
URL:   http://www.sunday-guardian.com/analysis/gandhis-grandson-fails-to-see-truth-of-emergency

Both media and judiciary had actually crumbled like the rest of the country .
               
Surprising Comments

"If today we can talk about the emergency in the past tense, it is because the nation's collective spine did not go into a forward bending dhanuasana (bow-position) and because the 'media vertebra', despite censorship, stayed particularly unbent. And because the judiciary, despite the demoralizing judgment in ADM Jabalpur v/s S.S. Shukla retained its core independence, thanks to the conscience-keeping Justice H. R. Khanna."

That was Gopalkrishna Gandhi writing in the Hindu on 25 June. A man of many parts —administrator, diplomat, scholar, etc. — Gandhi has been the Governor of West Bengal and prior to that Ambassador to South Africa and Sri Lanka. A grandson of Gandhi and C. Rajagopalachari, he writes regularly in various newspapers.

But his comment on the Emergency comes across as rather surprising, to say the least. Knowing as we do that both the media, barring an honourable exception or two, and the higher judiciary had "bent" most abjectly to the handful who ruled the roost between 1975-77, Gandhi's tribute to these two institutions is either ill-informed or, worse, stems from a deep-seated animus against the only forces that led the fight against the Emergency — the RSS and the Jan Sangh, the predecessor of the BJP.

Now how can anyone remotely aware of the grave-like silence imposed on the country in that dark period praise the media for having stood up to the challenge of those who had subverted the Constitution, draining the last ounce of republicanism from it? BJP veteran L.K. Advani was spot on when, commenting on the role of the media in the Emergency, he put it most succinctly. "When asked to bend, the media chose to crawl." And that media gets a pat on its back from Gandhi!

In the very next sentence he singles out SC Justice H.R. Khanna for not being a party to the complete extinguishment of civil rights. But here again Gandhi misses the point. Khanna was the lone dissenter when four of his brother judges sanctified cold-blooded murder, yes, murder, in the name of Emergency.

Indira Gandhi's Attorney General, Niren De, the present generation should know, argued in the open court that if a police officer murdered someone due to personal enmity, there would be no remedy in law in the Emergency. The majority ruling endorsed De's plea. That judgement gave legal sanction to the tyranny of the mother-and-son duo. Justice Khanna, because of that dissent, was superseded and not made Chief Justice.

Shockingly, Mahatma Gandhi's great grandson hails the same judiciary as having served the cause of Indian people well during the Emergency. If Gandhi must know, we can do no better than to quote Justice Y.V. Chandrachud, one of the four judges who had okayed the suspension of human rights, and had gone on to become the Chief Justice of India. Following the surprise election and her surprise defeat, Chandrachud publicly confessed that the courts were acting out of fear. And, yet, the well-known scion of the Gandhi and Rajaji families would have you believe that the judiciary had "retained its core independence". Nothing could be further from the truth.

It is not hard to comprehend the reason why the eminent writer twists facts. The truth is that the intelligentsia as a whole had crumbled. Cowardice was sought to be masked by the self-serving argument that the reactionary forces (read the RSS-Jan Sangh) were a threat to the constitutional order and needed to be taught a lesson.

Which brings us to Advani not ruling out another Emergency. Leftist-secularist elements were quick to interpret it as a hint that Mr Modi could impose Emergency. Actually, anyone in power determined to impose Emergency can do so regardless of the safeguards put in place by the Janata government. But that someone can never be Modi or anyone else from the BJP or the Communists.

Notwithstanding his preeminent position in the Sangh Parivar, Modi is not its sole arbiter. As a cadre-based party, there are limits to the extent individual leaders can exercise power, howsoever popular they may be. Which is not the case with family-owned parties revolving around single leaders. Indira Gandhi could do what she did because she was the sole and supreme boss of the Congress. Not so a Vajpayee or an Advani earlier, and now Modi in the BJP.

Yet, an Emergency can still be imposed because ordinary people have scant regard for their rights and basic freedoms. After the initial fear, Indira Gandhi was surprised at a total lack of protest against the Emergency. After all, resisting the Emergency was not the duty of the Opposition alone. Every citizen's rights were snuffed. But the people went about their business as if nothing had happened.

We, the people, do not have in us to stand up for anything. And it is not new. For centuries a long series of invaders have come and imposed tyranny and we have meekly surrendered. The same with the Emergency. In the election after the Emergency, Indira Gandhi still managed to win 150-odd seats, all from the relatively more educated South. Why did the enormity of the assault on the democratic system fail to register on the people in the South?

Because they were true to the ingrained mindset of being subservient to authority, any authority, Indian or foreign. We are not yet rid of the ghulami mentality, which led us to play footsie with a long list of invaders. A shrewd Mahatma Gandhi, in recognition of the deep-seated cowardice in the Indian psyche, rationalised non-violence as a tool to drive out the British. However, his grandson offers strange logic, arguing that only when the Emergency took away peoples' civil rights did they realise their true worth. Implied condescension in that argument aside, how then does he explain the overwhelming success of Indira Gandhi in the 1977 election in the South and her in 1980? A people who can condone the frontal assault on the Republic, can accept anything. Democracy is incidental to their feudal-conditioned psyche.

Postscript: Critics of RSS-Jan Sangh persist with the canard that it did not resist the Emergency. Now if ten per cent of the more than two lakh Sangh activists apologised, it would still make for a substantial number. Whereas ten per cent of a total of thousand-odd socialists who apologised would hardly attract notice.

ERASING REAL HISTORY

Still on the Emergency, the Shah Commission set up by the Morarji Desai government to investigate some of the more glaring excesses of the Emergency was immediately wound up once Indira Gandhi rode back to power in 1980. That was fine. But the interim reports of the work it had completed are nowhere to be found. The Gandhi government seized whatever copies of the reports there were and destroyed them. Such then was the venom of the perpetrators of the Emergency that they did not want posterity to know about them.

KEJRI'S GARIBI HATAO PLAN