Emergency: A Censorship On Collective Wisdom And Wit

“Just shut up; there is an Emergency on!” hissed my fellow reporter Pranab Basu as I strode into my newspaper office on the morning of June 25, half a century ago. I was eager to see the front-page display of my first major political story as a 22-year-old city reporter on the famous Jai Prakash Narain rally at Ram Lila Maidan the evening before.

“Big deal, there has been an Emergency on for the past several years,” I shot back, referring to the external Emergency in place since the 1971 Bangladesh War.

“No, this is an internal Emergency, quite different. Many opposition leaders and political activists have been or are being arrested, blanket censorship has been imposed and power connections have been snapped from last night in newspapers and presses, including our own,” whispered Basu with a grim face.

Inside the Link House on Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg (Delhi’s Fleet Street), which housed my Patriot newspaper, in the darkened office without electricity, there was a sense of gloom and doom. As my colleagues and I sat devastated in the gloom, only the chief editor, Edadata Naryanan, a fierce pro-Soviet left-winger who despised Jai Prakash Narayanan, seemed happy, much to our annoyance, cackling about how the right-wing had got its comeuppance.

Later we went to Indira Gandhi’s residence, where vast rented crowds, including a large band of eunuchs, shouted slogans supporting her. It is amazing to recall in these days of VVIP security that even the day after the government had put the entire Opposition behind bars, anyone could walk right up to the gates of the prime minister’s house without being checked.

The days, weeks and months that followed were indeed a nightmare. There was so much to report, but not a word appeared in newspapers. Homes smashed by bulldozers, old people and teenagers castrated in sterilisation camps, the bloodbath at Turkman Gate, and leaders abducted by policemen from the JNU campus. It is difficult to describe the frustration of being unable to see any in print even as sensational news filled my notebooks.

For me, it was a huge personal blow. Over the past few years, I had developed the typical swagger of a crime reporter, the prized city beat. Afraid of no one, I wrote my stories without fear or prejudice. My beat took me to the squalid shantytowns of East and outer Delhi, paunchy crooked cops in betel juice-stained police stations, crowded Muslim ghettos around Jama Masjid, conmen and dope pushers in Tihar Jail, call girl rackets in public sector hotels—an endless kaleidoscope of new faces and places provided me writing material.

But now I, from a pro-Moscow newspaper, had to cover boring functions by Soviet bloc embassies and cultural organisations. There, apart from disseminating the usual Soviet propaganda, sycophant Congress ministers were given an opportunity to drone on about the gains of the Emergency.

The North Koreans were particularly active, and soon I was sick of the supreme leader Kim Il Sung and his Juche idea. The audience mainly came from Delhi slums, hired by Congress leaders at piecemeal rates. I remember one function when a last-minute wrangling over rates caused a commotion. With anxious North Korean diplomats asking whether the protests were against their great leader and the Juche idea, unable to comprehend that the fuss was about money and not ideology.

The other journalistic occupations under the Emergency were a series of out-of-town junkets organised by various public sector banks, showcasing rural development programmes for the poor and landless under the 20-point programmes of the Emergency. It was sheer state propaganda, but the only silver lining was the generous supply of liquor to journalists.

I remember one particularly hilarious moment when a middle-aged journalist, known to be an alcoholic, suddenly intervened as a Doordarshan lady journalist interviewed a poor peasant on receiving a free buffalo. Suddenly waking up from his drunken reverie, he snatched the mike from her hand, shrieking, “This is not true journalism! You must interview the buffalo about being given to the peasant!” He then proceeded to interview the bemused buffalo.

Meanwhile, my chief editor was getting increasingly eccentric and paranoid about the CIA, who, he feared, would topple the government. One winter night, he announced to me that a trained CIA agent had infiltrated the office and I was to immediately get him arrested. I rushed to find a wretched homeless fellow taking shelter from the cold outside and shooed him away quickly before he could be charged with espionage.

The chief editor soon fell out with the Emergency regime in a fit of characteristic truculence after being told by the then all-powerful information and broadcasting minister, V. C. Shukla, to give more coverage to Sanjay Gandhi. Having been the only editor to openly support the Emergency, he now went to the opposite extreme, blacking out Sanjay Gandhi’s photographs and actively encouraging us to break censorship laws, much to our delight. One night a frenzied mob of Congress goons arrived to burn down the office, and it took a combination of bluster and negotiating skills to get rid of them.

NDA Slams Congress Over Rahul Gandhi’s Photo On Sanitary Pads, Calls It 'Mental Bankruptcy' (VIDEO)

The nightmare vanished as suddenly as it had emerged. After Indira Gandhi suddenly announced national elections as 1977 started, many of us journalists and even most released Opposition leaders felt they would be rigged without bringing a regime change. Yet, as the elections drew closer, something extraordinary happened when Mrs Gandhi addressed an election rally at Boat Club, Delhi.

A vast crowd, including many central government employees from nearby government offices in Lutyen’s Delhi, had assembled. But much to the fury of the Congress supremo and the horror of her party leaders on the dais, the crowd was not cheering, clapping or shouting slogans praising her. Instead, they jeered, laughed and booed against her and her son Sanjay and finally walked out in large numbers in the middle of her speech.

This public humiliation of the Emergency regime in the heart of the national capital told me it was all over, and so it was.