EDITORIAL: ON THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE DECLARED EMERGENCY AN UNDECLARED EMERGENCY HAS NOW EMERGED
Vinod Mubayi
Over the last month, the ruling BJP regime seems to be trying hard to reawaken memories on its 50th anniversary of the Emergency imposed by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in June 1975. It is obvious that this is being done to denigrate and discredit the Congress Party, India’s largest opposition party, in general and, in particular, Rahul Gandhi, Indira Gandhi’s grandson. There is little doubt that the 1975 Emergency that stretched 21 months from June 1975 to March 1977 was a politically fraught era when thousands of opponents of Mrs. Gandhi’s Congress (I) government were jailed for daring to protest. It is also significant that the founding editor of Insaf Bulletin, late Dr. Daya Varma, was one among several Indians in North America who happened to come together in Montreal in June 1975 to create the progressive organization IPANA (Indian Peoples Association in North America) that opposed the Emergency and exposed its undemocratic character.
It is highly ironic that the current regime ruling India decided to declare June 25 the day Indira Gandhi imposed the Emergency in 1975 as Samvidhan Hatya Divas or Constitution Murder Day. Many votaries of the BJP have made no secret of their desire to junk the current Indian Constitution and replace secular India by a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu Nation), a mirror image of Islamic Pakistan. In fact, during last year’s national elections in India, BJP leaders had boasted that they would change the Constitution in fundamental ways once they increased their tally to over 400 seats, a super majority, in the Lower House of Parliament. (In actuality, their seat tally fell from over 300 before the election to 240 and they have had to rely on various allies to maintain a majority hold on the government).
What led to the 1975 Emergency has been debated over the last several decades. The usual explanation given is that it was Mrs. Gandhi’s desire to hang on to power after the Allahabad High Court judgement had voided her election to the Lok Sabha on the grounds that she had misused the powers of her office during her campaign. However, whatever the proximate cause or causes were, one paradoxical outcome of the Emergency was that it gave the Hindu right-wing a chance to enter the national government when they joined the coalition government that took power after Congress and Mrs. Gandhi were handily defeated in the 1977 elections that had been called by her after she ended the Emergency.
The core of the Hindu right-wing nationalists is the para military proto-fascist organization, the RSS, founded a century ago, that took inspiration for its organizational model from European fascism in the 1920s and 1930s in Italy and Germany. Many RSS activists and members share organizational links with the BJP, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi who was an RSS pracharak (missionary) for many years before he entered politics via the BJP. In fact, the BJP is frequently referred to as the political arm of the hydra-headed RSS, which refers to itself as a purely “cultural” organization, but has offshoots that extend into many sectors of Indian society and politics. The RSS and the Hindu right-wing political party Jana Sangh were outcastes on the Indian political scene since a former RSS member, Nathuram Godse, was convicted of assassinating Mahatma Gandhi in January 1948, a few months after Indian independence in August 1947. However, during the Emergency when a large number of political opponents of the Indira Gandhi-led Congress ranging from RSS and other right-wing Hindu cadre to Communists and Socialists were jailed in anti-corruption protest movements that were, somewhat misguidedly, supported by the veteran socialist freedom movement figure Jayaprakash Narayan (JP) and the protests became known as the JP movement, the Hindu right-wing along with RSS gained a measure of political respectability. So much so that when Gandhi’s Congress party was defeated in the elections she had called in 1977, the right-wing Jana Sangh, which had changed its name to the Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP (the initials standing for Indian Peoples Party) was able to enter a coalition government and be rewarded with the important portfolio of External Affairs Minister. Although Indira Gandhi and Congress were able to come back to power in 1980 and even increase their majority in Parliament after Mrs. Gandhi was assassinated in 1984, the BJP became a fixture on the national political scene, captured power in the states located in what is known as the “Hindi belt” as well as others such as Gujarat through elevating divisive anti-minority politics based on religious identity of the Hindu majority to a national strategy and has ruled the country since 2014. In the person of Narendra Modi, trained and schooled in the RSS since an early age, the Hindu nationalist right-wing has the ideal representative needed for trashing India’s constitutional secular democracy and implementing its long term goal of establishing India as a Hindu nation.
Shedding crocodile tears over the 1975 Emergency and calling June 25 as samvidhan hatya divas is quite hypocritical when one considers what the RSS media wrote about India on the eve of independence and on the Indian Constitution when it was adopted by the Constituent Assembly in 1949 under the leadership of B.R. Ambedkar. Prof Shamsul Islam of Delhi University has provided a useful compendium of RSS writings on the subject. He mentions an editorial in the RSS magazine Organizer on August 14, 1947 that states “in Hindustan only the Hindus form the nation and the national structure must be built on that safe and sound foundation…The nation itself must be built up of Hindus, on Hindu traditions, culture, ideas and aspirations.” Similarly, Prof Islam points out that the Organizer in an editorial (‘The Constitution’) on November 30, 1949, complained: “The worst about the new constitution of Bharat (name for India in various Indian languages) is that there is nothing Bhartiya about it. The drafters of the Constitution have incorporated in it elements of British, American, Canadian, Swiss and sundry other constitutions. But there is no trace of ancient Bhartiya constitutional laws, institutions, nomenclature and phraseology in it…”
Prof. Islam goes on to indicate that the
“RSS is committed to converting democratic-secular India into a Hindu Rashtra in opposition to secular India will be clear by the perusal of the oath (pratigya) which every member must take before admission into the RSS and prayer (prarthana) which is recited in its meetings.
Oath:
“Before the all-powerful God and my ancestors, I most solemnly take this oath, that I become a member of the RSS in order to achieve all round greatness of Bharatvarsha by fostering the growth of my sacred Hindu religion, Hindu society, and Hindu culture. I shall perform the work of the Sangh honestly, selflessly with my heart and soul, and I shall adhere to this goal all my life. Bharat Mata Ki Jai (Long Live Mother India).”
Thus, they are not faithful to the Indian Nation as it exists as a legal entity but want to subvert it into a theocratic state like Muslim League which created Pakistan in the name of Islam.”
BJP, under Modi, has been ruling the country for 11 years now. While it may lament hypocritically over what happened on June 25, 1975, many political observers that include journalists, intellectuals, human rights activists, and cultural workers among concerned citizens have noted that for the last several years of Modi’s rule a kind of Undeclared Emergency is spreading across the country. Erosion of civil liberties, blatant undemocratic acts such as banning documentary films critical of Modi or his government, creation of an enormous cult of personality around Modi himself, targeting of religious minorities and marginalized groups like Dalits have become commonplace. More sinister is the weaponization of each and every government agency to follow the BJP’s rulebook; harass, demonize and where necessary criminalize the political opposition by foisting false cases on them and putting opposition political leaders in jail. Civil rights and human rights activists have faced harsher treatment by being spied on their computers and cell phones, having malware underhandedly installed on their equipment, lodged in jail without a trial for years where the process itself becomes the punishment and where many parts of the judiciary have become prey to the regime’s powers and is afraid to adjudicate in a fair manner.
As a companion piece in this issue points out: “A leading party of the opposition namely CPM which also faced repression during emergency days was categorical enough to emphasize that the country is currently going through an undeclared Emergency. A leading light of the formation correctly differentiated between emergency then and political situation now. ’If Indira Gandhi abused the Constitution, then today the Sangh Parivar government is trying to do away with it’ quipped Pinarayi Vijayan, Chief Minister of Kerala.”
Prof. Sumit Ganguly in an article entitled Modi’s Undeclared Emergency published in the Journal of Democracy, Volume 34, Number 3, July 2023, pp. 144-152 (Johns Hopkins University Press) indicated the depths to which the country is plunging in this era:
“Beginning in 2019, however, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi started his second term in office with an overwhelming parliamentary majority, his government launched a steady attack on civil liberties, personal rights, and free speech across India without issuing any such proclamation or going through any constitutional channels, even for the sake of appearance. Hewing to a familiar playbook, the government targets the opposition, the media, civil society, and minorities for repression or retaliation. Not surprisingly, a number of independent, global prodemocracy and human-rights organizations have sounded the tocsin warning of democratic backsliding in India. These fears are entirely warranted. Democratic norms, procedures, and institutions long taken for granted are now under unprecedented assault. Modi’s choices and actions suggest that he is intent on creating an ethnoreligious state. The brief undemocratic interregnum under Indira Gandhi was based on strictly instrumental, short-term considerations. Once she and her advisors were convinced (albeit erroneously) that she would win the next election, she lifted the state of emergency. Modi’s drive to undermine democracy, in contrast, is rooted in ideology. There is thus no reason to believe that the current antidemocratic onslaught will end. Indeed, democracy is now under such duress that if present trends continue and Modi’s vision prevails, democratic norms and institutions will be damaged beyond repair, making it is far from certain that India will remain a viable democratic state.”
Two years and another election later, this conclusion remains unchallenged.
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