‘WE NEED A DICTATOR’

Dictatorship. It's often recommended as a solution to Mumbai’s civic problems. Time Out looks back on what the Emergency meant for Mumbai and the nation.

On the morning of June 26, 1975, prime minister Indira Gandhi made an unscheduled broadcast on All India Radio.

She warned that a "deep and widening conspiracy" was threatening the unity of the nation. "The President has declared an Emergency," she said." There is nothing to panic about."

At 11 pm the night before, at Indira's request, President Fakhrudin Ali Ahmed had signed a document activating Emergency powers under Article 352 of the Constitution, to counter threats to the nation from "internal disturbances".

Citizens' fundamental rights under Article 19 were suspended. The right to freedom of speech and assembly, the freedom to form associations and unions, the freedom to travel and settle throughout India, the freedom to practice any profession or trade all had been revoked. Prison governors were warned to expect large numbers of new prisoners, and opposition leaders were swept up in a wave of midnight arrests. Indians had gone to bed in a democracy and woken up to a dictatorship.

In Mumbai, the reaction to the Emergency was initially one of confusion. "On the 25th night we started hearing rumours that opposition leaders were being picked up," recalled Kalpana Sharma, who was then working as the assistant editor of Himmat, a weekly political newspaper. "Then we heard on AIR that a state of Emergency had been declared. At that time, no one really knew what that meant."

"'The President has declared an Emergency. There is nothing to panic about,' Indira said in a radio announcement."

 Prominent leaders of the Jayaprakash Narayan Movement and their supporters were rounded up and thrown in jail, including JP himself. Over the 19 months of the Emergency, around 100,000 people were arrested under the Maintenance of lnternal Security Act and the Defence of lndia Regulations. But in Mumbai the number of arrests was relatively small, around 600, according to the People's Union for Civil Liberties.

On hearing of the first arrests, many Mumbai activists immediately went into hiding. One was Dr GG Parikh, the chairman of the Bombay chapter of the Socialist Party, who escaped to Gujarat, a hotbed of anti-Congress activity, to mobilise resistance through fundraising and writing anti­government literature. While he was there his wife Mangla, also a socialist activist, was arrested and imprisoned. He didn't see her again for 18 months.

 Parikh returned to Mumbai in August because friends believed that police did not intend to arrest him. He resumed his medical practice, held meetings every night and prepared literature. But when the secretary of his party was arrested in October, he decided not to run. That night, he took a final drive around the city for an hour and went home to bed at his Grant Road flat.

"Early in the morning, they came," Parikh recalled. "They rang the bell and I said, 'Come'." Four police officers entered and told him, politely, that he was under arrest. "I was ready. I picked up some clothes and books and went with them." He was taken first to the CID lock-up at Crawford Market and from there to Pune, where he spent the next 17 months in Yerawada Central Prison.

Apart from the initial reports on June 26, the names of those arrested during the Emergency were never printed. Circulars were sent to every city newspaper declaring that all copy would have to be first taken to Mantralaya and examined by a censor for anti-government content. At Himmat, they resolved to resist.

"The Bombay censor was a former Indian Express editor named Vinod Rao," remembered Sharma. "I would go across to Mantralaya with the copy and sit across the desk from him while he went through it with a blue pencil, like an editor. Later he made me sit outside hisoffice so I couldn't argue with him."

Initially, Himmat wanted to pull out censored pieces, leaving columns blank. But that was quickly banned.

"We tried putting political comment in humour columns, but even that was censored," Sharma said. "Rao was a journalist, so he knew what we were doing. If one of his deputies was on duty that night, then maybe it would slip through. Even if we tried to raise issues by writing about dictatorships in other countries, it was banned."

Ashok Mahadevan, deputy editor at the Reader's Digest, found his own way to sneak political dissent past the censors. He'd recently come across a fake obituary in the name of DEM O'Cracy, written by a Sri Lankan poet named Riley Fernando and printed during his country's emergency of 1974.

“O’Cracy, D E M – beloved husband of T Ruth, loving father of L I Bertie, brother of Faith, Hope and Justice, expired on 26 June.”

Mahadevan copied down a shortened version and took it to the Times of India, where it was printed in the death notices column on June 28. "After it was printed I heard that the police were looking for me, but fortunately the [Times of lndia] clerk didn't know who I was," said Mahadevan. "I was later told by several people that the person who wrote that obituary was being beaten up in jail."

With newspapers muzzled, the worst excesses of the Emergency were kept from those who didn't make the effort to find out. The thousands of forced sterilisations conducted under Sanjay Gandhi's family planning programme were mainly confined to the north of the country. Slum demolitions were carried out as part of so­called beautification drives ­ another of Sanjay's pet projects ­ but those had no effect on the average middle-class citizen, to whom the Emergency represented a welcome relief.

After years of morchas, protests and disruptions, a sudden quiet had descended. "The Emergency was good," said 70-year-old Thomas Mathias, a taxi driver. "The trains ran properly. They rounded up all those goondas and we had some peace and quiet."

Sharma recalled: "Within a week, all these people who had formerly been pro-democracy were saying, 'So what if there's no opposition?' What does it matter if there's censorship? We need a strong leader.' It was frightening how quickly that attitude took hold."

But if many responded with acceptance, for others the Emergency marked the awakening of political consciousness. Among them was engineering graduate Yogesh Kamdar, who had previously been entirely apolitical.

"I wouldn't have become an activist if it hadn't been for the Emergency," he said. "You only value air when you're being suffocated."

Kamdar became active in the People's Union for Civil Liberties, established in 1976. Much of his work focused on getting hold of and disseminating accurate information on who had been arrested and what was happening in the rest of India.

Others took greater risks. Khorshed and Kekoo Gandhy, the owners of Gallery Chemould at Kala Ghoda, had already been helping to pass on information and donating money to help the families of jailed activists. They then decided to offer hunted socialist activist Mrinal Gore shelter in their Bandra bungalow. "We didn't know her well, but because we were angry we decided to help," said Khorshed Gandhy.

Gore stayed for a few weeks before moving on to new accommodation. Shortly afterwards, she was also arrested.

The notion that India needed the iron rule of a dictator was sustained in the first few months by a new-found activity in government departments.

Visitors to Mantralaya found offices crammed with bureaucrats intimidated by the new regime into showing up for work.

Corruption initially waned, but it was short-lived. "You still had to pay the cops, the corporators except the stories we heard from the poor was that now they had to pay much more," said Sharma. "And they couldn't protest." As for the Mussolini-style train services, Kamdar remembered: "Well, they didn't always run on time, just as they don't always run on time now. The difference then was that I couldn't grumble about it." Iain Ball