The dark design at dead of night

THE MORNING of June 26, 1975. I was roused from sleep by a telephone call from the resident editor of The Statesman,New Delhi, the paper I worked for then. ``You know what has happened? Emergency has been proclaimed. J.P., Morarji, Vajpayee, Chandra Shekhar, L. K. Advani have been arrested. Let us hurry up and bring out a supplement.'' That morning, most New Delhi newspapers did not come out because of what seemed a mysterious disruption of power supply, but was actually a well-planned ploy. The next two hours in the office and the main story for the supplement was ready - complete with details of the proclamation, of the arrests and the official rationale. The page lay-out looked impressive - what with the shrieking banner headline, the file pictures of the arrested leaders and the like. Just then the agency ticker announced the government decision to impose press censorship.

Without losing time, I took the page proof to the Press Information Bureau at Shastri Bhavan. The officials had just then received the censorship order but did not have the faintest idea of how to go about it. The Deputy Principal Officer, in charge of the Home Ministry, was asked to deal with the ``case''. He had no guidelines, no dos and don'ts. He chose to use the blue pencil liberally, crossing out the names of the detained personalities in the headline, deleting their pictures - and whatever else was considered ``unsafe.'' It was the first story to be censored.

That evening I met D. K. Barooah, then Congress president - he was apologetic about not having kept an appointment the previous evening because he was at the P.M.'s house and the ``discussions got prolonged''.

That meeting, as it turned out later, was crucial - the decision to promulgate ``internal emergency'' was given the final shape there. It was a culmination of the exercises that had gone on during the preceding fortnight - after the Allahabad High Court judgment unseated Indira Gandhi and the country seemed in for a massive, unmanageable agitation for her removal from office. Involved in it were legal experts, Siddhartha Shankar Ray, Chief Minister of West Bengal, Rajni Patel, Bombay Congress boss and main fund collector of the party, Barooah and, of course, Sanjay Gandhi, architect of the plan. It was a highly secret operation known only to a few others (for operational reasons) - Bansi Lal, Haryana supremo, Om Mehta, Minister of State for Home, R. K. Dhawan, Indira Gandhi's aide, and Kishen Chand, Lt. Governor of Delhi. The draft of the proclamation was carried by Dhawan to Rashtrapati Bhavan late at night. The President, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, signed it at 11-45 p.m., 15 minutes before the deadline fixed by the core group, without posing a single question. The Cabinet was called the next morning for what turned out to be an ex-post facto approval. The ministers who reached the P.M.'s house, venue of the meet, had no idea of what it was about. None demurred. Only Swaran Singh had the temerity to inquire whether any other course was not available.

In her nation-wide broadcast that evening, Indira Gandhi said she had to take this step ``because of the deep and widespread conspiracy which had been brewing ever since I began introducing certain progressive measures.'' The plot, according to her, was intended ``to negate the very functioning of democracy''. Murdering democracy to ``save'' democracy.

K.K.K.

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