He was indebted to Mrs Gandhi for elevating him to the highest position in the country.” After returning from Rashtrapati Bhavan, Mrs Gandhi decided on a Cabinet meeting at 6 am, by then she knew that the arrests of JP, Morarji Desai and several hundreds were going according to the plan. The President understood the impli-cations quickly.
Nayar details that “Siddhartha Shankar Ray and Mrs Gandhi drove to Rashtrapati Bhavan four hours before the deadline. Secrecy was paramount, no one had an inkling as to what was being planned, as the Opposition was busy preparing for the June 25 rally to be addressed by Jayaprakash Narayan, popularly known as JP. ‘Internal Emergency’ was the cloak a lawyer had found for an action planned with dictatorial motives.” Nayar writes: “A vague plan for ‘doing something’ to silence the press and opponents of Mrs Gandhi had not only acquired a firm shape but also achieved constitutional sanction. After this she responded to the advice of Siddhartha Shankar Ray, the Chief Minister of West Bengal, and her younger son, Sanjay, who did not hold any constitutional position nor any position within the party and was in fact involved in the setting up of his Maruti car factory. He recalls Justice Sinha of the Allahabad High Court had ruled Indira Gandhi guilty on the count of two corrupt practices during her election. In the book, Nayar recounts how the Emer-gency came about and freely takes names in his characteristic, courageous, signature style. In other words, the very idea of India was derailed. The power came to rest in the then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, and her son, Sanjay Gandhi, an extra-constitutional authority.” He also writes that the institutions never got back their original vigour and sanctity. He goes on to write: “More than one lakh Opposition leaders and critics were detained without trial. Nayar asks in his new preface: how does one explain the Emergency, imposed in 1975, to a new generation? It does not know what it meant.
The book is a valuable document of the times and is an account by a prisoner of conscience of what actually happened. He then toured the country and kept an account of the darkest chapter of India’s democratic life. Kuldip Nayar was arrested under MISA (Maintenance Of Internal Security Act), kept in Tihar Jail, and only released on a writ of habeous corpus filed by his family.
The book published by Konark Publications was released on June 26, the 38th anniversary of the Emergency, to an audience of journalists, authors and democratic rights activists at New Delhi’s India International Centre. Emergency Retold by Kuldip Nayar Konark Publishers, New Delhi, Seattle first published: 1977 paperback edition: 2013, pages: 320.Įmergency Retold is a new edition of a book on the Emergency by the distinguished journalist and human rights activist, Kuldip Nayar.
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