The Shell Cracks

Shashi Tharoor

Most of the real victims of the Emergency were amongst the poorest classes, the ones who, I came to realise, most needed the protection of democracy

I am not entirely surprised that the wave of articles in the Indian media about the Emergency — the 25th anniversary of which we all recalled in June — has now dwindled to a trickle. Our national amnesia about those 22 months in our history, when we went from being the world’s largest democracy to its most insufferable banana republic, is such that I was half afraid the 25th anniversary would pass unnoticed altogether, as the 10th and the 20th did.

And yet, for many Indians of my generation, the Emergency was the seminal event of their political maturation. I went to the United States on a graduate fellowship soon after it was declared and found myself travelling an even longer route to political awareness.

At first, like most foreign students in the US, I instinctively thought it my duty to explain and defend my country to my not-always-well-disposed hosts. Ironically, I’d had a minor personal taste of the petty tyranny inaugurated by the Emergency: soon after it was imposed, the censors who had moved into newspaper offices spiked an innocuous short story of mine that had been accepted by the youth magazine JS and was, as luck would have it, slated to appear the week after Emergency was declared. It was a detective story with a trick ending and it was called The Political Murder, but the very thought that anyone might be murdered for political reasons was anathema to the Emergency censors, who tended to make up in zeal what they lacked in judgment. So it was banned.

Soon after, I left for the US, where I had a scholarship to pursue graduate studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. There I found myself being greeted by liberals and conservatives alike, as if I’d just arrived from Ceaucescu’s Romania or Pinochet’s Chile. A lot of their criticisms of the Emergency were excessively formalistic, or so it seemed to me at the time; they seemed much more concerned about what Mrs Gandhi had done to the trappings of democracy — press, Parliament, judiciary — than about those who democracy was meant to benefit: the common men and women of India. As a writer breathing the air of American freedom, they assumed I would agree, but I found myself arguing (with the reflexive chauvinism that strikes most Indians when they first come abroad) that I was precisely the sort of Indian who was least entitled to object to the Emergency: I belonged to the tiny minority that could write and publish and be banned, whereas the Emergency — however cynical Mrs Gandhi’s reasons for imposing it — was supposed to work for the betterment of the vast toiling multitudes for whom such rights meant little. Their bread was more important than my freedom.

I nearly convinced myself with this argument for a while, but I soon came to realise how hollow it was. My roommate at Fletcher was a journalist and he daily brought me the wire-service copy about the latest atrocities — the slum demolitions, the bulldozings of homes and livelihoods, the compulsory sterilisation schemes, the arbitrary quotas assigned to them, the arrests and beatings and the torture in jail of young student activists.

Travellers from India brought me copies of underground newsletters, cyclostyled or badly printed on cheap paper, their ink smudged but their message clear, eloquent testimony both to the people’s despair and their defiance. The very thought that India, famously overflowing with a free and irresponsible press, even produced ‘‘underground’’ literature shamed me utterly.

Most of the real victims of the Emergency were amongst the poorest classes of Indians, the ones who, I came to realise, most needed the protections of democracy. For all its chaos and confusion, our parliamentary system and its inefficient trappings were all that stood between them and the absolute power of the state — a state that could seize them in the bazaars or in the fields and cart them off to have their vas cut off in sterilisation camp.

Middle- and upper-class Indians, except for the handful who sought to resist, largely carried on as before; our newspapers may have been blander and opinions usually expressed at the tops of our voices may have had to emerge in stage whispers, but little really changed in our daily lives. If anything, many saw improvements: the proverbial tra-ins ran on time, prices held steady as hoarders and blackmarketeers lay low, there were fewer strikes, demonstrations and other disturbances, and the habitual absenteeism in government offices fell so dramatically that the bureaucracy suffered a crippling shortage of chairs and desks to accommodate the number of personnel who unexpectedly reported for work. For most Indians of the middle and upper classes, the Emergency was by and large a Good Thing. For me, living and studying in America, the story of the outspoken Indian student in Chicago whose passport the Embassy refused to renew because of his anti-Emergency activities was more than I could bear. I burned with shame that the regime I had been defending had sunk to this: I had associated my Indian passport with the right to express myself freely on any subject I chose to and now it was a document denied to one who had exercised that basic right of every Indian.

And so the Emergency became the defining experience of my political consciousness. By starting out defending it and then coming to realise why it was indefensible, I learned one more thing about what it was that I cherished about the country I had grown up in and why I would never be able to accept the fatuous assertion of the Congress’ contemptible President, D. K. Barooah, that ‘‘Indira is India and India is Indira’’.