I wonder how many people will recall this week that on the 25th June night, Indira Gandhi had pushed India into an abyss of darkness and despair. In the name of emergency, she suspended fundamental rights, gagged the press and detained one lakh people without trial.

Her instruments were the bureaucrats, who willingly carried out high handed and arbitrary actions. Gripped by fear or considerations of personal gain, they even lost the will to do the right and proper thing. Today, twenty two years later, they have reached high positions or have retired. Some even got better assignments. No one is sorry; and none has been punished. The sole motivation for their actions and behaviour continues to be the desire for self-preservation.

I do not think a system which is run by the bureaucrats can ever pick on them. Politicians are too dependent on them. But the nation owes it to the present and the future generations that the administrative set-up is not subverted in the manner it was done 22 years ago.

At least the lessons learnt from the emergency should not be lost on us. The most important one is the misuse of power. Were the government to become transparent, as Prime Minister Inder Gujral promised while assuming office, the instances of arbitrariness and recklessness would decrease. People would become aware of how a decision is reached. It would give them a sense of participation in the governance. Democracy would get strengthened then.

The misuse of power is maximum in the states. Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Rajasthan are bad examples. At least, Laloo Prasad Yadav of Bihar and Bhairon Singh Shekhawat of Rajasthan should have been conscious of the rights of citizens because both chief ministers were the victims of the emergency. What is worse is that they do not even realise when they misuse power.

One suggestion made by the Shah Commission, assessing the excesses during the emergency, was that the police should be insulated from politics and the force should be used ``scrupulously on duties for which alone it is by law intended''. But interference by politicians has not only increased in the past years but has become institutionalised. Now it is accepted that the party in power will give orders to serve its ends and the police will not demur in carrying them out.

How much are the police to blame for this? It is clear that they have learnt from their experience that the honest and forthright among them have generally gone under and the pliable and sycophantic have gone up. Soon after Indira Gandhi returned to power in 1980, she hounded out the officers who had anything to do with the Shah Commission. P. Rajgopal, secretary to the Shah Commission, was reduced to a status where he had no choice except to retire. N. K. Singh and R. C. Sharma, the two investigating officers of the Commission, were singled out for unending harassment. She walked out of a function to honour some CBI personnel for their outstanding work, after R. K. Dhawan, her personal assistant, told her that three or four of them were associated with the Commission. Subsequently, she took the organisation to task.

Justice Shah wanted his recommendations to cover the entire bureaucracy. He said: ``What applies to the police applies in equal measure to the services as a whole''. His argument was that ``the politicians who use a public servant for purely political purposes and the public servant who allows himself to be used were both debasing themselves and doing a disservice to the country''. One has only to watch closely the working of the secretariats all over India to realise how political considerations and unreal reading of situations dictate particular programmes and policies. The Gujral government is yet to correct old ways and thinking.

Happily, Gujral has implemented one recommendation of the Shah Commission. That is, archaic laws should be scrutinised to find out if they had ceased to serve the purpose for which they were enacted. However, Shah's warning was that ``when government has no time to frame properly even new laws, where is room to find out which ones from among the old have become redundant?'' This despite the fact that many times the law courts have pointed out the defects in drafting laws and the Law Commission itself has gone on record acknowledging this.

Another proposal that the Shah Commission made was that the intelligence agencies should be ``overseen and evaluated'' by responsible forums comprising persons of integrity, functioning independently. But far from doing this, these agencies continue to work in the manner they did during the British Raj. I will not be surprised if they are supplying the same ``information'' to Gujral, Deve Gowda and Sitaram Kesri at the same time. And what information? The less said the better.

The circumstances in which the emergency was declared and the ease with which it was accomplished should be a warning to the citizens of the country. The cabinet and the important functionaries of the Government were not only not consulted but were deliberately kept in the dark by Indira Gandhi when she decided to advise the President to impose an ``internal emergency'' upon an already existing emergency in the country. This was at least as early as June 22, three days before the emergency was imposed. Some of her political confidantes have told me this.

What has harmed the society most is that it has ceased to be sensitive to what is right and what is wrong. For politicians and government servants, the dividing line between right and wrong does not exist any more. The dialogue which the government once had with the intelligentsia has remained suspended. The pity is that no remedial steps were taken after the emergency to correct these. And no remedial steps are being taken even now.

The only way out is that the public asserts itself against any authoritarian methods. At present, it is docile and resigned. There is a tendency to accept the worst. No one protests, much less revolts. It is time the shadow of the emergency was removed either by the government or by the people.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.