Emergency
may not return in the same form, but we need to guard against illiberal
tendencies.
The Emergency may never return.
Those who fought against this fascist action in 1975-77 are the rulers today
and their commitment to protect democratic institutions is absolute.
(Illustrations by: Pradeep Yadav)
The Emergency wouldn’t really have
mattered to a 10-year-old boy like me in 1975, but for my father’s arrest under
the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (Misa) in the early hours of June 26.
He was a senior Jana Sangh leader in Andhra Pradesh and, hence, spent the next
21 months in jail. I vividly remember those days, when I used to visit him
every fortnight in my mother’s company. I would generally find him in good spirits.
There were several other Misa detainees from his own party, as well as others
in jail with him, besides those groups that would join at regular intervals
under the Defence of India Rules (DIR). I used to hear from my mother that he
was all right because, as a Misa detenu, he enjoyed certain facilities in jail.
While life inside jail was probably
not so harsh, especially for the senior detainees arrested under Misa, life
outside was just the opposite. I often heard my mother saying that life was
probably more difficult for her outside than for my father inside. This had
nothing to do with economic hardship. The real problem was fear. The Emergency
had instilled so much fear in the country that your own kith and kin would
desert you. If they didn’t, the police would ensure they did, by harassing
friends and relatives of detainees. I remember my family facing acute
isolation, my relatives being troubled unnecessarily by the police, and friends
shying away. Except for the occasional visits by RSS leaders operating
underground, we didn’t have much social interaction during those fateful two
years.
This fear was the key to the
Emergency. Independent India had never witnessed the like of that fear in the
preceding 25 years. Whatever success stories were written about the Emergency,
like the punctuality of trains or attendance in offices, were all due to this
fear.
Today, when we talk about the
possibility of the return of that dark era, we must not forget that while
Indira Gandhi could silence the opposition by putting them behind bars, she
could carry on with draconian laws for a full 22 months by instilling fear in
the nation. She had turned the entire country into a prison of fear. There were
few who didn’t succumb to the fear tactic. L.K. Advani’s famous quip, “When
asked to bend, they crawled”, aptly sums up the mood of the nation during
Emergency. The only section that stood up against the dictatorship of Indira
Gandhi was the RSS cadre.
The Emergency may never return. Those who fought against this fascist action
in 1975-77 are therulers today, and their commitment to protecting democratic
institutions is absolute. Democratic institutions like the media, judiciary and
civic organisations are much stronger today than they were four decades ago.
The democratisation of technology and information is another guarantee against
any such misadventure by future rulers. Indira Gandhi could succeed in an
environment of controlled media. But today, that is next to impossible. The
forces that fought against the Emergency, such as the RSS, used alternate means
of communication those days. Today, it is much easier, due to the omnipresence
of social media. To quote Thomas L. Friedman, “everyone is connected and no one
is in control”.
However, fear can return. For, the
tools to create this fear and terror can be derived from the Constitution
itself. That is what Indira Gandhi did. She manipulated the provisions of the
Constitution to suit her whims and, once in control, she took to silencing the
safeguards built in the Constitution too. That’s how the infamous 42nd
Amendment came into being.
Democracies can be illiberal while
remaining democracies, argues Fareed Zakaria in his book The Future of Freedom.
“Across the globe, democratically elected regimes, through referenda, are routinely
ignoring constitutional limits on their power and depriving their citizens of
basic rights. This disturbing phenomenon — visible from Peru to the Palestinian
territories, from Ghana to Venezuela — could be called illiberal democracy,” he
avers.
While the Emergency may not return
in the same form and content, we need to guard against these illiberal
tendencies. Our freedom was hard-earned. Our Constitution is a document that
came out of the churning of enlightened minds in the late-1940s. Eminent jurist
Nani Palkhivala used to say: “The Constitution was meant to impart such a
momentum to the living spirit of the rule of law that democracy and civil
liberty may survive in India beyond our own times and in the days when our
place will know us no more.”
Palkhivala also used to warn us of
the danger from people who have the authority to man the Constitution, by
quoting the 18th century American jurist and commentator Joseph Story, who
said: “The Constitution has been reared for immortality, if the work of man may
justly aspire to such a title. It may, nevertheless, perish in an hour by the
folly, or corruption, or negligence of its only keepers, the people.”
Democracy, of Herodotus’ time, meant
just the rule of the people. What we practise today as democracy is the rule of
the majority. We have to guard against the tendencies of illiberalism in our
democracy. For that, we need leaders who have absolute faith in the three
cardinal principles that guided the French Revolution — liberty, equality and
fraternity. “Liberal constitutionalism”, to borrow a phrase from Zakaria again,
should be the order of the day. A cursory look at our political spectrum
highlights the fact that the BJP
is the only party with internal democracy, while most others are either
family-run or feudal.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s actions thucommitment to the
liberal values of our democratic polity. His connect with the masses through
programmes like Mann ki Baat, his respect for Parliament, his push for
“empowered federalism” and, most importantly, his total integration with social
media — the torchbearer of liberal democratic principles — show that, under
him, India’s democracy and liberal constitutional values will be safely upheld.
However, as the saying goes,
“eternal vigilance is the price to pay for freedom”.
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