1. Indian Emergency should not be considered an artifact of the past. It is this thought and notion that has caused India and Indians to cry foul of having an emergency even during the slightest mishappenings in the country pinning it on the government. These people especially the millennials have far forgotten what our country had to go through from 1975-77, how our democracy was tarnished. The darkest period in our country's history. A colossal lesson betrayal on the people coming as a direct result of the ambitions of a single prime minister - Indira Gandhi. We should not blame the millennials. They have no knowledge of the time, and even purposefully or not sidelines by our history textbooks as well. 2. On the occasion of the 44th year since the dreaded incident, we would like to take you through those dark times through this article in the India Report Card.

OPINION : 25/06/2019 : 1836.

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SUB : FACT CHECK -

1. Indian Emergency should not be considered an artifact of the past. It is this thought and notion that has caused India and Indians to cry foul of having an emergency even during the slightest mishappenings in the country pinning it on the government. These people especially the millennials have far forgotten what our country had to go through from 1975-77, how our democracy was tarnished. The darkest period in our country's history. A colossal lesson betrayal on the people coming as a direct result of the ambitions of a single prime minister - Indira Gandhi. We should not blame the millennials. They have no knowledge of the time, and even purposefully or not sidelines by our history textbooks as well.

2. On the occasion of the 44th year since the dreaded incident, we would like to take you through those dark times through this article in the India Report Card.

Ref :The Indira Emergency: Excruciating Pain of Indian Democracy : Jun 25 2019 : PMINDIA

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Indian Emergency should not be considered an artifact of the past. It is this thought and notion that has caused India and Indians to cry foul of having an emergency even during the slightest mishappenings in the country pinning it on the government. These people especially the millennials have far forgotten what our country had to go through from 1975-77, how our democracy was tarnished. The darkest period in our country's history. A colossal lesson betrayal on the people coming as a direct result of the ambitions of a single prime minister - Indira Gandhi. We should not blame the millennials. They have no knowledge of the time, and even purposefully or not sidelines by our history textbooks as well.

On the occasion of the 44th year since the dreaded incident, we would like to take you through those dark times through this article in the India Report Card.

THE IMPOSITION BY THE FUHRER :

In June 1975, the political climate around Indira Gandhi was growing stormier by the second. On the 25 of June, Emergency was declared. But the build-up was full of strange stories and characters.

In 1969, Sanjay Gandhi was 23 years old and had been trained at the Rolls Royce factory in Crewe in the UK. Though he did not complete the course, Sanjay was one of several applicants to seek a license to manufacture a small and cheap car in India — in 1970, and he was the lone applicant to have been granted the license. The Haryana government, under Bansi Lal, handed over 300 acres of land for Sanjay's Maruti factory — some 15,000 farmers were evicted to free the land.

PN Haksar, who was the principal secretary to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi till 1973, was dropped from his post for opposing the Maruti project.

Indira was charged with nepotism — she made little effort to deny the charge. Each time the matter was raised in Parliament, Indira would purse her lips and shrug off the criticism.

This period also saw the emergence of Jai Prakash Narayan, a freedom fighter who was living quietly in Bihar till then. JP, as he was popularly called, was a young man in 1921 when Nehru and Abul Kalam Azad spotted him. To keep him away from the freedom struggle, JP's family had packed him off to the US, where he spent seven years in various colleges. But JP could not resist joining the Congress and the freedom movement. In 1930, he met Nehru and joined the party.

After spending considerable time in various prisons, JP was finally released in 1946 — but soon after independence, he developed differences with Nehru and joined the Congress Socialist Party, which was also known as Socialist Party (India) or Praja Socialist Party.

On the 25 of June 1975, the entire Opposition showed its strength when Jai Prakash Narayan appealed to the police and armed forces to 'disobey' any illegal orders of which their conscience did not approve. The following morning, a cabinet meeting was called. Instead of the established practices of discussion and consultation, Indira's colleagues were merely informed that Emergency was being imposed under Article 352 of the Indian Constitution. The Emergency effectively bestowed upon Indira the power to rule by decree, suspending elections and civil liberties.

A declaration of Emergency was not unusual in developing countries like India. Even in the UK, the Edward Heath government had called for it five times in the four years of its existence.  In Australia, the governor general had dismissed the Prime Minister in 1975 and called for fresh polls. In India, too, there had been a declaration of 'external' Emergency during the 1962 and 1971 wars.

But in the summer of 1975, there was nothing urgent for which to call an Emergency. The political scientists and scholars of that era felt that if individual states such as Bihar had some problems, a presidential decree would have sufficed.

DEMOCRACY ALMOST DIED :

In 1978, the Shah Commission — which went explicitly into the Emergency and its excesses — found that there was no evidence of a threat to the Constitution or law and order in the country that warranted the declaration of an Emergency.

Indira's colleagues kept mum, perhaps recalling that discretion was the better part of valor. Only Defence Minister Sardar Swaran Singh made a feeble attempt to ask if such drastic action was necessary. Minutes later, Indira was heard announcing on All India Radio the merits of the Emergency — and Swaran Singh found himself replaced by Bansi Lal.

Subsequently, during the Emergency, the 42nd amendment in the Constitution of India of introduced and enacted in November 1976 when the life of the Lok Sabha had expired beyond five years. The amendment purported to reduce the power of the Supreme Court and the High Courts to pronounce upon the constitutionality of laws. It also declared India to be a socialist, secular republic and laid down the duties of Indian citizens to their government.

The primary author of this Amendment was Dev Kant Barooah, who, as Congress president, had immortalized himself by coining the slogan, "India is Indira, Indira is India."

AR Antulay was another prime mover behind the amendment. When the Bill was placed in Parliament, Antulay, a barrister from Lincoln's Inn, outdid Barooah in praising Indira and called for a 'fresh look' at the existing Constitutional provisions — among them, five-yearly Parliamentary polls. Antulay praised Indira for driving out Congressmen who were not in the Nehruvian mold. Next, he was heard saying, "It has been left to Nehru's proud daughter, the daughter of the Indian nation, the daughter of India, ancient, present and future, to bring into effect what Nehru had visualized."

Defense minister Bansi Lal tried to outdo both Barooah and Antulay when he told Indira's cousin, BK Nehru, "Get rid of all this election nonsense... Just make our sister (Indira) president (of India) for life, and there is no need to do anything else."

Once again, Sanjay was seen as the moving spirit behind all this. The young man had no experience, but he went ahead and made his mother and himself targets. Sanjay's biggest drawback was that each time he realized he had made a blunder, he chose to turn it into a bigger disaster.

Between June 1975 and January 1977, Indian democracy took an extended leave of absence. Under directions from the Prime Minister, Mrs. Indira Gandhi, political opponents were jailed, human rights extinguished, news censored, and a personality cult of the Leader promoted. The 'Emergency,' as it is known, was once regarded as a defining moment in the history of independent India. After it was lifted, and Mrs. Gandhi dethroned, the Emergency experience was viewed as a 'near miss' so to say, whereby this country had narrowly failed to join the well-subscribed ranks of the world's dictatorships permanently. Political commentators alerted the citizenry to its lessons—not to allow bureaucrats and judges to ally with political parties, never to justify curbs on freedom of expression, above all, to always put faith in the process rather than personality.

POST EMERGENCY :

The Emergency lasted for twenty months. In January 1977, to everyone's surprise, elections were called. There are competing explanations as to why this decision was taken. Within India at the time, as we recall, it was widely believed that Mrs. Gandhi's own trusted spies from the Government's Research and Analysis Wing had predicted a comfortable victory for her. In his book, P. N. Dhar speculates that she wanted once more to hear the accolade of the people, to seek through the campaign trail the admiration and reverence that had so readily come her way in 1971. A third possibility is that the example of Pakistan shamed Mrs. Gandhi, then enjoying one of its all-too-rare periods of democratic rule.

When General Elections were due in early 1976, Mrs. Gandhi amended the Constitution to extend, by a year, the life of the Lower House, the Lok Sabha. Later, the Lok Sabha's life was extended by a further twelve month, until early 1978. Her advisers, and especially her son Sanjay, thought this process could continue forever. One still does not know, for certain, why in 1977 she decided to hold elections after all. Anyway, her party was comprehensively defeated, and the Prime Minister and Sanjay lost in their respective constituencies. Others saw her defeat as a commentary on authoritarianism and abuse of power. But for Mrs. Gandhi, it was time to unwrap, once more, the theory of the foreign hand. Thus the unseated dictator wrote to a relative that 'people have always thought that I was imagining things or overreacting, but there has been a deep conspiracy and it was bound to overtake us.' Or, as she helpfully explained to a foreign interviewer, 'they had a lot of money to spend… Some sections in the Janata party had the support of the Western press, Amnesty International and other Western organizations. Another section was supported by the Soviets'.

Thousands were already in jail, most of them unaware of why they were there. Within days of the Emergency, people gathered that the country was being run by Sanjay Gandhi and a couple of people around him. Stories of citizens being forced to undergo sterilization became the talk of the town. A sense of fear gripped practically every household. At a rough estimate, victims of the 'Sanjay Sterilisation Effect' could be more than 70 lakh men. Imagine what a devastating impact it would have created on the person himself, at least five immediate family members and a further 10-15 close relatives. Think of families in which young unmarried persons were also forcibly subjected to this cruelty. In addition to these victims, the number of persons detained during Emergency under MISA and the Defence of India Act reached a staggering 1,11,000. Officials were given instructions to complete the quota of arrests and sterilizations 'anyhow,' and no one was in a state of mind not to obey. No Indian should suffer such ignominies in future and, hence, must know everything about the dark days of Emergency. The description of democracy in Indian textbooks will always remain deficient if the learner is not educated through the example of Emergency on how a functional democracy is to be sustained and strengthened against diabolical onslaughts.

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NOTE : "PM MODI'S REPLY TO THE MOTION OF THANKS ON THE PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS IN THE LOK SABHA" - VIDEO BELOW

https://www.facebook.com/narendramodi/videos/550646418674844/?t=5

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OPINION :

‘Thus far and no further’: PM Modi’s sharp warning to Congress in Lok Sabha

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday treated the Congress as his punching bag in the Lok Sabha during his reply to a discussion in Lok Sabha, rebutting criticism that his government had attempted to corner credit for India’s development and belittled his predecessors.

“I may be the only prime minister to have said, from the ramparts of Red Fort, that all governments at the centre and the states have played a role. I have said the same in this house also,” PM Modi said. Then, he went on to hurl stinging darts at the Congress, accusing the party of having ignored the contribution of not just leaders from other parties such as Atal Behari Vajpayee but also its own.

PM Modi named former prime ministers PV Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh as two examples, wondering why Congress leaders did not name either of them when they spoke about achievements of Congress governments.

“In this Lok Sabha debate, the same people did not even speak of Manmohan Singhji… Because people outside the family don’t get anything (credit),” PM Modi said, responding to a discussion in the Lok Sabha that mirrored the acrimonious campaign during the recent national elections.

PM Modi said he didn’t like making this point but was forced by Congress leaders who accused him of cornering credit for himself. “Thus far and no further,” he said breaking into English, warning the Congress to stop this campaign.

The Congress that led the opposition assault against the ruling BJP-led national coalition in the early part of the debate had alleged the government was “driven by manipulation”, called PM Modi “a big salesman” and attributed the BJP’s stunning victory in the Lok Sabha elections only to its ability to sell its product well.

The BJP, on the other hand, had hammered the opposition for building a “false narrative” in the run-up to the elections; its first speaker a first-time MP from Odisha had asked why the opposition was reluctant to praise PM Modi.

The tone and substance of the discussion – the first in the life of the 17th Lok Sabha – is seen as an indication that politics would continue be severely polarised and parties are already looking at future elections with an eye on key social constituencies.

That bitterness was reflected on Tuesday as well as Lok Sabha resumed the discussion on the motion of thanks to President Ram Nath Kovind for his address to the joint sitting of Parliament.

BJP’s Dilip Ghosh, who is leading the party’s offensive in West Bengal, accused the Mamata Banerjee government of trying to create a “West Bangladesh” by allowing infiltrators from Bangladesh to settle in Bengal. The DMK, in turn, similarly slammed the AIADMK government back home in Tamil Nadu.

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LAST WORDS : "THE IMPOSITION BY THE FUHRER" : Indira Gandhi

25/06/2019 IS SIGNIFICANT TO REMEMBER :  "In June 1975, the political climate around Indira Gandhi was growing stormier by the second. On the 25 of June, Emergency was declared. But the build-up was full of strange stories and characters.

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JAY HIND
JAY BHARATHAM
VANDE MATARAM
BHARAT MATA KI JAY

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