Emergency left and right

HER Emergency rule was two months old when Indira Gandhi was poring over a traditional speech she would deliver at the Mughal-era Red Fort. It was Aug 15, India’s Independence Day, an occasion to make everything seem normal while left-wing and right-wing opponents languished in her prisons. Just then she was handed the message of Mujibur Rahman’s assassination by Bangladesh military officers two hours ago. She remained calm at the turn of events and decided to strictly withhold the information in her nationwide broadcast. To revisit the 21-month-long Emergency with the hindsight of 12 years of Narendra Modi’s rule, let’s loiter a little in the manner of today’s drones to reconnoitre the hotspots of the time. What we are likely to see is that the geopolitics of that decade was indeed notably fluid. The East-West chessboard was in flourish. In 1973, Salvador Allende was murdered in a CIA-sponsored military coup in Chile. The USSR got a leg up with the Arab oil embargo the same year targeting sympathisers of Israel and the US. In India, 1973 set off the start of a Maidan movement of sorts. In Gujarat, RSS-backed students went on a rampage known as the ‘Navnirman Andolan’. It would be joined soon by students in Bihar who included Lalu Yadav and Nitish Kumar. They formed a largely north India-based campaign under the stewardship of Jaiprakash Narayan, seen by many as a Gandhian pretender. He called on the military and police to disobey all “illegal orders” by Mrs Gandhi. This didn’t surprise her as it was happening two short years after she riled Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon over her 1971 stand-off with Pakistan. Firmly in the Soviet camp now, and increasingly reviled in Western media, Mrs Gandhi was experiencing the unfolding of an all-too-familiar script. Matters came to a head when on June 12, 1975, a high court judge ordered her removal from power over a hitherto unheard of charge against a sitting prime minister — that she had used the services of the public wo