Total Recall

Those were momentous years, and it was my good fortune to be working for the Patriot newspaper out of Link House, now no more than the name of a nearby bus stop. The Patriot was India’s only independent left wing newspaper, close to the Communist party of India but not a party organ, edited by the wonderful iconoclast Edatata Narayanan, feared and respected by his editorial staff. The CPI was an ally of the Congress during the years of the Emergency; its leaders were not jailed though many of the workers in its front organisations, especially the trade unions, were serving terms without charges.

But the CPI too, like the Patriot, was making a fine distinction between Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s argument that the Emergency had been clamped to save the country from the anarchy and army revolt propagated by Jaiprakash Narayan, and the non-constitutional power centre of Sanjay Gandhi and his cohorts, both in the bureaucracy and police, and in the third level leaders of the Congress party. Patriot, and its reporters, therefore had a semblance of independence.

Editor Narayanan and his reporters took full advantage of the limited liberty, and with censorship leaving wide spaces in other newspapers, much of the reportage of Sanjay Gandhi-inspired mass demolitions and mass sexual sterilisation campaigns was in the Patriot, and its companion magazine, the Link.

Beyond the brutal farce of the demolitions and sterilisations, colloquially called “nasbandi”, what clings to the memory is how good and intelligent human beings changed, forgetting their oath to the Constitution and obeying orders of a person who was not even, formally, in office. I had a friend in the municipal commissioner of Delhi, a kind man called Mr. Tamta who, because possibly of his caste origins and earthy habits, was not in the league of the more sophisticated Stephanians  at various levels of the Indian Administrative Service and the Indian Police Service. Tamta gave us vibrant, but blood curdling, experiences of the morning “durbar” at the residence of Sanjay Gandhi, Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s younger son who had been given authority  by his mother over the routine functioning of the government.

Sanjay Gandhi’s inner cabinet consisted of people who were his colleagues in his so called small car project who had been brought into position in the city political matrix.  In hind-sight, I think many of them, once refugees from Pakistan during the violence and massacre of the partition of India were rabidly communal. They were anti-Muslim. Many of their crazy schemes, told me by Tamta, sometimes allowing me a peep into city designs and blueprints he was carrying, consisted of plans to break the monolithic Muslim qasbah, or ghetto, in the Old City areas surrounding the Jama Masjid. I saw one map which involved the broadening of a stream to connect the Connaught Place area at the heart of New Delhi, with the old market at Jama Masjid. Thousands of houses would have been demolished, millions displaced. There may well have been a religious uprising. Better sense prevailed, or perhaps the rich businessmen whose trade would also have been impacted, just bought peace at some pecuniary cost. The plan was shelved.

Most other plans were carried out, specially the demolitions. Sanjay abhorred slums. As did others in the Delhi Development Authority. Jag Mohan, then with the DDA, responded with alacrity. Even his later  book, No Man is an Island, cannot explain away the massive demolition drives he ordered,  lifting the displaced mass of humanity to  refugee resettlement camps in faraway fallow fields towards Delhi’s borders with Uttar Pradesh and Haryana. Kalyanpuri and Dakshinpuri, Trilokpuri and Sultanpuri were not then the lower middle class five storeyed mass-habitation colonies they have become now. Houses then were 22 square metres chalk marks on the dry ground, with lavatories marked out in other chalk marks and water taps non-existent. Water was to be had from the mobile tankers, if and when they came. Policemen, sometimes themselves victims of the demolitions, kept an uneasy watch. No protests were allowed. Jag Mohan was later feted both by the Congress, which made him Lt. Governor of Delhi and then Governor of Kashmir, and by the right wing Bhartiya Janata party which, when it was in government, lauded his role in goading Kashmiri Pundits, harried and harassed by Islamic fundamentalists and separatist groups, into a mass exodus out of the Kashmir valley to Delhi and Jammu. Navin Chawla has travelled even further. He was the secretary of Lt. Governor Kishen Chand – who later committed suicide – and therefore the gateway to the powerful group sitting in the Governor’s house, taking orders from Sanjay Gandhi’s home and then implementing them through the administration, the DDA and the Municipal Corporation. Chawla rose to become Information secretary, and then secretary to the Union Public Service Commission, before he was handpicked to be a member, and later Chairman of the Election Commission of India. In retirement now, Chawla is a global authority on conducting free and fair elections, and is often an international observer and speaker, and is of-course an author. But his world fame comes as the authorised biographer of Mother Teresa in her lifetime. An erudite and polite person, Chawla perhaps would not care to recall his life in the Governor’s office. Such things are better forgotten.

But someone must really write a book on the role of the media, on individual journalists who were direct beneficiaries of the emergency, and whose huge bungalows, and reputations, can ill afford an investigation. Of that, another time.