There are at least four noteworthy aspects to the tyranny that was unleashed upon us 20 years ago. First, promulgating the State of Emergency was Indira Gandhi’s way of hanging on to power in the face of the Allahabad judgement and thus of deliberately ‘larging’ the issue of legality of her election. Second, Emergency rule was the most blatant form of suppression of dissent and freedom of expression, witnessed in independent India. Third, it suspended and undermined the political process at the heart of normal, quotidian democracy. And fourth, it involved the growing replacement of elected politicians, many of them corrupt and ineffective, by hand-picked, efficient, ruthless bureaucrats, especially at the state and district levels.

The first aspects, and the more grotesque, personalized instances of abuse involved in the other three, have attracted a great deal of comment. But my contention is that all four are interrelated and important, and not just for their extreme or acute as distinct from routine, normal or chronic forms. Together, they represent a desperate effort on the part of the ruling elite to impose order, stability and a conservative status quo at the expense of democratic accountability, and to suppress the healthy politicization of this society through the involvement of more and more plebeian layers in influencing its fate. Precisely, because this tension between stability and accountability remains unresolved today, there is a danger that the authoritarian impulses that drove Emergency rule could yet be revived, albeit in new disguises.

How did the coterie around Indira Gandhi and Sanjay Gandhi seek to legitimize the Emergency? If the 20 point programme (soon replaced by Sanjay’s four points) was one means, and a ‘populist one at that, the stability platform was another, with a special appeal for the elite which felt threatened by growing social turmoil, disorder, political chaos and unrest among workers and students. At the root of this turmoil during 1972-75 lay two processes: popular disillusionment with a government that came to power on the Garibi Hatao promise, but delivered unemployment, falling real wages and unprecedentedly high inflation, and the long-term erosion of the Congress traditional social base owing to the party’s increasing inability to relate to the aspirations of newly articulate strata, such 00Cc peasantry, leave alone the militant, independently unionizing the working class.

Indira Gandhi could cope with neither process. Her economic policies increasingly produced wayward results. And the Congress, a victim of over centralization and closing of internal spaces for political representation of disparate social strata, found itself floundering in the face of popular disgust with corrupt, irresponsible, politically bankrupt regimes that became monuments of misgovernance. The Emergency was an attempt not just to suppress the consequences of this failure, but so to speak also attack its causes by depoliticizing society through coercion. A depoliticized, dispirited, despondent, sullen India would then be remoulded and transformed from a flophouse of a nation gripped by chaos into an efficient, organized, orderly society where by government works, the people are disciplined, the trains run on time....

To begin this remoulding, Indira Gandhi had to subvert the Constitution, tutor the judiciary, immobilize politicians (were they not at the root of all venality, corruption and inefficiency as well?) and muzzle the press. Sanjay had to forcibly sterilize more than a million people, Mr. Jagmohan had to demolish Turkman Gate and terrorize lakhs of people. Only then could it be said Anushasan Parva, a new era, had begun. This logic went beyond personal venality or cruelty. It was tantamount to removing the people as a factor from the process of political representation, however distorted, and democratic competition on the basis of programmes, however imperfect.

k is in this light that we must see media censorship. The free, independent media is an integral part of the political process of democracy in India. You cannot effectively suppress that process without systematically destroying the independence of the press. The media also plays an invaluable function in a hideously hierarchical society addicted to a highly centralized discourse of power: it alone reflects grass roots concerns and reports what’s happening at the base of the pyramid at whose apex sits callous ruling elite. As Professor Amartya Sen has so authoritatively argued, the existence of an independent media largely explains why millions perished in famines in China while there has been no large scale famine in independent, but poorer, India. This irreplaceable function of the media must be affirmed a fortiori in respect of political freedom itself. The daily, vigorous, street level activity that is part of our politics, but is scarcely expressed within the walls of our legislatures, finds a reflection, however unsatisfactory, in the media as nowhere else.

At the end of the day, Indira Gandhi’s depoliticization project, calculated to replace the people as an inconvenient factor from politics, failed, not least because the media resisted, and the people rejected it resoundingly. The arrest of 1, 70,000 activists, the tyranny visited upon millions of common people, and the free rein given to handpicked bureaucrats did not succeed in reversing the long-term process of self-expression and empowerment of growing layers of plebeians which is in such clear evidence even today.

This is a reaffirmation of the truly lively, vital, spirited nature of Indian democracy, with its rising participation indices and polling rates in sharp’ contrast to the listless, exhausted, effete character of democracy in much of the West where the population has temporarily given up looking for alternatives to the alien policies imposed by market totalitarianism. This vigorous, robust, if chaotic and disorderly, democracy is surely our greatest asset both intrinsically valuable for the space it opens for plebeians, and instrumentally valuable as a means to development based on people’s needs.

Segments of our elite, however, take a different view. For them, democracy, in its participative, inclusive, accountable sense, is a drag upon what they see as the only conceivable form of development market-driven, globalized and demand (not need) based in which stability, order and discipline are overwhelmingly important. When asked to choose between stability and accountability, between super bureaucrat T. N. Seshan and the elected politician, the elite will invariably choose the former. Such is its craving for order at all costs that faced with the likelihood of coalition governments; it now toys with all kinds of formulas, from presidential government to direct election of the Prime Minister by Parliament, i.e. Gaullist and semi-Bonapartist notions that undermine accountability.

It is no surprise that this genre of ideas has been revived in the guise of a call for peace (read stability of neoliberal economic policies) by Mr. P. Chidambaram: given 15 years of ‘peace’, India will emerge an economic giant. This is no different in essence from the Anushasan argument. It too seeks to bypass the people and place the elite’s wisdom, stability and extraneous factors like investor confidence or India’s ‘image above the democratic principle of subjecting policies to popular endorsement. It is a safe bet that the people will throw out such pernicious ideas with the same contempt they showed for the Emergency.

Choose the synonym of “COERCION”