June 25-26 hardly creates a ripple in Indian polity anymore, save for a couple of newspaper articles by a dying breed of journalists and politicians who lived through those tumultuous times. Many among the younger generation got to know about this dark chapter in India's democratic evolution through the eponymous Bollywood film starring Kangana Ranaut, panned for its "selective storytelling".

Yet two generations of Indians have grown into adulthood since Indira Gandhi, in a midnight crackdown on June 25, 1975, curtailed fundamental rights, jailed political and other opponents, and imposed press censorship in the enforcement of a declaration of internal emergency.  Democratic India had not seen anything like this since British colonial rule and the next 21 months marked a watershed in the country's chequered history.

For a rookie sub-editor working on late-night duty in the newsroom of the United News of India (UNI) news agency the period marked a loss of political innocence.  The events are still too vivid in memory: the first startling reports of the closure of newspaper printing presses, switching off of power and seizure of newspapers from places as far apart as Jalandhar and Indore; sightings of unusual security movement at many places, including Connaught Place in the capital; rumours of midnight arrests of opposition leaders, and then the first call from a leading opposition figure of his impending arrest.

Acting on a tip-off, a colleague, Arul Louis, who is now a journalist in New York, and I - in the absence of any senior reporters at that hour - rushed to the nearby Parliament Street police station to get the latest information (in an era where there no mobiles and landlines worked fitfully). It was past 2.30 a.m. and the city was asleep, blissfully unaware of the retributory machinations of a democratically elected prime minister, who was subverting democracy to stay in power in the face of a judicial verdict removing her from parliament after finding her guilty of electoral malpractices. 

Midnight swoops

Outside the sprawling white-colonnaded police station there was unusual activity and riot police were driving out in trucks.  The air was taut with tension.  The two of us were asked to leave, but we hung on in the shadows. The defiant wait proved journalistically rewarding as very soon a white Ambassador car drove up in a flurry of escort vehicles. Wedged in between two plain clothed police officials was the familiar sight of  Jayaprakash Narayan,  hailed as "Lok Nayak", or 'people's leader', who the day before had given a call to the military and police at a massive public rally in Delhi to act on their conscience and disregard unconstitutional and immoral orders.

He reiterated his call for a programme of social transformation which he termed "Sampoorna Kraanti" (total revolution).

As the tough-looking cops tried to shield the frail, gangling man, Narayan gave his terse reaction with words that were to make history: "Vinash kale vipreet buddhi" (reason takes flight as doom nears).  We rushed back to our office to file the breaking news.

From then on the few of us who were privileged to be on the nocturnal beat worked feverishly to a climactic dawn. With the printed phone directory on our laps,  every senior opposition leader was rung up  and the tracking efforts proved rewarding.  UNI's General Manager GG Mirchandani, though a former government official, encouraged us to keep the truth flowing and the public informed. Government censors arrived in the morning and took charge of the editorial operations as censorship set in.  
 
Aides of Moraraji Desai, who was to later become the prime minister in 1977 heading a short-lived government, said he had been woken up by police and was being taken to jail.  Similar stories were heard from the homes of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Chandra Shekhar, Charan Singh, all of whom were to become prime ministers of India.

Sikander Bakht, who later became a cabinet minister in the Desai government and was one of the stalwarts of the Jana Sangh/BJP, said he had hidden in his bathroom when the police came calling and appealed to us to save him from arrest.  

Tales of midnight knocks and police swoops on homes of targeted people came from around the nation as every conceivable opponent of Mrs Gandhi was rounded up and thrown into prison cells. 

A few, like Subramanian Swamy,  were tipped off by colleagues and escaped in time, catching the first flights to the freedom of the West from where they organised opposition to the repressive regime. Dissenting teachers, students, journalists, intellectuals were all put behind bars as independent India for the first time came under a dictatorship. Authorities belatedly realised what havoc unrestricted information flow about the crackdown had caused through newspapers and news agencies in the pre-internet analog era, which otherwise was planned as a swift, silent operation in the dead of the night. They quickly moved to close down those they could before sending in the censors.

Triumph of democracy

The Emergency rule made heroes of some but revealed the clay feet of most. BJP patriarch L. K. Advani, then leader of the Jana Sangh party, made the telling comment on cravenness to authority when he said that some people when asked to bend crawled. That applied to journalists, officials, industrialists, and all those who displayed a singular lack of spine in standing up to Mrs. Gandhi's dictatorship and instead ended singing paeans to her virtues lest they also were arrested. 

It is said charitably by many historians that it was a tribute to the innate democratic spirit of Indira Gandhi, as the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, that she decided to lift the Emergency after 21 months and ordered free elections in the hope that people would endorse her move. But the truth was that her own intelligence reports told her about the flourishing underground movement against the Emergency that could pose a threat to her life, as that of her upstart son Sanjay Gandhi; the gross abuses of power by police and other regulatory officials like demolition of slums and forcible sterilisation; and finally, the realisation that the Indian people can be gagged but their inborn democratic spirit can never be crushed.

The elections that followed in March 1977 was a fitting riposte to her and Sanjay Gandhi's political calculations. There was an element of utter disbelief when results showed that Mrs. Gandhi, her son, her acolytes, and countless cheerleaders of the Congress party had all been routed. The repressive regime went but the scars it left took a long time to heal and in some cases caused lasting damage to the body politic. The credibility of the vital pillars of the nation, like the judiciary, stood badly eroded, corruption became institutionalised in the name of party mobilisation, and politics became the last refuge of the criminalised and the lumpen as long as they served its political ends.

Emergency's lessons

The fateful March 1977 election vindicated Indian democratic traditions and proved the triumph of freedom over bread.  Ballot after regular ballot has shown that just because a man is poor and maybe cannot read does not mean he does not care for his liberty and human rights. It went to show that democracy and freedom of choice was very much an Indian value.

It may be difficult for another prime minister to impose Emergency under similar circumstances because of a constitutional amendment in 1978.  But whether the lessons it taught to the ruler and the ruled are still remembered remains doubtful.

(The writer is former Chief Editor and Director, IANS.  Views are personal. The article was published in The Tribune and reproduced with permission)