 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch. June 25th marks the 45th anniversary of the imposition of the internal emergency in India. Now this internal emergency was imposed when former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was in power. A court verdict led to the possibility that she might lose her status as a member of parliament and subsequently even as Prime Minister and this led to her imposing the emergency. This emergency was marked by a very sustained assault on democracy, on fundamental rights. Leaders of the opposition were put in jail, thousands were arrested, there was a huge crackdown on the media and most importantly the poor and the working class in large numbers were attacked through forcible evictions from their houses through being put in jail and even through forced sterilization. In 1977, after almost nearly two years, Indira Gandhi who was under the assumption that she would win if her election was called, did call for an election but the people of India rose up and opposed her and voted her out, leading to her resignation finally and a new government came to power. Today it's 2020 and Indira Gandhi's Congress party is no longer in power, it's the right-wing BJP that is ruling but a lot of observers have pointed out that in a number of ways, the situation today is not very different from that of 1975. There is no real emergency in place now but we see many of the same tendencies that were there during this emergency being replicated. So to talk more about this, we have with us Praveer Purkayasar, the editor of NewsClick. Praveer was a student activist during the emergency and was also one of those who was detailed. So Praveer to start with, could you probably give some a bit of context about that period both at the national level and internationally that led to the imposition of this internal emergency because until that time India was very proud of the fact that it was a democracy that it became a democracy immediately after independence in 1947. So what led to this phase where in 1975 it basically suspended fundamental rights and saw this attack on democracy? There's always been a question, was it simply because Mrs. Gandhi was a prime minister at that time and she had lost the court case by which she was unseated as a parliament member and though the appeal was still pending in the Supreme Court, the question came up was therefore her becoming a prime minister at least quasi-illegitimate in the eyes of the people. And this more than the legal issue which is that she had to be unseated, could she appeal and get a steer order, continue as a prime minister, instead of that what she did was to declare emergency. So that is therefore one approximate reason has always been held for being unseated as a member of parliament and therefore legally putting her prime ministership under a cloud. But I think there was also the other part which must not be lost sight of when we look at the consequence of what happened that there was a strong section in the Indian middle class which always argued that democracy was not suitable for a country of India size and complexity. What we needed was really a dictatorship and a dictatorship by which they felt the what shall we say the poor, the working sections, those who are not really in their class, they could be silenced, they could be then forced to do what their betters told them to and it also fed into apart from the middle class or upper middle class ideas of what a meritocracy should be and they always considered themselves to be meritorious and that the other people who have vote, the poor, the other sections who have vote, therefore are the sections who don't understand while they do, they felt that it will really empower them against the mass of Indian people and they always are held in the drawing rooms of the elite, that democracy was not a suitable institution. So they felt that this was the time for them and then of course population which is the other major issue always in India. India has overpopulated the poor breed too much, that's in fact the other issue and there is also another argument, it's not purely a Malthusian argument of breeding too much but also the argument which was also there in the various societies as a part of the eugenic program that the poor breeding too much means the best of society does not reproduce enough, so genetically there is a fall of quality and therefore sterilizing the poor is a method of controlling the racial, in some cases the racial descent and in other cases the descent of IQ etc. So the whole IQ debate is also very much a part of the elite eugenic debate so to say. So we have to also understand that why sterilization suddenly came up, it didn't come up because Sanjay Gandhi, Mrs Gandhi's son sort of suddenly decided his own program in this but it also came out because there were all these elements which also went into the middle class psyche which backed Mrs Gandhi's emergency, not so much because of they wanted her as a prime minister because they saw her as an instrument to institute a certain kind of authoritarian rule in the country, do away with people's protests and movements which they thought were fetters and also more important than also have their so-called sterilization program which in their mind was as much population control as also the control of the of an eugenic kind. So all of this combined to provide I think the larger framework of what caused the emergency not simply the unseating of her being a prime minister or her unseating of her being a member of parliament but also all these issues also combined to create essentially an authoritarian 19 months government which was what the emergency was really all about and as you have said putting political opposition in jail, large number of people who could protest and organize in jail particularly the student activists, the workers activists, the workers leaders, the movement leaders we all of them put in jail was very much a part of it but also she put the right in jail so that she could argue that there was a fascist overthrow possible which was being germinated somewhere and therefore she had to intervene. So that was her shall we say argument in front of the third world leadership of which she was a very important component and she was really in the we owing at that point of time also a international image for herself which of course was solid badly by the emergency but nevertheless she was trying to say well you know there is this CIA American possibilities coups which take place in different countries and of course you know the US has intervened number of countries and of course they had their fourth column in the column in India too so it was not that it was completely out of air thin air that she bore the story but that was not the thrust of the emergency that that really we should understand today. So in this context one of the key issues I think is also the fact that how what was the kind of resistance that took place at that time because you mentioned how for instance political leaders trade unionists many of them were imprisoned and a lot of these operations were done very quickly without warning so it is not even that there was a lot of time to prepare for eventualities so can you talk a bit about what was the kind of resistance especially in the left that was taking place during that time? I think the left had actually thought that this is going to go on for a long time and India has turned into an authoritarian direction and she wasn't going to give you know declare elections soon till she had established total control of the country and I think that's where a lot of people had also miscalculated because they thought they had given up in fact a lot of the opposition parties that we are talking about they really had given up because they did not know how to resist an authoritarian leadership of this kind and they after initial protests and so on found that their model of protest was inverting so they decided that well there is nothing else to accept try and see whether they can negotiate our way out of jails so that was the way that I think the different sections were operating so the left had decided that it needs to build essentially what would be called underground apparatus how to continue struggles without openly identifying who are the leaders so that they don't then immediately get put into jail in fact in the university that I was in and the time we talked about being a student activist in this time we had organized a three-day strike and I was arrested on the second day and it was again done anonymously in the sense that the left was distributed everybody knew who were doing it but the names are not there so it is difficult for the state to make a case against us and that's why when they arrested me during the on the second day of the strike I was picked up and put under what's called the maintenance of internal security act which did not have any specific evidence that need to be produced it was essentially what's called preventive detention so that that was the bonus that was actually being used so this was the left really model of resistance and it was something that we were organizing in different parts of the country but what took everybody by surprise and honestly it did take everybody by surprise is that Mrs. Gandhi at one point decided to legitimize her emergency by calling for elections and that was a miscalculation by her because she didn't expect the people would turn in this way and use the valid box to unseat her so her expectation was and I guess this is what authoritarian rulers also have is a problem that everybody around them tells them what they want to hear which is what you see also in the current government and if they hear what the what they think is happening which is conducive to them then of course the policies get more out of act with what the reality of the ground is and the reality of the ground was all of this was creating enormous resentment among the people particularly what you talked about the sterilization program in which men were targeted for the srasik to be and I think the Indian people particularly the sections the poorer sections those who are most oppressed understood the value of the vote or even today understand the value of vote much more than what the middle class or the elite do in India so I think that was one of the things that happened and it's also interesting we stopped hearing talks about a benevolent dictatorship after that which was quite popular in the drawing rooms at the time before the emergency after emergency for 25 30 years we did not hear the talk unfortunately the generation which was born after emergency or entered politics or social consciousness after emergency that has forgotten that history. One thing I wanted to ask was also in terms of in terms of democracy itself in terms of institutions in terms of politics itself what was the legacy or what were some of the more dangerous legacies of that period which are perhaps playing out in much much more strength today. You know before we get into that question which I think is an important one I would also like to point out what actually happens during emergency and what we are seeing today I think the most important part of its people's ability to resist was greatly weakened because your organizations the leadership the instruments of organizing being able to communicate to others all of these were taken away and once you take them away then of course resistance becomes much more difficult and particularly organizing resistance means that some people immediately are identified and then of course you have prevented detention they go to jail the government doesn't have to prove anything so the whole consequence of that was the chilling effect on resistance and of course coupled to that you have the chilling effect on the media with the direct rules by which you could you could actually go to jail for printing something government didn't want and the media as was famously said by one of the right wing leaders Advani was the press crawled and asked to bend but they were asked to bend there's no question about that there was censorship and the censorship was quite strict and those who violated the censorship did or were harassed in different ways including being set to jail for short times so all of that meant the media also became compliant and of course you had the movements which could not operate openly so the resistance of the people were subterranean was building up the anger was there but there's no open resistance which is possible and today when you look at it the COVID-19 provides an environment also which prevents the kind of mobilization on the ground because parties or political movements don't want to be responsible and therefore do not want to organize resistance in the same same form that they were doing earlier and also there is a recognition epidemic is here for a shorter period and at some point this will normalize and then we will go back to our own forms of resistance which was actually taking place just before the epidemic was there if you remember the attack on the minorities in the guise of what is called the national population register national register of citizens which was seen widely as a way to disenfranchise the minorities this had run into serious resistance both from secular political formations secular organizations and of course the minority which was being targeted so this resistance which is building up actually got derailed in some sense by the COVID-19 epidemic because people had to then abjure or give up give up mass mobilization so I think the resistance being weakened is something which has happened today because of the COVID-19 epidemic and the fact institutionally the government has passed or has taken powers under the disaster management act which is an emergency provision so we have it not a de facto but a legal de jure emergency in the country so that is the also the parallel you have an institutional mechanism which allows for emergency powers in the central government and you have a collapse of the resistance because of COVID-19 in this case and at that time because of the authoritarian nature of the emergency rule that was declared so these are the two parallels that I think are very important to focus on and yes I do think that both these things just as it changed earlier emergency lift got lifted and you have the delay the therefore dethroning of Mrs Gandhi in that election we are going to see a change at some point of time it will become normal again and I'm sure it will if not with herd immunity but with the vaccine and then if you do get you will get an opportunity then to go back to quote unquote new politics again or the normal politics again and then of course the resistance can build without the resistance I think the emergency by itself is not so easy to fight you were asking about the legacies in the constitution you know one is the legacy of the constitution worked in a different way in fact we tried to inoculate the emergency provisions in a way they're more difficult exercise today so you cannot have the emergency that Mrs Gandhi did at that point of time that easy that is one that that happened the second part of it we have more provisions within the system now to say put checks and balances of the government you have various transparency laws which have been passed you have the rights to examine a lot of the government documents the courts have been active in this period establishing certain very necessary conditions on what is life to write to life and liberty but of course the problem that we have now is while all those provisions exist institutionally their applicability is where the problem comes because you have a court which is the key instrument of protecting our legal rights the court today says all the right things and then does not give any relief to the petitioners so effectively what it does is says yes these things should be they're very important they exist they should be examined then gives the power of examining or the authority to examine on the same people who have committed the shall we say the violations of law so you have Kashmir as a case you have various other cases which are going on in the courts today and all of them you do not hear a violation of the law in terms of the judicial pronouncement pronouncement being obviously wrong but what you hear is essentially that yes we agree with the these are the legal provisions but some little small loophole is found or by which the court finally does not give any relief to the petitioners so I think that is the more issue here it is not the legal structure which is being changed take for instance the labor law the labor laws have not been changed all that has happened is the government said for next three years because of COVID-19 because we have an emergency situation in the country they're all being held in a ways now under Disaster Management Act can they do so if they can not do so who do we go to to strike down that pronouncement we go to the court and that's where the problem lies so unfortunately without resistance on the ground I do not think courts will protect the people or their rights and that's all this with the issue and the democracy it is not the rulers it is not the judiciary who protect the rights of the people it is the people themselves and that's the conclusion that we have to come to today or under any other emergency