 Hello, and let's talk about the 45th anniversary of the emergency. On June 25, 1975, around 11 p.m., President Fakrudin Ali Ahmad signed the Proclamation of Internal Emergency, citing the threat to security of India from internal disturbances. This marked the beginning of a brutal chapter of Indian history, which showed both the fragility of our institutions and the need to fight to strengthen them. The major pillars of our democracy crumbled one by one, with a few exceptions before the authoritarian will of Indira Gandhi. Many fundamental rights were suspended. The Draconian Maintenance of Internal Security Act, or MISA, was used indiscriminately to target any opponent of the government. Opposition state governments were dismissed, and leaders of opposition parties were jailed, as were tens of thousands of common people. The press, which was supposed to be a defender of democracy, was censored. But what was worse was the fact that many media organizations willingly accepted the censorship. The Supreme Court of India forever damaged its reputation when it agreed with the government that during the emergency, fundamental rights were not available to citizens, and habeas corpus pleas were not valid during this period. An important thing to remember is that the majority of the victims were the poor, the working people of the country. These were the people who were forcibly evicted from slums, who were sterilized, who faced a sustained assault from a government of their own. If any of the above seems familiar to you today, it's not surprising. The past few years have seen many commentators drop parallels between the situation then and what is happening now. We don't have an official emergency in place, but what we do see is that the same institutional collapse is happening at an accelerated rate. The same crackdown on critics of the government. The same unquestioning submission to authority. We talked in news clicks, Prabir Purkayastha on this issue. Prabir was one of those detained during this period as a student leader. Here's what he had to say. Prabir, thank you so much for joining us. So like we just mentioned, it's the 45th anniversary of the emergency. There's been a lot of discussion about it, opinion pieces of course. But more importantly, a lot of commentators, both now and over the past few years, have been drawing certain parallels. And one of the key aspects that has been talked about is the collapse of institutions itself. Now there have been misguided and even malicious policies by governments before. But we are probably in a phase where the ability of the pillars of Indian democracy or the willingness of those pillars to resist this kind of attack seems to have come down to an all-time role. So we'll talk a bit about that, especially keeping the emergency in contact. You know, let's take the comparison that is quite often being made. This is a super emergency and that was the emergency. Now if we leave the, shall we say, all these adjectives out, we had one kind of emergency, then we have a different kind of emergency now. I feel a common issue is not so much the collapse of the institutions or the collapse of the media as people are making it out to be. But the fact that it is very difficult to resist during COVID-19 epidemic, with all the laws that have been put in place. And I'm really referring to the Disaster Management Act, which as you know, is a draconian piece of legislation meant for very extreme times when you have an epidemic. This is really after the bubonic plague of the 1920s, 30s when you really had serious case of bubonic plague. We are really seeing again another epidemic of this order. So this obviously is a draconian act because it's meant to control emergencies of certain kinds. So that's a legal instrument which is in place. We also have the Epidemic Acts, which give the state governments a lot of power. But for the central government, that's not the main instrument that is being used right now. And they have used, in fact, the Disaster Management Act to pull up district magistrate who obeyed state orders. So that kind of institutional mechanism is one which is already there. The second collapse is basically because of the end of the epidemic. We are not able to mobilize people on the streets. We don't want to right now. Though if you see what's happened in the United States, the people coming into the streets of protest have not really increased the numbers. And that's one of the reasons is that this epidemic seems to affect people much more in confined spaces. So given that, it's good to know that mass demonstrations on the roads do not lead to immediately spiraling up of numbers. But nevertheless, it is true that this is not the time that we ask people to come out in large numbers due to various reasons, mainly because of the nature of the epidemic itself. So resistance in that sense is now confined more to social media, private discourse rather than public resistance, which is a normal political time resistance. And normal politics means you, of course, mobilize. You get people on the streets. The temper of the people also give a pause to both the institutions and the rulers. So I think the dynamic of the institution being weak is not so much only of the interaction between the rulers and the institutions of democracy as you called it, the court being, of course, a key one in that. But it is really also the pressure of those who are ruled to fight back. And if that fight back is weakened due to whatever reasons, then, of course, there is a problem that the institutions then get into, that they then start succumbing slowly, one by one they seem to fall by the wayside, which is what the Supreme Court at the moment is perhaps most glaringly doing. It says all the right things about law. But then it doesn't provide relief to the people. So given that, you have an institutional failure on the court that even in the famous emergency judgment, which is what's called the ADM Jabalpur judgment, the court said, yes, people, the detainees have the right to life and liberty. Since I was a litigant in that same petition. So you have a right to life and liberty. But you cannot exercise this juridically. That is the court cannot give you a relief that you're seeking for. So the essential part is not recognizing the law. What is right under law? What is right and what is wrong? But being able to provide relief to the petitioners. And that's exactly what we see today, whether it's Kashmir, whether it's other cases. The court says all the right things about law. But what is missing is giving relief. So this is one part of the really the issue. So I will say that the institutional collapse is a consequence of the emergency architecture, which is the disaster management act, and the fact that mass resistance has become more difficult under epidemic times. And the government in that sense has got a window of opportunity where it can do a whole bunch of things, including changes in labor laws by fiat. Not by changing the law, but by fiat and saying, OK, because it is an epidemic, we say unions cannot do ABC. You cannot go on strike. We can sack you whenever we want. The labor courts will not interfere. Now, these are all actually dictates of the government, not backed up by an illegal infrastructure. The court is unwilling to provide relief. People are not able to resist because the factories, half of them not even working. So given all of this, you have a situation. The normal avenues of protest don't exist. And then you have what you are calling off as the institutional collapse technique. It's not the intent of the rulers ever to give you democracy. You retain democracy as a consequence of ability to resist undemocratic measures, authoritarian measures. So that, I think, is the bigger issue for me. And the other key aspect I also wanted to talk about was regarding the role of the political opposition and state governments itself. Now, during that point of time, president's rule was the preferred way of getting rid of inconvenient state governments. But now what we see is that even with restrictions on how president's rule can be used, the idea of political opposition itself is slowly being utilized by financial strangulation of the state governments on the one hand. Then there is a mass defections that are being engineered in almost every state. So we see that there's also very strong, say, assault on the federal structure through these process. Yes, the federal structure has been affected in a number of ways. And as you have pointed out, the finance is the key issue. They're not even getting what is their due on the GST disbursement, which would have taken place much earlier, not for funds which have now been constrained because of the lack of lower tax revenue, but taxes which are collected in an earlier period. Even those disbursements are not being made to the states. The states cannot borrow unlike the central government which can actually print money, what is called helicopter money into this language. The states cannot do that. It is also hamstring by how much it can borrow because that's the central permission it needs to seek because they've been allowed to borrow more, but borrowing more also has consequences for them. So all the fiscal transfers which needs to be made are not being made. The share of the state government's finances which are due to them are not being given to them. And then you have also all the so-called 20 lakh crore plans that you have on which you are now, say, you are doing, most of it is either imaginary, past schemes being sort of refurbished, if you will, or whitewash to present as if they are new. And plus a lot of them are actually just loans. They're promise of loans, not even loans. And most of the transfers there are to be capital, not to the state governments. Whatever the state government is spending even on emergency health measures, only a small proportion of that is going to the states. And the total health transfers are 15,000 crores, about 7,800 crores for this year, the rest for new year. And the total share of the state out of this 20 lakh crore amount is only 3,000 crores. So given all of these states have been really hamstrung and if the protest, the currently, the issue that is still there is if the protest, there is still the issue that the central government holds by fear over rules, whatever it wants to do. And can say, no, no, you have to follow this. And as you said, there is a democracy sort of of course dismissal that can also be used. But you also pointed out that buying and selling of MLAs for both the higher, this upper house, which is Rajasabha, that has been going on. You have buying and selling of MLAs for overturning governments, which was what was exercised in Madhya Pradesh, for example. So you have various other processes that were going on simultaneously, which does not seem to have been constrained by the epidemic. So you have this opposition's ability to resist this curtain, but the buying and selling by the central, the power that holds the central government today, the political party that holds the central government, the BFP, that does not seem to be constrained in terms of buying MLAs and MPs maybe at some point. And trying to therefore up overthrow state governments or save its government again by horse, daily got different kinds. So none of that seems to have stopped. Right. And finally Prabir, so the other aspect which was commented on widely during that period was the role of the media about how client they were, how with some exceptions, of course, how they surrendered to the government way of doing things, the government narrative around it. So how do we see the situation today? Again, like we've discussed, there's no official censorship, but the amount of the volume of content that furthers the government cause seems more than ever before. Yeah, Advani had a very telling phrase. The media crawled when it was asked to bend. And I have to say that the current generation of media hasn't fallen that far. It's still printing stories, it's giving views. There is that part of it. Yes, there are compromise, it clearly is making. Certain stories don't come. Certain comments are very, very muted, shall we say. Certain views are over portrayed in the media. All that is true. But nevertheless, there are critical stories to give some amount of balance and not make it completely as one sided as it was during the emergency, but the media completely caved in. That's one part of it. The second part of it is today the instrument of, shall we say, building up an opinion of a certain kind is not only policing the media, which is what was there earlier, but it is also creating a whole bunch of what I will call troll media or whatever other media you want to call, using the social media platforms, basically attacking anybody who dares to be critical about the Modi government. So this is the voice that is sought to be raised and there are a huge number of television channels as well as certain newspapers and digital platforms which are willing to abet the government on this or basically partner in this venture. So this is the new normal, shall we say, where trolling is considered news and news can be then proceeded against under first information reports by either people who follow the law fair model, attack people legally by filing cases or by the government itself by filing FIRs. So you have a whole range of now instruments like this being used. If you see, for instance, the case against Vinod Dua, a leading journalist at a long-time television anchor or against the Supriya who's in scroll, what's being done in scroll or Siddharth Varadarajan editor of wire, you will see that this is the pattern being followed. There are FIRs being filed by the police. There are then again cases being filed by other people and then it's a case of harassing and hoping therefore that this provides a chilling effect for the rest of the media. And I must say that some of it really works because most people would not like under current conditions to go to jail and with the COVID-19 hanging as a sort of democulus in everybody's hands. And this is true for also those who've been now put in jail in the Bhima-Korega case. That COVID-19 becomes then a further threat apart from the normal threat of jail because as you know, jails are crowded and therefore social distancing is not possible. And if there is an infection in the jails, it's very likely to spread fast. This is what we saw in various other places where infections did take place in the jails. So I think that's the other threat that's being held out both directly and indirectly to the media and particularly to the digital platforms which have mushroomed in the last five, six years and play a very important role today including media platforms like newsclaves. Thank you for talking to us. In our next segment, we continue the conversation that we showed yesterday with Brazilian social leader, Jesse Dayani. In this segment, she talks about the project that President Jair Bolsonaro a right-wing leader is building in Brazil. The sanitary crisis and the coronavirus made this negative stance of the disease by Bolsonaro deepening the political crisis because many governors, most governors in Brazil, in the States, are all positioned in the sense that this stance of the federal government is wrong. Not all of them are in the opposition to the government but most of them are. And all of them have a stance of recognizing that the pandemic is real, that this is not an invention and that it kills. And that it will have a very serious impact on the population. So most governors have a position to respect the measures of the WHO and try to develop measures to counter the epidemic. And this aggravated the political crisis and generated a very strong incision between the power of the public. So many governors have this stance. While the parcellus of the judiciary has been positioned a lot in this sense of this is not fair. This is a crime against the nation. The president is putting the people to die. So one of the hashtags, including here against the Bolsonaro government, is Bolsonaro Genocida because it is a project that actually kills the Brazilian people. So everything began to deepen with the sanitary crisis. So a deep political crisis, this generates a great opposition movement to the government against this stance. It is not only this, the fact that Bolsonaro, in addition to having this stance, the negationist, anti-science, anti-righteous, he has also never hid, never denied, defending authoritarian projects. Since he was a federal deputy, he has already made threats to torturers of military dictatorship here in Brazil. He never hid his authoritarian project. But while the president of the republic he was more or less content, let's say, during a period. And from this deepening of the political crisis, the dreams and his authoritarian project began to appear with more force, several street demonstrations began to happen, asking for military intervention, the closing of the National Congress, the closing of the STF, which are things that only happened in the dictatorship here in Brazil. And the president of Bolsonaro participated in these demonstrations, even without wearing a mask, passing this message that this is a flu and that this disease does not need anything from this thing, to wear a mask, to wear a mask, and to ensure the necessary social distancing to contain the coronavirus. Another important element was the announcement of the video of the Ministry of the Interior, that the Brazilian judiciary authorized it. When this video was broadcast, it was also very evident, as not only Bolsonaro, but also his ministers compacted with this authoritarian project of the closing of the democratic regime in the country with a neo-fascist character. It is very important to remark and leave this very explicit. Bolsonaro is a fascist leader in Brazil. And his ministers compacted with this project. This ministerial meeting revealed the will of Bolsonaro and the existence of a base armed in society willing to do anything, to kill, and even the last consequences to defend Bolsonaro as this leader of this legion, regardless of his contradictions, including an interesting element that when this crisis is ending, the Bolsonaro government, as the president, makes a movement to ally with a center at the National Congress with the aim of avoiding the opening of the more than 30 impediments that exist today at home. And when he makes this movement, he is extremely contradictory with his speech, because Bolsonaro in the elections was not going to negotiate, he ended up killing his mother, he ended up taking it from here, and he always denied this process of forming blocks, alliances and so on, in the Congress, to guarantee the interests of the government. So he makes this movement, but even so, the Bolsonaro base is that the base follows the leader, which is another characteristic of this fascist character of Bolsonaro and his Bolsonaro base. So these elements added a new element of opposition, of the opposition movement. So in addition to negation to the pandemic, there is also this element of the defense of democracy. So several governors in the country, the judiciary, the media, started, in addition to the opposition on the left, which historically, and before all that happened, it was already positioning against this government, so for us, the left is not a novelty, we already knew that this was Bolsonaro, but let's say that other sectors that even supported Bolsonaro arrived where he arrived, today look and do not, this cannot be denied, the pandemic cannot be denied, and attack democratic institutions also cannot be denied. So this began to make a movement of opposition wider than the left, Brazilian, began to defend the impeachment and defend the impediment of the Bolsonaro government for two reasons. Without preventing the Bolsonaro government, our people will die, because he denies the pandemic, he throws the people to death, and for another reason, it will not remain democracy in Brazil if Bolsonaro continues as president, this is already very evident. So, before that, many requests were presented, there are already more than 30 impeachment requests, now, if the impeachment request will be accepted, opened, if this process will indeed unfold in the president's impediment, then there are questions that are still in the game, the game is still being played, a Bolsonaro element grew a lot in society, but it has a stable social base, about 30% of support in society, and none of Brazil's presidents have ever been impeached with this base of support. So this is an element. The second element is that he made this alliance with the central, which, from the point of view of the votes, prevents a process of impeachment from being opened today. But the favorable elements are that they have exploded mobilizations of street in Brazil, against fascism and against racism, and this has increased the pressure against the government. There are sectors, governors, media, judiciary, and the Brazilian left with a lot of force in this movement of the president's impediment, and there is a serious social crisis that will be decisive for this process to progress or not. So, I processed a notion here in Brazil, we have a data now from IBGE, that we are in a brand of 10.9 million unemployed, but this data of unemployed considers the people who are without occupation are looking for jobs. It does not consider the data of the people who are not looking for jobs, be it for social isolation, be it because, in the case of women, for example, with the pandemic, with isolation, it has increased many domestic tasks and women have to stay with the children, take care of the house, etc., and they are not looking for jobs. So, either the other element is the people who are already so confused about the lack of jobs in Brazil that they are not looking for this reason. But if we look at the total number of people who are unemployed in Brazil, it reaches 75 million among the people who are looking and among the people who are not looking. This means that 41% of the population is a lot of unemployed people. And these data can cause a social crisis at such a point that makes this 30% of this relationship of forces that have not yet completely turned deeper into the opposition to the government, to the government, combined with these political forces that are already positioned as the Ministry of Justice, as the governors, the left, and part of the National Congress and the media. Now, another important element that we have to consider is that in addition to this 30% state base and this concentrated control line, Bolsonaro also has the support of the Parcelo das Forças Armadas and the support of the military police in the States. So, it is an extremely complex situation in Brazil. It is not a simple game to be played. It is complex, it is difficult. But we are following the effort of consent and dispute of society so that people understand that it is only to prevent from Bolsonaro, that we will have democracy and life in our country. We can preserve the life of millions of Brazilians, whether from the coronavirus, whether from fascism, whether from the racist bullets that are killing black and poor people in the periphery, every day, even inside the house, innocent people, being killed in a very violent way by the military police. So, all of this is in dispute, but what I can say is that from the point of view of the political sectors, many are in favor of impeachment and from the point of view of society, the gap only increases. So, it is possible the impeachment in Brazil and we are pushing the block in this direction to prevent the president. That's all we have time for today. We will be back tomorrow with major news developments from the country. Until then, keep watching NewsClick.