 It's June 25th, an important day in India's history, and like every year, we're back at news click to discuss a very disgraceful period of India's history. That's the internal emergency. It was imposed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the year 1975, went up to 1977. A very difficult time for activists, for journalists, for people who wanted to build a better India. Many of them thrown into jail. Many forced to go underground, a lot of censorship, atrocities of all sorts against the poor. And the emergency is now especially relevant because we're talking about what many have called a different kind of emergency, an undeclared emergency perhaps. Many of those tendencies repeating again. Many of those institutions facing similar blows. And to talk more about this, we have with us Prabir Pukhaistha. Prabir, thank you for joining us. We often start these interviews by talking about how those times and these times are similar or what happened. But also, I know that you're writing about it. There's a personal element for you as well. You were detained around that time, I believe, for quite a number of months. But also, could you maybe start by taking us through for people who only read about it. What exactly were those times like as activists, as people who had been involved in protests for many years? Well, you know, of course, you talked about the personal angle to it. Yes, I was arrested, in fact, with other students asking Menaka Gandhi not to attend her class. And the consequence was that you had within an hour or so, the DIG range at the time, P.S. Binder, who came there, and literally abducted me from the campus. And that, of course, did become an issue in Shah Commission as well. And one of the things that Shah Commission had said is something which they should proceed against as an atrocity during the emergency. But that's a very small part of it. And to be honest, my health improved during the emergency because I never had such regular hours and regular food. And of course, you had nothing else to do except read and exercise. So both these things were good for me in that sense. So of course, at that stage, you didn't know. The indeterminacy was that when will the people get out? Because emergency did not specify a period in which people would be in jail. So it could continue for any length of time. And a lot of people were thinking that emergency would not be lifted and therefore, this would continue for a long, long time. And of course, Mrs. Gandhi did lift the emergency. In fact, declared elections, one selection were actually announced. The detainees had all been released by the time, if not within a week or so. And of course, the electoral process started. And almost all the various draconian measures which were being taken, though there were still existed of the books, had actually been in the last few months before the elections. Yeah, it started with December itself. This process had started by January when the elections are announced. This was quite, you know, there was a normalcy that took place. Now, I think the important part about the emergency was that what did the people do? That is, I think, the important question. And in this, of course, what did the activists do? What were their sense of what the struggle was all about? Let us face it. People did not know how long the emergency would last. There was a total uncertainty about it. And they also did not know how to react to a situation of emergency where the normal discourse, the political discourse was not there anymore. You could not approach the press to print what you were doing. You could not do protests in public without getting arrested, put under at least the defense of India rules, if nothing else. Three months is a minimum, if not longer. So all the normal processes had disappeared for all practical purposes. But, you know, the issue again was that if you look at the emergency then, though we had the Sanjay Gandhi-Goon squads which were becoming more and more active, we had the vasectomy drive, the family planning, which is a Sanjay Gandhi five point program loved by of course, a number of the rich, the wealthy sections, middle class who thought the poor be too much. This is something which the Americans had been propagating across the world. So all of this was also there. But at the end of it, the major part of it is that if you did not resist, in some form or the other, then as an activist, you felt depressed, demoralized, and that was also true for a number of people. They actually got, if you don't fight, you lose hope. If you lose hope, that is a political activist. You are either depressed or you become cynical. So this is also a process which took place for a number of people. Particularly those who are either arrested and therefore didn't know for how long they would be in jail. And for those who then had to make a choice, do they take risks, go to jail, risk of going to jail? Or do they then say, okay, I will then remain quiet and be cynical. And say, the people are bad, the state is bad, but the people are bad, they're not doing anything and so on. So I think those are the challenges we faced. Interestingly, those are the challenges we face today as well. So the challenges of today are also that, do you fight, do you give up? If you give up, what happens to you? As a human being, as a person, as an activist, whatever you want to call yourself. If you don't, then what are the repercussions? Of course, the repercussions are there for people like Siddiq Kappan, for people like Gotham, who was one of our colleagues. The repercussions are there that they are under draconian sections of law. They may get some relief from the court, but nevertheless, it is sparing. And it has really been available to very few people. A number, still languishing under various charges. And it's a continuous repressive regime that goes on different cases, different kinds of instruments being used. The old one of income tax, to the new one of enforcement directorate. Of course, the UPI is very much a part of this. So this refashioned draconian laws are also there. And very much confronting different sections of the people. The media in some ways, and also those who are willing to protest. And therefore, also seen to be people who are undesirable. And therefore, the government would like to take action against them. What action to take, how much to take, what should be, what is calibrated, what is not. These are all open questions. But there's no question that we have, I'm not going to say declared, undeclared emergency, I'll just say a different form of emergency. And these two forms of emergencies have the different dynamics. And different trajectory, that is something we still need to think about. What were the differences? What are the trajectories? And what are the similarities? Well, one of the unfortunate things about the emergency was actually how all those institutions that we were very proud of, we became a democracy in 1947. We built all these institutions. But when the time for the emergency happened and it is declared, suddenly it seemed like all those institutions were just crumbling, falling like nine pins, as they say. And at that point, and today, again, many activists, many journalists, many observers have raised very similar concerns that it does seem like all those much hallowed institutions are very hollow inside. So at that point, how did people like you, activists, people who are working in these sectors, how did you sort of respond to this crisis that basically, like you said, the press was censored, habeas corpus had been suspended, which means a key element of the legal system was under attack. The police, of course, were completely out of control. Laws like MISA were in place, which allowed almost anything. And the government at some level, and there was no mass uprising, which was what you would often in fiction, it seems like this is bad government and there's a mass uprising. So at that point, what was sort of response to that? Well, two parts to your question. One is what's the response of the people and what's the response of losing all those instruments which you take for granted. You know, I must I must tell you one thing about this, that I had only three months outside before I was arrested. So in some sense, I was in a place, but it was complete freedom of speech. We were in jail. OK, so I think those people who are outside, they are the ones who really had to fight that every day issue. How much do you speak? What do we do? How do you propagate our views? How do you take action in limited ways and so on? So I will say that the challenge that people faced for us, the challenge is already over. We are safely behind bars. OK, but for the rest of the people, the challenge was very much there. And I think there is always a kind of celebrating those who are in jail as the victor, as the ones who fought the emergency, but not those people who had to fight every day during emergency. I had to take an every day decision. How much will they do? What they will wear them? How far will they go? So I think that's an important element of it. Secondly, I would say that the people did throughout the emergency because if Mrs. Gandhi had won the election, then she hadn't lifted the emergency till the day she lost. So maybe she would have said, OK, all the measures I've taken have been already accepted by the people. They voted to be back to power. That means they endorse it. Therefore, this new normalcy is OK. There is also the maligned presence at that time of Sanjay Gandhi who led the Goon Squad within the Congress. And he was he had at least been able to get allies within the Congress in both Haryana, UP, Chief Ministers, more in the Northern other places to try his favorite instrument that he thought would help the country, according to him, Pasik to be. And that, of course, did lead to a huge impact on the North India, at least. South, it doesn't seem to have been used in the same way. So the Southern ministers, Chief Ministers, were a little more conscious about what to do and what not to do. Not it was widespread and it affected middle class employees, school teachers and everyone of them had caught us to produce. And in fact, it set back the India's family planning program by huge margin because what happened is even today men's vasectomies for family planning is very low. It's only the women who are actually getting operations done to stop from the reproduction. And the men have sort of abdicated their responsibilities for family planning. It was a reaction to the emergency and the vasectomy drive, which is Sanjay Gandhi's drive. So if we look at all of that, the ultimately it is the people who did react and it is they who voted Mrs. Gandhi out. I still remember when we came out of jail, the conversation was within the political circuit that we should boycott the election because if we participate, Mrs. Gandhi will win and this will therefore validate the emergency. Therefore, we should boycott. They had no idea about what the temperature of the people was. And as they hesitantly moved towards the people going and organising meetings, they found that there's an enormous response that was there. And very soon, within two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, it's clear that there was a ground sale opinion against Mrs. Gandhi. We still didn't expect the kind of results that at least that took place, I think, from West Bengal, right up to at least half of Maharashtra. So this is really, again, the people did come out. On the institutions, you know, the institutions, yes. The judiciary voted four to one on suspension of the habeas corpus. That is the famous Adyam Jabalpur judgment, which recently was officially said was a wrong judgment. But the point is that it was the bureaucracy, the judiciary, but it was also the middle class who thought that the emergency would be something which would make them more powerful. And this riffraff, the poor, you know, they would be disciplined. You know, that's the famous phrase, the middle class love, the disciplining of the nation. So that would be helpful. They didn't realize that anybody with a word in uniform, anybody with a government position held power over him. And as Niren, they put it succinctly, during his argument on the habeas corpus petition, it was that early general, that even if a police constable shoots anybody, there is no regress under emergency because all your rights, fundamental rights are there, but they're not just the same. So this is the position. And then they suddenly realized there are the mercy of the anybody in the government who can ask them to do anything and they have no recourse. This was what was very, I remember very succinct, again, very well put by a person, a villager. He said, you know, during emergency, the habildar wo hamara pradhan usse zyada taakhat rakhta tha, pehle wo pradhan ke paasata tha, he would come to the pradhan and, you know, really take advice from him. Now, wo joh hai, an order deta hai pradhan ko. Ye hamse badash nahi hota. This is, so the fundamental level of the what the people realized, the power of the vote, the power of democracy, the power that they have, at least to be heard, if the unite, those things, they understood the absence of it. So the Indian middle class was, the shock was that they were also a party to this repression. They thought they would be lauding it over the others. So, you know, every generation of middle class, I think has to go through this lesson that you are not, as you think, part of the one who lauded it over others. If you give the state these powers, then anybody who identifies with the state can do this. And today you have the, you know, this, so the Goon Brigade, which you see in the name of Gaurakshya, they can do pretty much anything that they want. All love Jihad for that matter. All love Jihad for that matter. So all of this shows that arming the state in a way that they can arm anybody they want to exercise power over others is the danger that the democracy always will incur if you have an authoritarian bent in the government. What is different in this emergency from that emergency is the formal powers are there, but there is an erosion of the constitutional values that it enshrined. It's also important when you see Mr. Modi goes to the United States, he says that what we wrote in the constitution is something which is the democracy. Democracy is in our blood. It is in our genetic material, so to say. And this has only been clothed in the words of the constitution and therefore what in fact what they had denied in 47, 47 to 50 period when the constitution was being written, they had denied that India should have a constitution of this kind. It's about the RSS and RSS, RSS essentially. And they had at that time said that our constitution we should be based on Hindu values. Manusmriti should be the basis of our constitution. This constitution that Ambedkar is drafting, Nehru is pushing. These are basically borrowed from the West and they don't conform to our values. But Modi and this is what differentiates this version of the BJP from the earlier version of the BJP is that they believe that you don't have to change the constitution. You don't have to say we need a new constitution, but you can make tweaks here and there, remove the protection, introduce certain things within the so-called parameters of the constitution and therefore defeat the purpose of the constitution itself. So you can see a whole bunch of laws coming in, NRC being one identity, it apparently is only to say start identify certain problems and therefore citizenship. But we know what it means. It is to disenfranchise certain sections because proving that you are born in India and you have a birth certificate and all this can be verified. We have seen in North East what's happened is a consequence of this in Assam. So all these are essentially instruments that can be used to disenfranchise people. And then you have a whole list of other things, what you can eat, all those things that are coming in, in the name of protection of the cow. Love Jihad as you had said, essentially that anti-conversion, but in the process really attacking other organized religion of different varieties is being attacked in this. So all of this is interesting that the emergency which was formally declared and suspended certain rights, how you can have an encroachment of the same rights, but done in a different way by tweaking the constitution, that is currently, that is the project currently, they have realized that asking the constitution to be thrown out and the new constitution, that's not going to work. So therefore, how to make this change happen, that's a new project and let's face it, Modi has articulated this very clearly. It is answered to a press conference question. That was his 10, 12 minute answer that he gave over there. It's interesting, he's never held a press conference in India. And of course that is probably also why there's so much focus on controlling the media, on running it in a particular way. The IT cell, the focus on propaganda, all of that serves that purpose. Thank you so much Praveer for talking to us. You know, this has almost become some kind of an annual ritual as far as news click is concerned. I believe we will keep doing this and what hopefully circumstances also change in this context. Thank you so much. And that's all we have time for today. We have produced a number of other videos on the emergency as well, both this year and in the previous years, which talk about the concentration of power, the attack on institutions, the attack on media, how activists were forced to go to jail and the economic aspect of it, how the poor suffered and the rich kept getting richer. So do watch these videos and read these articles as well and also visit our website newsclick.in and follow us on all our social media accounts.