I slept on a cot outside my room in Rama Krishna Puram in New Delhi. As usual, I waited for the newspaper boy to deliver The Patriot and the Indian Express, which I subscribed to, to get up. I could not stay in bed for long as the rays of the sun had started hitting my face.

I woke up and put the cot back in the room. My “landlord,” a Goan who stayed in the adjoining room, told me that an Emergency had been imposed on the country, and all the top Opposition leaders had been arrested.

I did not have a telephone or a radio receiver to check the veracity of what I had heard. I understood that the newspapers were not distributed because of the new development. I did not know what the term Emergency meant, though Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had imposed it during the India-China war in 1962.

Without waiting, I got ready to go to the restaurant for breakfast and from there to the India Press Agency (IPA) office at 14-B Hanuman Lane, New Delhi, where I worked as a full-time correspondent.

As usual, everyone was present at the office, where a sullen atmosphere prevailed. News had just come that press censorship had been introduced and all the reports had to be cleared by the Chief Censor and his subordinates at the Press Information Bureau.

Our political correspondent, Narendra Sharma, refused to do any reporting as a mark of protest against censorship. Our editor, OP Sabharwal, had to bring out the day’s bulletin. He himself wrote a story on atomic energy, which went as the lead story. My colleague K Raveendran’s story on agriculture was the second lead.

My fortnightly column, *Window on Latin America*, was taken as the feature of the day. None of the items had anything to do with politics. The editor himself took the bulletin to the PIB office to have it censored. Our office radio receiver was giving us news of how the Emergency was “welcomed” by people all over the country.

Late in the afternoon, we had a few visitors from the PIB. They wanted OP Sabharwal to write that day’s Spotlight to be broadcast the same evening. He tried to resist the proposal. When he consulted his boss, Nikhil Chakravartti, he was told that he himself could take a decision.

An Ambassador car from the PIB came to fetch every paragraph he wrote. He wrote a little over 1,000 words. That night it was broadcast immediately after the main news bulletin at 9:15 pm. The whole country heard it. I got a call from a relative at Vechoochira in Kerala that he heard my editor’s Spotlight.

The Spotlight was repeated the next morning. Worse, it was translated into all the Indian languages and broadcast by AIR. The Directorate of Audio Visual Publicity (DAVP) printed millions of copies of his Spotlight in English, Hindi, and Urdu and allegedly distributed them all over the country. Actually, they remained in the field offices of the PIB, only to be picked up by waste paper buyers.

The day after, when OP Sabharwal went to the PIB for routine work, he realised that he had become persona non grata with journalists. They all hated him for his piece. He regretted writing the Spotlight, which fetched him a princely sum of Rs 75, which many compared to the 30 silver coins someone got for betraying his master.

The fiftieth anniversary of the declaration of the Emergency has been raked up by the Narendra Modi government to paint the Congress in the darkest hues. I wish Modi had gone back a little more in history to condemn the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, who, he thinks, became famous only when Richard Attenborough made a film on him that won several Oscars.

President Draupadi Murmu termed the Emergency as a “frontal attack” on the Constitution. I wish her advisers had told the President that the provision for internal Emergency was a part of the Indian Constitution. Five years after the imposition of the Emergency, Indira Gandhi apologised to the nation. Let me quote from the report:

“Former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi publicly apologised for all the mistakes and excesses committed during the Emergency and declared that she was taking ‘the entire responsibility for the same.’ Addressing a large public meeting in Yavatmal (Maharashtra), Mrs Gandhi said even if others who were responsible for the mistakes and excesses were not willing to own up, she would own the responsibility for those mistakes as well.”

In contrast, has Modi ever apologised for presiding over the pogrom in Gujarat when he was the chief minister there? All that he has said is that he felt sympathy when a puppy was run over by a fast-moving vehicle. He was the one who stopped the supply of provisions to thousands of Muslims who took shelter in what is now Amit Shah’s constituency.

True, the Allahabad High Court had found Mrs Gandhi guilty of electoral malpractices, as one of her aides was a government employee and government resources were used to build a rostrum in her constituency, Rae Bareli. These are peanuts compared to the colossal misuse of government machinery by Modi for election campaigning.

The Allahabad judge, while unseating her, stayed the operation of the judgment for one month so that she could file an appeal in the Supreme Court. Her case was heard by the Vacation judge, Justice Krishna Iyer, arguably one of the greatest judges of the apex court. His verdict, written in purple prose, was published in full in all the major newspapers of the country. I read it a couple of times.

She did not violate any court order. The right-wing groups led by the Bharatiya Jan Sangh used other stratagems to create civil disorder in the country. In Gujarat, MLAs were forced by mobs to resign. Jayaprakash Narayan gave a call to the police and the Army to defy orders that were illegal. Who could say which order was legal and which one was illegal? It was an incitement for violence.

All this would have resulted in anarchy and civil war, like the one Bangladesh witnessed a few years earlier. Personally, I was against the Emergency, especially press censorship and mass-scale arrests. Nonetheless, there was an undercurrent of support for Mrs Gandhi administering a bitter dose of medicine.

The 1977 election showed a critical divide. The Congress swept the poll in South India, winning about 175 seats, while the newly formed Janata Party had a clean sweep in North India, especially in UP and Bihar. One reason for the Janata Party’s victory was Sanjay Gandhi’s involvement in the Emergency regime. He took the lead in fixing quotas for male and female sterilisations.

Over-zealous officials went about forcibly sterilising men. There were some cases of bachelors having to undergo sterilisation. The propaganda based on this helped the Janata Party score brownie points in the North.

Less than three years later, Mrs Gandhi came back to power with an overwhelming mandate. The wife of the late Sanjay Gandhi, Maneka Gandhi, was elected six times on the BJP ticket. Her son was also a party MP. What’s more, Jagmohan, who danced to the dictates of the “extra-constitutional authority” as the Patriot referred to Sanjay Gandhi, became a hero for the BJP. He created a mess in J&K and was rewarded for it.

As regards the three-letter organisation, it was banned along with a few others. Lawyer and writer AG Noorani, known for his meticulousness, has, in a book, explained how this organisation, which does not believe in democracy and which never honoured the Constitution and the national flag, licked the chappals of Mrs Gandhi in the same way its founders and theologians of Hindutva licked the boots of the British.

The bearded gentleman who shouts about the Emergency the most avoided arrest and spent much of the period in the US, enjoying the hospitality of fellow Gujaratis. One by one, the knicker-wearers gave a written undertaking to the government that they would behave. So much for their courage! To help them, the government gave copies of an undertaking they just had to sign to get the release order.

Of course, there were many who spent the whole 21-month period in jail. The khaki-clad were few and far between among them. They prefer to function from behind the scenes, like when Anna Hazare started an agitation in Delhi.

Allegations were made that Congress and DMK ministers had made tens of thousands of crores of rupees through corrupt means. Hazare found a solution for the problem — set up a Lok Pal. Yes, there is a Lok Pal under Modi which is as good as a paper tiger. As regards the money they amassed, has Modi succeeded in ferreting out even a rupee from those former ministers?

The agitation was able to create suspicion in the minds of the people, which Modi exploited to remove Dr Manmohan Singh from power. Had Arvind Kejriwal not fallen out with the BJP, he would not have been arrested for a petty crime. There is a chief minister in the Northeast who was also accused of corruption, but he is now the ruling party’s blue-eyed boy.

Small wonder that the BJP is nicknamed a washing machine because it can wash clean anyone who joins the party, whatever the crime he committed. True, Mrs Gandhi acted like a dictator but she apologised for it and held elections that allowed the people to punish her. She did not run away like the Lalit Modis and Vijay Mallyas.

On the contrary, she accepted the people’s verdict, sought mercy, and got re-elected. The Emergency lasted just 21 months, not even two years.

This country witnessed an undeclared emergency during the last ten years. Mrs Gandhi got a Time Capsule written and buried deep somewhere near Qutab Minar. Leaders like Arun Shourie claimed that it was to eulogise the Gandhi family. It was unearthed only to find that it contained some historical information about India, which is Bharat.

What has Modi done during the last 10 years? He claimed that India got real independence only in 2014, thereby repudiating the contributions of even party leaders like AB Vajpayee and LK Advani. The President, the Prime Minister, and the Speaker who remember what happened 50 years ago do not remember what happened in Manipur, where it is difficult to see a Christian Church in the Valley area.

One idiot referred to India as Indira and Indira as India. He is still remembered for that blunderous statement. What about Modi? When the Cochin Maharaja signed the Instrument of Accession, he sought only one favour from VP Menon: he wanted a calendar of the Government of India every year. This year, I was given a calendar, but I refused it because every page had multiple images of Modi. In fact, his name has become a byword for megalomania.

The way the G-20 session was held proved beyond a shadow of a doubt how Modi could indulge in wasteful expenditure. His pictures and cut-outs would have appeared normal in a country like North Korea or Romania ruled by the Ceausescus. The death in custody of Stan Swamy and the long incarceration of journalist Siddique Kappen would not have happened in a non-dictatorial regime.

The Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi could have issued an election manifesto titled Gaddafi’s Guarantees. Even he would have refrained from doing so because he never claimed to have a non-biological birth.

Who else could have thought that he revolutionised the country by renaming a road named Janpath and installing what is called Sengol while undermining the Constitution in every possible way? While passing resolutions against the Emergency, why not remove from Parliament’s precincts the portrait of a man who wrote so many clemency letters to the British to escape the cellular prison in Andamans while countless freedom fighters preferred to die there than to be called boot-lickers?

Instead of finding fault with others, let the leaders stick to their task, which is to improve the living conditions of the people so that nobody suffers for want of money and everyone can feel proud of the progress of the nation. Inclusion, not exclusion, should be the nation’s catchword.