The day the Emergency was imposed on the country and Press censorship became a reality, my colleague at the India Press Agency (IPA) Narendra Sharma refused to do a story. A column that I had been asked to do, ‘Window on Latin America’, was one of the items published that day. After the day’s bulletin was released, we all returned home.

With nothing better to do that evening, two of my friends, Unni, Ravi and I went to Vasant Vihar in South Delhi to watch Sanjeev Kumar-starrer Mili at Priya Cinema. It was a beautiful movie that helped us forget the calamity that had befallen the country, though for less than two and a half hours.

After the show, we walked towards 185, Sector V at RK Puram in Delhi where we stayed. Near our house, a person in civvies stopped us, claimed that he was a Delhi Police officer and wanted to know where we were coming from. We had the cinema tickets with us but we refused to show them to him. He was reeking of liquor. He told us that the Emergency was on and we could be arrested because the Fundamental Rights stood suspended.

We decided to defy him and virtually ran away from there. He could not have followed us, as his legs were not steady. We felt secure only when we closed the door. We waited for the knock for some time before we fell asleep. That is how my Day One of the Emergency period ended.

I received an invitation to attend the first Fr Stan Swamy Memorial Lecture to be delivered by Neera Chandhoke, Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Ethics and Global Politics, on July 5. The invitation said it would be held at the Indian Social Institute at Lodhi Colony. Later, I came to know that the venue was shifted to Yusuf Sadan, near Gol Dak Khana post office.

I wanted to attend the programme, more to express solidarity with Fr Stan Swamy, who gave up his life in the service of the aboriginals whom some call “vanvasis”. I was told there that the police did not allow any commemoration of his death anniversary at a public place. Not even lighting of candles!

The situation during the Emergency was also the same. People were arrested and kept in jail because they were assumed to be a threat to the nation. Newspaper editors sought to protest by keeping the editorial column blank till the government came down heavily on the proprietors who had to prostrate because they ran other businesses also.

In India, large businesses cannot be run without the support of the government. And if there is government support, not even the sky's the limit for businessmen. See the kind of growth Gautam Adani achieved since he gave his helicopter to Narendra Modi to campaign in the 2014 elections. He is now Asia’s richest man!

At the rate at which Adani and Ambani grow, they will soon be richer than the Government of India! During the Emergency, I joined a newspaper owned by one of the kingpins of the Emergency, Vidya Charan Shukla. 

Suddenly, the newspaper began getting advertisements it could not publish for want of space. Construction also began on a multi-storied building at TT Nagar in the heart of Bhopal. For once I realised how government patronage could help a business enterprise!

When Dr Shankar Dayal Sharma, who later became President, lost the Bhopal Lok Sabha seat to Arif Beg of the Janata Party in 1977 like Indira Gandhi lost to Raj Narain at Rae Bareli in Uttar Pradesh, the advertisements dried up and journalists like me had to wait for three-four months to get their salary in installments.

No other event after Independence impacted the nation as the Emergency. I do not include demonetisation and the Covid pandemic in this list. Not even the India-China and India-Pakistan wars. The Emergency, the provisions for which existed in the Constitution, was a misuse of power by Mrs Gandhi. 

No democrat could have approved of it. She was guided by the sole consideration of protecting her turf, weakened by a verdict of the Allahabad High Court, and saved from total collapse by the verdict of the Supreme Court’s vacation judge Justice VR Krishna Iyer.

True, she also faced a political challenge from Jayaprakash Narayan, who was slowly emerging as the conscience-keeper of the nation. It was against this backdrop that she suspended many provisions of the Constitution. Even the courts danced to her tunes. Unlike Mrs Gandhi, Narendra Modi does not face any threats to his regime.

He has even talked about remaining in power for at least 40 years! What baffled me is why he did not say 50 years or 100 years! His “Congress-mukht Bharat” seems to be becoming a reality. Yet, why is it that people like me feel an Emergency-like situation in the country? Would the heavens have fallen if the people were allowed to light candles at a public place in honour of Fr Stan Swamy, a victim of the draconian UAPA.

I found it curious that most newspapers preferred to ignore the arrest of Mohammed Zubair. In the ordinary circumstances, he should have been encouraged and felicitated for doing a signal service to the nation. 

Democracy can thrive only when the media are free. That is why the “Press” is considered the Fourth Estate, after the First Estate which was the King, the Second Estate which was the House of Lords and the Third Estate which was the House of People. In India, we equate the media with the executive, the legislature and the judiciary.

Fake news signifies a threat to the nation. Recently, Rahul Gandhi pardoned the SFI cadres who attacked his office at Wayanad which he represents in Parliament. It was like Gladys Staines who pardoned the killers of her husband and teenaged children. The bite was used by a television journalist to give the impression that Gandhi pardoned the killers of the tailor in Udaipur. It is called fake news.

A few years ago, fake news prompted thousands of people from the Northeast to leave Bengaluru in a hurry. Mohammed Zubair runs a website called Alt News. What it does is to fact-check news and reports and find out the fake from the real. All political parties support fake news when they suit them. Alt News did not make any distinction between fake news favouring one party and fake news favouring another party.

In other words, he was serving a national cause. He and his colleagues were running the website with support from his subscribers. A senior journalist friend told me how he has been contributing small sums to help Zubair and Co. run Alt News. 

Zubair was arrested by the Delhi Police for a humorous tweet dated March 24, 2018. The tweet showed the signboard of a hotel changed from 'Honeymoon Hotel' to 'Hanuman Hotel'. The image is taken from a 1983 comedy film 'Kissi Se Na Kehna’, directed by Hrishikesh Mukherjee. The arrest was made on the complaint of a Twitter user Hanuman Bhakt@balajikijaiin who tagged the Delhi Police in the four-year-old tweet by Zubair.

During the last four years since Zubair tweeted the funny image from a film which was cleared for universal viewing by the Censor Board, nobody’s religious sentiments were hurt. There was never a protest against Zubair. Yet the police swung into action and he was arrested. Someone in Sitapur in UP also filed a complaint against him.

But for the Supreme Court granting Zubair conditional bail on July 8, he would have remained in jail till at least July 14. Yes, telling the truth has always been problematic. That is why it required the innocence of a child to tell the King on his face that he was indeed naked. Comparisons are odious. Yet, one cannot but compare Zubair’s experience with that of Nupur Sharma.

Her comment on the Prophet Mohammed antagonised a whole community. Protests came from several West Asian countries, where tens of thousands of Indians earn their livelihood and from where we import oil without which our vehicles cannot run and the Prime Minister’s state-of-the-art moving palaces cannot fly.

Nothing justifies killing. The killing of a tailor in Udaipur and a chemist in Amravati are condemnable. The fact that they have a link to the blasphemous comment cannot be denied. There are cases registered against her in many states. And when she approached the Supreme Court, the judges who heard the petition, gave her a piece of their mind.

It encouraged some “conscience keepers” of the nation to protest against the judges in question. Yet, the lady has not been arrested till the time of writing. Imagine what her condition would have been if she had a different name.

Justice is supposed to be blind because it does not distinguish the Hindu from the Muslim, the Christian from the Parsi and the Sikh from the Jain and the rich from the poor and the man from the woman. Is that the case now? If you wear a particular colour and threaten genocide, you can get away with it. I feel really sorry to say this.

Zakira Jafri is not an ordinary person. She was the wife of a Congress MP from Gujarat. When the Gujarat riots began, it was to his house that some local people went in the belief that his word would count. The poor MP himself became a victim of hatred. His wife has been moving from pillar to post seeking justice for her husband Ehsan Jafri. 

She made a last-ditch attempt by knocking on the doors of the apex court. The court could have rejected her appeal but in doing so, it quoted a probe finding as if it was Gospel Truth that social activist Teesta Setalvad, former Gujarat DGP RB Sreekumar and former IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt were guilty of spreading canards against those in power.

Within hours of the judgement, Teesta and Sreekumar were arrested. Sanjiv Bhatt was already in jail. I am an educated person but I cannot prepare an affidavit because I should know its format. 

Now, imagine the condition of the riot-hit people in Gujarat. A majority of them were illiterates. Could they be asked to study the IPC, the CrPC and the Indian Constitution to prepare their affidavits? 

If someone like Teesta Setalvad helped them to file petitions and the petitions have identical language, is that a crime? Those in power do not realise that the language of violence and hatred is the same, everywhere. Does it really matter that the language in the petitions is the same when they were victims of mob fury. If someone lost her parents, someone else lost her children. 

They are all people who lost. People like Zakira Jafri, Sreekumar and Sanjiv Bhatt. And the winners are the harvesters of hate. I had once an occasion to speak to Sreekumar on the phone. That was when I visited MR Gopinatha Pillai at his house at Nooranad, near Pandalam. 

He was the father of Praneesh Kumar, alias Javed Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, who was killed along with Ishrat Jahan, a brilliant student of Khalsa College at Mumbai and two youths, whom the Gujarat Police claimed were from Pakistan. He gave me the names of some people who had been helping him in the fight for justice for his son, who converted for love, not hatred.

And one of them was Sreekumar. Pillai, in whose house at Thatta, the first karayogam of the Nair Service Society (NSS) was held in the presence of Mannath Padmanabha Pillai, would have been shocked by the arrest of Sreekumar.

Pillai did not succeed in getting justice for his son. He was taken away from this world when the car in which he was travelling was hit by a truck coming from behind on the National Highway at Vayalar in Alappuzha district. His own death is mysterious in many ways like his son’s! 

All this forces me to raise the question why a political party which is certain to rule the country for the next 40 years should bother so much about one Mohammed Zubair and another Teesta Setalvad? Someone who aspires to be Vishwa Guru should conduct himself better so that the world looks up to India where equality, fraternity and liberty are not just slogans. 

Emergency, declared or undeclared, does not redound to the credit of the largest democracy.

ajphilip@gmail.com