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Well, yes and no. All that I just said is true, but it's not the whole truth.
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Indira Gandhi was a monster, her son Sanjay even more so.
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But the most monstrous thing about the emergency was that our constitution and our laws allowed for it.
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Our constitution did not give fundamental rights or protection they deserved.
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And our founding fathers, from Nehru to Siddharth Patel to Ambedkar, all felt that the Indian state needed to have precisely the kind of draconian powers that Indira later used to her own advantage.
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And it isn't only the constitution that was flawed.
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Our lawmakers consistently treated us as if we were subjects, not citizens.
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In a manner of speaking, the emergency was no aberration, it was inevitable.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral science.
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Please welcome your host, Amit Padma.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
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My guest today is a historian, Gyan Prakash, a professor of history at Princeton University, whose new book is called Emergency Chronicles, Indira Gandhi and Democracy's Turning Point.
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When I picked it up, I assumed it would be a blow-by-blow account of the emergency, much like Kumi Kapoor's book on the emergency a couple of years ago.
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But Emergency Chronicles is like a forensic undertaking.
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It peels back layer after layer of the root causes of the emergency, going all the way back to when some of our founding fathers sat together to frame a constitution that would keep the country together.
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At a time, the country was wracked by violence.
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I chatted with Gyan on the sidelines of the Times Literary Festival in Mumbai recently, but before I cut to our conversation, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Gyan, welcome to the scene. Thank you. Thank you.
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Gyan, when I picked up a copy of your book, Emergency Chronicles, at first I thought that it's going to be sort of a narrative of what happened during the emergency, much like Kumi Kapoor's excellent book a couple of years ago.
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But reading it, I was delighted and surprised to find that it's a lot more than that. It actually goes much deeper into all the structural causes of why the emergency was, you know, not an aberration, but almost inevitable in some senses.
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And a key part of your story really happens during the framing of the Indian constitution, when there is a lot of turmoil on the streets and you have the framers who are framing the constitution in the context of the turmoil outside.
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Yeah, you know, the background for that is that I came to think about writing about the emergency when I was in Delhi in 2011 in August, there was a rally for Anna Hazare in Ramli Lamaidan, and I happened to go there.
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And so I thought, you know, I'll go and see what's going on. And, you know, the place was kind of swarming with young people and young people of a different kind, you know, what people call the aspirational class, you know, first generation, educated people who wanted jobs and opportunities.
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And they were there with a great deal of kind of optimism and hope. And what struck me was first, the predominance of the young people. And the second was a kind of an anti politics air that, you know, all politicians are crooked, and we need some kind of transparency and escape from this.
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And that reminded me then of the JP movement. And I said, you know, I've seen this before. And there was this kind of, you know, populist sentiment, which was everywhere.
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And then I thought of many of the things that were happening in the world around that time, you know, Tarir Square, Occupy. Now, each one has its own particular, you know, context.
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But what was common to all of them was again, this kind of anti political sentiment. So I began to think of the emergency. And I said to myself that, you know, I knew the kind of literature that had come from the journalists and politicians, but they had sequestered the whole thing into 21 months.
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And the story was very clear. So you have, you know, Indira Gandhi as the kind of prime culprit. And, and she is, you know, painted as a person who just wants power.
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And on the other side, you have the saintly, frail JP, you know, figure of innocence and transparency. So corrupt and so on.
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I didn't think that, you know, story was altogether untrue. But it was so simplified that I thought I have to kind of look into its history. So that's when I began digging.
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And, you know, the first thing that occurred to me was that, you know, emergency was not illegal. It was in the Constitution. And then many of the laws that were used, like preventive detention, DIR, MISA, all these laws, they were on the books that the parliament had passed.
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So to me, it seemed like, you know, Indira Gandhi didn't drop from the sky and, but emerged in the context of Indian history. So it seemed very logical to go back and, you know, look at the, you know, framing of the Constitution.
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You know, just to quote directly from your book, start quote, resistance, riots and violence only strengthened the resolve to bring a strong centralized state. They helped invoke a Hobbesian state of nature, which has typically served to justify the founding of a state as an inaugural act of extracting unity out of chaos.
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Stop quote. And you kind of write about how there was so much violence erupting in so many places that different founding fathers of the Indian Republic, like Patel, like Ambedkar, spoke for, quote unquote, a strong center where you need to hold it together.
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And there might have been a vision earlier, like you talk about Nehru's post-national idea of India, which never came to be. And you talk earlier about how there might have been the possibility of a very federal sort of system where the states have a lot more power.
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But because of all this violence erupting and the immediate imperative to keep India as a strong union, the framers of our Constitution ended up giving the state an enormous amount.
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Yeah. You know, when I went back to the framing of the Constitution, so I read in one of the places that when the members of the constituent assembly met in Delhi, they had to get curfew passes.
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So there was something really bizarre about this, that here these people are meeting in the constituent assembly and they're talking about something very kind of rational, like law, and just outside the city, the city is torn.
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So I thought that, you know, I have to do some more research into really what the post-war turmoil looked like. And in fact, that's when another colleague of mine and a student of mine, we did a kind of a conference in Princeton on the post-colonial moment in South and Southeast Asia, where we looked at across South and Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Burma, India, Pakistan.
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What was the context like? And it seemed like the more I read, and if you also bring Europe into the picture, that across the world, World War II had a very, very deep impact, not just in terms of killing, but in terms of the deep penetration of the state into society.
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So when you are recruiting on that kind of scale to fight a war, when you're mobilizing resources on that scale for a war, that really means that society is now much more involved in the affairs of the state.
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And so in India too, the state capacity during the war changes enormously, becomes a much more important entity.
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So I was reading about this and then realized from my reading that after Second World War, when people come out on the street, there are two things going on.
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One is after 200 years of, you know, British rule, they have a great deal of aspiration, what freedom would bring.
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And at the same time, they are very conflicting ideas of what that freedom might mean, you know, and the formation of Pakistan is part of that picture.
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So in that turmoil, there are so many disparate passions and, you know, conflicts that are in play.
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And so the lawmakers are writing the constitution against that background.
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And so the unity of the country is, of course, uppermost in mind, but they're also very aware that people want some dramatic change and that the state must become an instrument of that change.
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So, you know, people, political theorists talk about two different models of constitution.
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The American model in the 18th century was governed by the fact that, you know, the American leaders distrusted political power and they thought political power leads to corruption.
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And therefore, they devised a system that was much more federal, full of checks and balances and so on.
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And then you have the French model, where you have revolution, you have coming of the state, and the intent is to destroy the aristocracy and bring about change.
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And most of the postcolonial countries went for the French model, as did India.
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And in writing a constitution, they wanted not only a state that would maintain unity, but also that would be an instrument of social change. And certainly Ambedkar was very committed to the idea because he didn't have any faith, understandably so, in the capacity of society to generate any kind of radical social change.
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And so for him, it was important that there would be a state governed by law, which would be an instrument of that social change.
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And so that's how we ended up with a very strong centralized state. I mean, in name, they use the term federal, but it's not really a federal system.
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And I think you can see the effect of that in what's going on now because the state has so much power that you don't even have to formally declare emergency anymore.
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You can have a silent, creeping emergency.
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One of the terms that kept recurring through your book and was very resonant was passive revolution, where you talk about how, you know, at independence, we had political transformation. But, you know, and Ambedkar would probably lament this if he was, if he could see this, no social transformation at all.
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It was almost as if the government is disconnected from the people.
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Yeah. I mean, the whole idea of passive revolution is a political revolution without social revolution. And so it's a revolution at the top.
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And the idea is that the people at the top would then enact social changes. So the agency remains with the elites.
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And Ambedkar has that, you know, famous line in 1949 where he says, we have established political equality, but not social equality. And if this continues, you know, one day, the whole thing will blow up.
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So, and I think, you know, people like Nehru who were committed to social change, but still thought that that would come about through the action of the leaders, that we would pass laws, land reforms, all of these things that we would do.
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But Indian democracy put a very high premium on the ability of the leadership to maintain that kind of high ground and long term outlook.
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And that is why I think one of the problems of Indian democracy is that, you know, what if, as it happened, the leadership doesn't measure up to the expectation and instead of thinking of democracy as a way to institute equality, if they think of democracy as just a game of power,
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then you have shrunk the vision of democracy and then politics becomes just a game of power. And, you know, so I think that was one of the consequences of this passive revolution.
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In fact, it's been said that the rules and institutions that you design should be designed keeping in mind the need to keep a check on the ruler. So it doesn't matter how bad the person in power is, you could have a mad megalomaniac in power, but the rules and institutions should be strong enough to keep them in check.
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And instead what we have, as you pointed out, is partly because of the imperatives of the turmoil that was outside. You almost had the new Indian government taking inspiration from their colonial overlords.
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And even the Government of India Act in 1935 was really framed by the colonial powers to keep their subjects in check. And that's very much the spirit that pervaded our constitution makers.
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In fact, you have a sentence here, quote, the elite was compelled to rule with a heavy degree of coercion. Stop quote. And you had Somnath Lahiri, in fact, saying eloquently that many of these fundamental rights have been framed from the point of view of a police constable.
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Yes, a great line. It's a fantastic line. It's a great line. And, you know, and there's also, I mean, I have also a quotation from Ambedkar, where Ambedkar, so there was criticism of the fact that the draft constitution had imported 80% of Government of India Act.
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And Ambedkar says, I make no apology for the fact that we have imported a large portion of Government of India Act because he thought, you know, those things were necessary.
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And of course, in importing that 80%, you imported all the kind of police powers and surveillance powers that the colonial government wanted. And so the Indian state, as it emerges, it emerges with powers that are not very different from the colonial state.
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I mean, there is one scholar, Sandipto Dasgupta, who's written a very interesting article where he talks about the two sides of Indian constitution making.
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So it would be untrue to say that nothing changed, you know.
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So the communists in 1947 said, yeh Azadi Jyoti hai and it was a hoax. And so that's not true because something does change. And the mandate is for citizenship, you know, that was a huge thing compared to colonial rule, giving adult suffrage to everyone.
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And in a way, it's also a radical step when you compare it to, you know, the writings of great liberal thinkers like John Stuart Mill and so on, who believe that citizenship depended on education.
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And here we were giving citizenship to a mass of illiterate people. So it was a huge radical step.
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But at the same time, Dasgupta speaks about the administrative state. And as far as the administrative state was concerned, where, you know, police powers and all those things are involved, the Indian state kind of remained unchanged from the colonial state.
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And the reason behind that, the power of the administrative state has to go back to, I mean, the way in which the British saw India and they saw themselves as an island in an ocean of kind of alien people.
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And they felt that in order to rule such a population, they would need extraordinary power. So it goes back to actually 1818 and you can see that in Roller Act and DIR and all those rules that they had formed.
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And the Indian state, because they were elites, they also saw themselves as being surrounded by an ocean of illiterate masses for whom they saw being responsible for their well-being and for their transformation.
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But still that vast gulf remained and that then explained their preference for these administrative powers.
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So would you say that there's a kind of a paradox here that on the one hand, we've gained freedom and you want all the people of India to be a free people.
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But on the other hand, this view of sort of the elites looking at the ocean of chaos around them is also somewhat paternalistic.
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The same kind of like the civilizing impulse that Macaulay talked about, for example, that these are people and we have to and what ends up happening there therefore is through the Constitution and through the way they rule,
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the elites end up imposing a system of values that is imposed from top down and may not really be endorsed by society at large.
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And that's therefore, in some senses, a kind of liberal paradox where you may try to impose liberal values, but the imposition itself is illiberal.
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Yeah, I mean, because the elites have a belief in the universality of their views.
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And there's a very interesting moment in Nehru's discovery of India when he's going around the village and the peasants are saying Bharat Mata Ki Jai.
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And Nehru talks about this and he says, you know, I didn't understand what did they mean Bharat Mata Ki Jai.
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Do you mean this soil? So he actually goes.
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I mean, you know, Nehru is very interesting that he's also very self aware of his distance from the mass of the people.
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And but he's self reflexive and he's willing to talk about it.
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So it's a very telling exchange where he explains, do you mean Bharat Mata lives on this soil, this piece of land, that piece of land?
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And he says, now he's reflecting, he says, well, it was kind of a wrong question and that in their minds Bharat Mata was kind of a metaphorical thing.
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And when they said, you know, this particular soil is Bharat Mata, they didn't literally mean it.
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So what you see going on over here is a person who is encountering a subaltern culture that he doesn't quite understand, but then he still has to rationalize it.
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So in the end, the distance is kind of stitched up by his rationalization by saying, OK, yes, they have a different culture.
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It's not mine, but it makes sense in terms of how I think.
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So now Nehru is, you could say, you know, the most farsighted of those liberal leaders, but still he's part of the elite.
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And in that encounter, you can see how the elite then takes on the kind of responsibility of working on behalf of the people who think in terms of Bharat Mata Ki Jai.
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And they think that this particular land is where Bharat Mata lives. But, you know, they are uneducated and they think that way.
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But I understand what they really mean. So therefore I can act on their behalf.
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So there is a kind of an appropriation of what the people think and a claim to represent them.
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Now, that's the most kind of a generous way you can think of this liberal elite. But in policy terms, then what ensues is that they would undertake various measures.
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And even if they didn't succeed, so, for example, land reform, you do half hearted land reform.
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And when even land reform doesn't quite go to the extent that it should have in your own terms, you can then rationalize it and say,
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well, given the, you know, political matrix, this is all we can accomplish at this time.
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But you've taken the responsibility of even determining that.
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So the whole agency in history then is appropriated by the elite.
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And that condescension even plays out in ways which actually peak during the emergency.
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For example, the family planning and the Naspandis and all that where you're making these life changing decisions on behalf of the poor who you don't really give a damn about.
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And it's interesting that even when the Constitution was being framed, there were voices of dissent.
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For example, Tajmul Hassan argued against the ability to suspend fundamental rights.
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And H.V. Kamath, in fact, invoked the Weimar Constitution in the rise of Hitler and said that no, we should not have similar provisions here.
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This was, of course, not Godwin's law because this was in the late 1940s is fresh in their minds.
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Yeah. I mean, one of the things in reading the constituent assembly debates, I must say it was I was very impressed by the erudition knowledge and deep concern of its members.
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And and also this kind of warning signs that they uttered at that time.
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So, yes, there were people who were aware that this could lead to something.
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And I think that's where the liberal elites believe that all this is necessary in a country like India with its vast mass of poverty and illiteracy.
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It places a certain demand on the elite to take responsibility and also an expectation that it will remain so that the country's leadership will be always guided by these kind of higher goals and more noble ideals of liberal leadership of the population.
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Now, if it had somehow happened that the liberal leadership was not torn by various kinds of caste and class and regional and linguistic conflicts and had maintained that idea, maybe things would have been different.
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But, you know, no law, no constitution is separate from society and politics. And so we can see down the line that belief and that expectation that this democracy would work or even if it's liberal led and elite led because we would maintain this kind of a higher ideal.
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It becomes a kind of a small minded, you know, politics by the time you get to, I would say, particularly after Nehru's death.
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But it's visible even before politics gets smaller and smaller and the gap between the rhetoric and reality becomes wider and wider.
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And, you know, you do a great job of sort of juxtaposing the violence outside parliament in this ocean of turmoil that was around them and that island of calm inside where the framers are deliberating how exactly to frame the constitution and therefore in their eyes it makes sense to have a strong centre.
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But I am just wondering that even despite this context, isn't there a sort of a will to power which makes a state try to increase its strength and its power at all times.
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For example, you know, you've mentioned that in 1950 the parliament as it then was passed the Preventive Detention Act and it was supposed to expire on April 1, 1951, which you call a cruel April Fool joke.
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But year after year this was renewed all the way till it became MISA in 1971.
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And equally there's, you know, one of my economist friends who's been on the show Shruti Raj Gopal and she'd done a presentation which I'll link from the page for this podcast, which is on YouTube, where she sort of traced out all the changes in the constitution since Nehru's times.
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And people often have the impression that, oh, the real changes in the constitution happened when Indira came to power. But the fact is that right from when Nehru took power, every time he felt it expedient to change the constitution, if it got in the way, he would simply amend the constitution.
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And it was in fact joked about that the constitution is not a book but a periodical.
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And therefore what we see the tendency over the last 71 years of our existence has been that the state is trying to always strongly centralize and increase its power in any case, which we've even seen recently and throughout these 71 years.
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Yeah. You know, the expectation that, for example, Ambedkar had that if you frame a constitution which gives state these extraordinary powers, but hem it with various kinds of rules and regulation, somehow the state will not overreach.
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That was the kind of expectation. And that is why I think India has the longest constitution in the world, because somehow Ambedkar believed that if you had enough rules and regulations, you know, things would work.
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But of course, you know, that constitution operates in a real environment with real politics and real politicians who have real interests and are grown by all sorts of different, you know, passions and interests.
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And so in practice, what happens is all those provisions which are expected to constrain you do not constrain you because the state is constantly, you know, gearing towards acquiring more and more power and exercising more and more power.
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And, you know, the temptation is something that no politician is able to resist. So even during, I mean, I know I find it ironic that, you know, one of the last things that the Charan Singh government does.
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Now, here is Charan Singh, who was put in jail by Indira Gandhi. And what does he do? One of the last things he does is to pass an ordinance reestablishing preventive detention.
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So, you know, one would have thought that for sheer political reasons, he would not do it. But I think once they are in the state, the temptation to exercise state power and expand state power is so great that very few politicians can resist it.
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And it's not a moral failing as such, you know, it's in a way systematic in the way our constitution has been framed and how it exists in our society.
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And the nature of politics in the sense that if the like I consider politics to be something that is morally corrosive to survive in it, you have to make the kind of compromises and do the kind of things which that ensure that you have no principles at all.
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So it's almost unfair to expect a politician who has got gotten to the top to actually be principled. He will, you know, he's got there because of the lust for power and the drive for power and they'll do whatever.
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And it's interesting that you point out how, you know, Charan Singh, when he came to power, renewed the Preventive Detention Act. I had written a column two or three years ago comparing Modi to Indira Gandhi.
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And one of the things I mused about was how Modi and Jaitley themselves had actually experienced the emergency in different ways.
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And the assumption of this was that when they come to power, they'll sort of understand how dangerous the power of the state can be.
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And instead, it seems as if their mindset was that it doesn't matter who's in charge, even if they've suffered earlier from the, you know, even if they've been victims of state power, once they are in power, they're just going to expand the power of the state.
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Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, in the run up to the emergency, it's the Allahabad Court judgment that turns what was essentially a political conflict into a constitutional crisis.
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And that then makes then opposition leaders like, you know, Vajpayee, Advani, Jaitley, Modi and so on, into great advocates of liberal democracy.
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They didn't start out like that. They start out as Indira Hatao. That was the limited goal.
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But because of the emergency, they were suddenly turned into great advocates of liberal democracy. And that wasn't going to last. So the moment they had achieved their purpose of, you know, Indira Hatao, then, you know, liberal democracy went out of window.
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Then, you know, it was back to more truncated version of what democracy means.
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On that extremely depressing note, we'll take a commercial break. We'll be back in a minute.
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Speaking of Puliyabazi, they were also featured in the Scroll magazine article talking about how English-speaking urbanites are interested in listening to content in Hindi languages.
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Check out the article on our Instagram highlights section.
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On IVM Likes, Comedian Supriya Jo, she joins the IVM gang to talk about pop culture they consume in non-English languages.
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Last week, we launched a brand new Hindi podcast called Cinemaya. It's hosted by Swati Bakshi and our first guest is Nandita Das.
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She discusses her journey as a woman filmmaker in a male-dominated industry. And with that, let's continue on with your show.
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Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen. I'm chatting with Gyan Prakash, author of Emergency Chronicles.
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Gyan, so before the break, we spoke about how, sort of, because of the imperatives of the violence around them, the Constituent Assembly framed a constitution that centralized state power
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and that had the means embedded within it to, you know, suspend fundamental rights that had,
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you know, and the parliament later came up with the Preventive Retention Act, which kept getting renewed all the way to Indira Gandhi.
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And that is, sort of, the political, structural context of this.
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There's also a social context, and, you know, which you bring out very evocatively when you talk about, for example, all the students' movements through the 50s and the 60s.
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And there is this classic, sort of, hypocrisy that I find among the elites who ran our country,
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is that while they themselves, when they were fighting against the British, they would all be for people rising up and so on.
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But the moment they were the state, they frowned upon it.
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In fact, you've quoted Ambedkar in your book talking about how, you know, we used to use all of these methods of protest because we had to.
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But now that there is a constitution and there's a constitutional republic, they are no longer valid.
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In fact, he called a lot of these protests starting from, say, the 1955 Patna thing.
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He was speaking before this, but he referred to it as the grammar of anarchy.
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And can you just, sort of, give me a backdrop of how over the years, you know, there were students' protests, there was a jobs crisis,
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all of these things, much the same as they are today, in fact, and how that kind of set the scene for the 70s?
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Yeah, you know, many times when people look back to the early 50s and the early 60s,
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they look at it kind of nostalgically, thinking that it was a time of consensus.
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In fact, right from the time of independence, various kinds of, you know, discontents and dissatisfactions and movements and uprisings, they continue right through Nehru's death.
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They don't acquire the kind of scale that they do subsequently, but it's always there.
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But the fundamental problem is that the elites never saw the ordinary people as political subjects in their own right.
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And that is why the only conception that someone like Nehru has of Indians after 1947.
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So what would be our, let's say, political agency? How would we be politically active?
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Well, you should participate in the national effort towards development.
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So the state sets up, for example, let's say, you know, five-year plan.
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And in fact, one of my students has written on this.
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There was a concerted attempt to involve the population in making planning a part of kind of public consciousness.
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So the entire population should join in a kind of a national effort for, you know, grow more food, more planning and achieving all the kind of planning objectives.
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So even the activity that they imagined for the ordinary population was in fact mandated from above.
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They just couldn't think of any kind of agency that would emerge from below on their own.
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So that is why during, you know, the colonial rule, they could understand, you know,
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peasants and workers and students coming out on the streets against the British and they could be political subjects.
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But once we have independence, it's almost as if the need for political subjectivity disappears.
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And all they can now do is participate in the national effort, which is, of course, defined from above.
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And so, you know, there is that moment in 1955 when Nehru goes to Patna and students are rioting and he addresses a meeting and he gets very angry.
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And he has this kind of bolster, Masnad, and he throws into the crowd and says, this is not politics.
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This is not politics. This is gundaism, because any kind of agency that did not contribute to national effort for him was not real political agency.
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And the irony is mind blowing because the British could have said the same thing to Gandhi and him.
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And the picture you paint of what's happening in the 50s is sounded, you know, I often forget being middle aged myself,
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that 60% of India is born after liberalisation, after 91. And a lot of the history behind them is sort of something for the books.
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But, you know, if you actually think about it, there are so many parallels of those times with current times,
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like when you were speaking about the India Against Corruption movement of 2011.
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And there are so many parallels with what was happening earlier in the 1960s.
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For example, there was a jobs crisis and we're going to have a far bigger jobs crisis now.
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It's already happening. There are these youth agitations.
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There are these different movements popping up which have different responses to the different crisis.
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For example, you know, Thackeray's populist movement, you know, starts in the late 60s,
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where he's like Bombay is for Bombayites and Bombay is for Maharashtrians.
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And, you know, and at that time, of course, his ire is against the South Indians.
#
But later through the decades, it, you know, finds various different targets.
#
And that's almost an exact analogue of what is happening at a sort of a national scale today.
#
And you have those, that same kind of ferment is taking place through all the student politics of the 60s and so on.
#
And you also talk of how parallelly at the same time, as a party, the Congress is disintegrating
#
and the system is also suffering, even as the administrative structure becomes bigger
#
and, you know, gets into almost a kind of sclerotic mode.
#
You have the Congress party going through its own sort of turmoil and all these different strands leading to 1975.
#
Yeah. And, you know, when I was looking at the politics in the 60s,
#
one thing I was struck by was that, you know, most accounts of emergency,
#
which even look at, you know, the JP movement, imagine it to be a completely uniquely Indian phenomenon.
#
So I wanted to expand the canvas and say, well, this is part of a kind of a global 1968.
#
And across the world, you have a certain discontent with the postwar regimes that had come into being across the world.
#
You know, the Cultural Revolution in China, Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia,
#
anti-Vietnam War movement, counterculture movement, May 68. And what unites all of them,
#
they all have very specific causes, but what unites all of them is kind of an anti-establishment thinking
#
and the idea that, you know, established institutions and established ways of representing your voices are failed
#
and that they have to look for something new.
#
And India also similar kind of thing is happening.
#
So the Shiv Sena, whatever we might think of its ideology,
#
but the idea that, you know, politics lies on the street and we have to occupy the street.
#
Anti-Hindi agitation in the South and then, of course, Naxalism.
#
So all of them represent a challenge which is somewhat different from the challenges that had come up earlier
#
in that they are now questioning the institutional framework that Indian democracy had worked out
#
and the ability of that institutional framework to deliver the goods.
#
So that really creates this kind of crisis through the 60s. And, of course, the Congress,
#
as a response to the social change that is happening, in part also caused by some of the changes that
#
the government itself had introduced, like limited land reform.
#
So you have for the first time the emergence of backward caste in North India.
#
I mean, it was already there in the South, but in North India.
#
And I think, you know, you have to give credit to Indira Gandhi's sort of political astuteness
#
that she recognized that the Congress was no longer able to command loyalty the way it had previously
#
through its kind of patron client system.
#
So when the Congress is defeated for the first time in the assembly elections in nine states in 1967,
#
she realizes that something needs to be done.
#
You know, people see it largely in terms of factionalism that she is trying to, you know, gather her power.
#
But, you know, the two needn't be contradictory. I mean, she was trying to do that,
#
but she also recognized that, you know, the old ways will not work.
#
And so when she splits the party in 1969, she's in fact responding to this recognition that things are changing.
#
The Congress itself is changing and that Congress cannot be a ruling party in the old way.
#
And it has to, you know, rejuvenate itself by adopting a more, you know, left wing ideology.
#
So and I think that is kind of a symptom of the change that's going on in the country.
#
And sort of go back to the parallels in, I want to ask you about JP.
#
So to sort of come to that, you know, recently I read Mayank Gandhi's book about how the Aam Aadmi Party was formed.
#
And he describes in detail how they sort of how he was chatting with Arvind Kejriwal.
#
And they decided that, OK, we need a figurehead who will have that kind of resonance with the masses.
#
And then they decide upon Anna Hazare and they get him.
#
And it works for a period of time.
#
But JP, on the other hand, was almost a model for that.
#
But JP was also a leader of tremendous stature, someone who was friends with Jawahar and Kamla,
#
who, you know, almost had this sort of uncle, niece affection for Indira,
#
who was disillusioned from politics for many years after this thing.
#
But he comes up as a sort of a natural focal point of the movements that are building up in the early 70s,
#
especially the student movements in Bihar and all.
#
The moment he becomes a face of that, it becomes something enormous that can challenge Indira Gandhi.
#
Now, I mean, what do you think of Carlisle's great man theory of history?
#
And do you think if JP had not existed, things would nevertheless have played out the same or, you know?
#
No, I mean, I think it's not surprising that, you know, they found JP.
#
I mean, JP didn't find them.
#
And, you know, this is something to think about that, you know, even now across the world,
#
if you think of the young people in Britain who flocked the Labour Party,
#
and who do they make their leader? Jeremy Corbyn.
#
Certainly not a young person.
#
The young people in the US, Bernie Sanders.
#
And same way over here.
#
I mean, I think it has something to do with the fact that the young people were expressing no faith in the existing political system.
#
And, you know, in both Navnirman movement in Gujarat and Chhatra,
#
you were a committee in Bihar, there were political parties which were, you know, trying to capture them.
#
You know, Jansung at that time was very active and, you know, ABVP.
#
They were trying to capture them.
#
But they realized that they needed someone other than a straight political personality to lead this movement.
#
Because the movement's urge was to, you know, break free from the existing political setup.
#
And it's not surprising then that they found a leader who had retired from formal politics, JP,
#
and who also had this saintly image that a person who doesn't seek political office for himself,
#
and therefore he's not leading the movement against Indira Gandhi because he wants to get into power,
#
whereas all the opposition parties, you know, couldn't escape that charge.
#
So, I mean, I think it's just fitting that they would have found someone like JP.
#
But had they not found him?
#
Then they might have, you know, thrown up leadership within their own ranks.
#
But, you know, they wouldn't have acquired that kind of a national presence.
#
So they did throw up, you know, that's the time when Lalu and Nitish both come up in Bihar.
#
In fact, you know, if you look at the political map today,
#
many of those people, they all came up into political prominence in the 70s.
#
JT was in student politics, Modi was a worker for the BJP.
#
Ravi Shankar Prasad, all these people, you know, they all came up during that time.
#
Right. And the other fascinating character during this time is Sanjay Gandhi.
#
And, you know, we are recording this on 17 December and just a couple of days back,
#
he had his, I think, birth anniversary.
#
And the Congress party put out a tweet celebrating him as a visionary leader
#
and someone who cared for the poor.
#
Did you see that? What did you think about that?
#
No, you know, in writing about Sanjay Gandhi,
#
one of the problems was that the man really didn't leave a diary or a substantial body of writings.
#
So it was hard to figure out what he stood for.
#
So all I had going for it was really his actions.
#
And Indira often said about Sanjay that, you know, he's a man of action.
#
He's not a man of ideas.
#
So, you know, this latter day revisionism,
#
I think, you know, the Congress has to at some point come clean
#
if it has to have any kind of credible future as a national alternative.
#
You can't keep saying, well, you know, certain things went wrong.
#
But, you know, he was great.
#
So I don't know if Sanjay Gandhi will be fully rehabilitated because the memories of the people are horrendous.
#
Yeah. So I know now people credit him with Maruti, you know, but that's a different story.
#
I mean, I don't think he can be directly credited, although he played a role and he played an indirect role.
#
He wasn't aware of what he was up to.
#
But if you see it in the kind of a larger picture,
#
his Maruti was the wedge to pry open the control economy.
#
So it happened through chronic capital.
#
You know, that's the irony of it.
#
So it's not because, you know, lots of people thought that, you know,
#
on their study or on their rational judgment that we should break free from license Raj and move to something else.
#
Just so happened, you know, he was prime minister's son.
#
In fact, it seems to me more than an attempt to open up the markets.
#
It seems to me a classic case of cronyism where state power is essentially used to push one man's interest.
#
And it's very anti-competitive.
#
For example, the way he gets an industrial license in 1969,
#
which you describe established companies haven't been able to get that.
#
And it's interesting that and also resonant that you describe Sanjay's mechanical mindset,
#
what today people call the engineering mindset.
#
And in that sense, he almost seems to be a caricature of what the state was
#
in the sense that he had this engineering mindset, a top down vision of the world.
#
Everything has to be planned. Coercion is essential to what he wants to do.
#
And of course, when it comes to his private endeavors like Maruti, he fails completely.
#
In fact, the Washington Post in 74, you've quoted them as describing his car as an inadvertent way of population control.
#
Because it was such an incompetent piece of machinery.
#
But then once he has state power at his disposal, he uses that for things like slum clearing,
#
like in the Turkmen Gate where you have a chapter which is very powerfully described.
#
And all the family planning nonsense that he did.
#
And while it seems that, okay, here is a man who is clearly a moral monster,
#
but at the same time, everything that he is doing or whatever we can make out from about his beliefs from his actions,
#
epitomize what the Indian state has always been.
#
Yeah. You know, let me just step back from both sterilization and Maruti.
#
But I want to come back to it in a more roundabout way in the sense that when we think of the emergency
#
and when we think of the memory of sterilization or Maruti or slum clearance,
#
they seem to epitomize the tyranny of emergency.
#
And in that sense, they become our understanding of emergency.
#
And of course, you know, they were tyrannical and, you know, I don't want to minimize the oppression that they accomplished.
#
But if you want to understand the emergency, not only in negative terms and by which I mean emergency
#
just as suppression of rights, denial of press freedom, censorship.
#
But if you want to ask what was emergency as a form of rule and as a vision of governance or as a vision of society,
#
then you can think of sterilization and slum clearance as two kind of classic examples of how elite thought India should function.
#
And so in one case, the idea is that the number of the poor is growing too much.
#
Population growth is a problem, but it's particularly a problem because the wrong kind of people are growing.
#
And the second is against, again, the poor and that the poor are spoiling your urban beautification by living in slums and creating slums.
#
So the idea is to tackle poverty through population control and through slum clearance.
#
So you can say that that's the positive vision of the emergency, positive not in the sense that it's good.
#
This is what they want to do. Yeah, but this is what they want to do.
#
And but then you need to step back and ask. So where does this come from?
#
You know, again, Sanjay Gandhi is, of course, critical in all of this.
#
But one of the things that I found really revealing even to me was that although in my mind also,
#
you know, I associated Sanjay Gandhi with sterilization, urban clearance.
#
And when I started looking into its history, I found that, in fact, it goes back to the 1950s and it's really part of a global movement.
#
And the interesting thing about the population control activists, most of them, you know, situated in the United States and Europe,
#
but mainly in the United States, they are demographers and they are worried about population growth.
#
And again, the wrong kind of population growth. And of course, India is at the center of this.
#
So all these population activists begin their programs, you know, setting up demography training,
#
various population control programs in India in the 50s and really gets going by the end of the 50s and early 60s.
#
So by the time Sanjay Gandhi comes along, that program has been in existence, encouraged,
#
financed by the Ford Foundation. And, you know, I read accounts about how the family planning ministry
#
was overrun by these consultants financed by the Ford Foundation and, you know, who were kind of running the show.
#
So by the time, you know, Sanjay Gandhi comes along, the program is well established.
#
There are, you know, population control zealots in Indian ministry, Indian government, you know,
#
including Ashoka Mehta, who was, you know, family planning minister.
#
And, you know, he says we have to take up this issue on a war footing.
#
So the war metaphor and, you know, coercion, they were already instituted into the system.
#
What Sanjay Gandhi does is to really ratchet this up several notches and it becomes far more coercive.
#
And the same thing happens with slum clearance as well.
#
And, you know, there's an interesting statement by Jagmohan, who was then the vice chairman of DDA and who says,
#
you know, he sees it as part of, you know, urban planning and part of Delhi master plan.
#
And he says, you know, we needed the sign to come, you know, give it sort of kickstart the process.
#
So again, you know, you see these as part of, you know, long term history of post-independence India,
#
which, you know, acquires a certain direction during the emergency, but it doesn't, emergency doesn't invent it.
#
In fact, there's, you know, speaking of Jagmohan, there's another telling quote in your book where you talk about
#
Jagmohan when Turkmen gate was happening, he justified it by saying we didn't leave Pakistan to create another Pakistan.
#
You know, and that same kind of thinking you could say permeates today where, you know, the ban on cow slaughter,
#
for example, is basically an attack on one community.
#
It's, you know, the whole cow thing is just a proxy for that.
#
And just speaking of population planning, I mean, obviously, and this is something I've written a lot about in the past,
#
because I've always sort of thought of people as the ultimate resource, as the economist Julian Simon puts it,
#
that our population is actually a strength and not a weakness because it's a positive sum game and people are the greatest resource.
#
And the US was dominated by this sort of Malthusian thinking in the forties, fifties, sixties.
#
In fact, Paul Ehrlich, who was one of the biggest doomsayers, would write books about how we were heading for a crisis.
#
I think in 1969, he or one of his fellows predicted that there would be famines in the US by 75.
#
And that the poor country should be allowed to starve because there is a scarcity of resources.
#
And all this, of course, is complete nonsense.
#
And I'll put links to the pieces I've written on the page for this episode.
#
Moving on from sort of Sanjay and I, really, people who haven't read about the emergency before,
#
I strongly recommend them to read your book and other books on it,
#
because the kind of horrors that were inflicted by Sanjay Gandhi and Indira Gandhi are just mind-numbing.
#
And it's interesting how they've almost become benign figures today.
#
I've heard people defend the things they did and speak about Indira Gandhi's monumental achievements.
#
And of course, on many more grounds than just the emergency, she damaged India enormously.
#
One of the delightful things I found about your book is that it also shows your immersion into the culture of the time.
#
You talk about Shyambeni Girls, Ankur and Nishant as films that sort of give a picture of what society at the time was like.
#
You quote from Nirala, I think, if I'm not mistaken.
#
You write about Nirmal Verma's novel at the end of the emergency, which is so evocative.
#
Tell me a little bit more about that.
#
When you were researching the book, did you also consciously make an effort to sort of...
#
I'll tell you two stories about this.
#
One is that when I started thinking about writing this book, I didn't want to write a straight political history.
#
I'm not particularly interested in it.
#
And I just didn't want to write about Indira Gandhi or Sanjay Gandhi and Muradji and so on.
#
So I was looking for a different form, and it just so happened that during that time, I read this British detective fiction writer, Philip Kerr.
#
And he has this trilogy called Berlin Noir.
#
The first one is set in 1933, second in, I think, 34 and the third in 1947.
#
And you have a private eye, Philip Gunther, you know, who examines usual private eye cases, you know, divorce, missing person.
#
But the interesting thing what he does is that as Bernie Gunther is examining these cases, he runs up first against the Nazis coming to power, then they are in power.
#
And the third one, which is my favorite, 47 post-war Berlin, where Americans, the Brits, the Russians, they're all jockeying for influence.
#
And Bernie is still following those cases.
#
And you get a kind of portrait of that Berlin through his examination.
#
So I was when I first started thinking about writing this, I sort of knew about this case, but hadn't paid much attention to it.
#
And that was the case of Praveer Purukas, who was kidnapped in JNU in 1975 by PSB.
#
One of the bad little JNUs in the center of the action.
#
Right, right. So I thought, well, you know, that story, I can, instead of Bernie Gunther, I would be the detective and I would be, you know, looking at clues.
#
You know, so how does an ordinary student get abducted? A big explanation is the emergency.
#
But then the emergency itself has to be explained, but is arrested under MISA.
#
And so why do we have laws like that? And what is the history of it?
#
So I thought that if I could keep his story as the kind of anchor of the book and each of the chapters would in a way take one element of that story.
#
You know, so I thought that's the kind of form that the book would take.
#
So that's what I tried to do.
#
And the second was, as I said, you know, I didn't want to write straight political history because also I didn't think that that would really capture what I wanted to capture, which is, for example, if you want to show the kind of environment in which.
#
First, the student youth movement took place and then the emergency was declared.
#
You cannot do it only through a political narrative and that you have to cast your net wider and see how it was being culturally represented.
#
Because one of the things that, you know, was very clear was that it's a very angry period.
#
There's a lot of anger on the street, you know, starting with, for example, the Shiv Sena in Bombay, you know, it's politics of anger.
#
And even when the students and youth, they come out in the streets, there's a lot of brick batting, you know, battles with the police.
#
And so how do you catch the kind of emotional mood of the country at that time?
#
And I thought for that, you know, both literature and cinema are very good medium.
#
And of course, I remembered Benegal's films from having seen it before, but hadn't quite seen them in this context.
#
And when I was, you know, reeling around it and saw the films again, then I thought, why didn't I see it this way before?
#
You know, because they're so clearly of that moment and express all the kind of frustrations and anger.
#
And also a sense of, you know, impasse, particularly, you know, in this, not in Angkor.
#
Well, Angkor also, you know, the last moment in the film where little boy throws stone.
#
On the one hand, it's a kind of a hopeful sign that, you know, of rebellion, but also its ineffectiveness.
#
So I thought, well, these were, you know, really part of the story.
#
And even among sort of literary writings, of course, everyone knew of Roentgen mysteries of fine balance, you know, which I also admire greatly.
#
But it was a well-known thing and it was written much later.
#
So I wanted to find that something that was written in that moment.
#
And that's where I found both Nirmal Verma and Rahima Sumraza.
#
You know, what I found very interesting about Rahima Sumraza's novel is that it's a novel in which the character addresses the reader directly, almost as a kind of a political speech.
#
You know, so it carries that kind of immediacy of the moment.
#
As a novel, it's not so great.
#
But I found it as a piece of writing, as a kind of a literary commentary and the urge in the writer to represent everything that's going on during the emergency, very, very telling.
#
So I wanted to, you know, really bring both literature and cinema in order to capture something of the kind of a cultural and political.
#
And I thought even the political mood cannot be captured without its culture.
#
No, and I found that structure very fascinating.
#
Like I read this book on cognitive neuroscience recently called Behave by Robert Sapolsky, where he basically takes actions and then he examines them one level at a time.
#
So the immediate proximate things which led to the action and then what is happening at the level of the brain and then what happened before that at the level of evolution and so on going all the way back.
#
And how you just described the structure of this book even seems like you're taking that Praveep Purkaya's case and then you're doing a sort of a forensic investigation of it where the most proximate cause is it's a case of mistaken identity.
#
And then you go one level above that and it's the emergency and then you go another level above that and you go back to the Constitution.
#
And, you know, that's extremely fascinating and a very interesting way of approaching a book of history.
#
Where I'd like to sort of end this episode by is two questions really.
#
One, what are the sort of parallels you see between that period, the ferment of the emergency and between what has happened?
#
Yeah, well, you know, I was writing this book actually here sitting here in Mumbai in 2016-17 and it was the kind of a stereophonic experience.
#
It was, you know, Modi here and Trump there. And so I was kind of thinking of both.
#
And it seemed to me that, you know, around that time and even now, you know, people were talking about undeclared emergency.
#
And I thought, in fact, you know, there were those kinds of parallels, the kind of stature in political power and authority that Narendra Modi had acquired was very similar to Indira Gandhi and even greater.
#
But what I found really striking and that I don't think is captured by the term undeclared emergency is that there are many new elements in play now.
#
So, you know, the media landscape has changed completely from the time of Indira Gandhi, you know, private media.
#
Indira Gandhi didn't have Arnab Goswami. Modi does.
#
He didn't have a WhatsApp army. Yeah, he didn't have social media.
#
Indira Gandhi didn't have the kind of foot soldiers that Modi has with, you know, these cow vigilantes and lynchings and so on.
#
So he's got actually people on the street as also in the digital sphere with, you know, a number of, you know, BJP trolls and so on.
#
So, and I find that that kind of power is far more ominous and dangerous and enduring than the kind of power that Indira Gandhi had.
#
And so, in fact, you could argue that it was precisely the lack of that kind of popular power that forced her to resort to the emergency.
#
Whereas Narendra Modi enjoys power at that level, you know, in the media and on the street.
#
And plus, you know, given what I've written about the enduring power of the state, he can just utilize those part of the state, and he doesn't have to formally declare emergency.
#
And so you get a form of kind of authoritarian power, you know, a lot of people use the F word, you know, the fascism.
#
That's a kind of real possibility here because of this kind of support on the street that he can have the gangs, you know, attack people and so on.
#
And there's actually a stunning irony there because you describe in your book that, you know, one of the reasons JP had to sort of compromise with the Jansung and make them part of the movement was he needed their foot soldiers to oppose Indira Gandhi.
#
And now suddenly those same foot soldiers are essentially on the other side as an adjunct to state power instead of opposing it.
#
Exactly. Yeah. So, you know, the parallel over there, they're striking.
#
And as I said, you know, I think they are even more ominous than Indira Gandhi.
#
And, you know, sometimes I wonder that, you know, if the Allahabad judgment hadn't taken place, which, you know, put her kind of legal position in jeopardy, she might not have declared the emergency.
#
And she might have just used the ordinary, you know, state powers to, you know, control the population and maintain herself in power.
#
Then, you know, then we wouldn't be speaking about, oh, my goodness, that emergency, that horrible thing that happened.
#
It would be normalized.
#
It would be normalized, you know, but it was the Allahabad judgment that really turned into something else.
#
If, you know, Modi doesn't have an Allahabad judgment to, you know, deal with, he can, you know, continue, you know, building a power.
#
And I just find that, you know, that kind of power that he enjoys also produces a kind of hubris that is really quite stunning.
#
I was just reading, you know, today's newspaper that, you know, right after a defeat in midterm election, the arrogance of power is just quite stunning.
#
And, you know, you expect the prime minister, once you acquire that position, to adopt a somewhat sort of statesmanlike tone.
#
I mean, to use the islands analogy again, they become islands of arrogance insulated from sort of reality.
#
My other question, which actually disturbs me when I think about it, is that, you know, as you've sort of correctly pointed out that, you know,
#
our constitution was framed by, and our state was shaped by a liberal elite, which was sort of out of touch with society.
#
And at that time, society didn't really have a voice.
#
It could be in the villages into Bharat Mata Ki Jaya or whatever, as in Nehru's anecdote.
#
But today, in some senses, it seems that society has actually caught up and is asserting itself.
#
And it is not the liberal society that our constitution envisaged.
#
You know, I would in fact say, for example, that one seminal moment in all of this is, and I wrote a column in the Times of India about this negative one.
#
I don't know if you'd agree with its premise.
#
But is that Adityanath's coming to power in UP is actually a moment where society has caught up with the state, where it's kind of asserting itself and saying this is what we are.
#
You liberal elites can stuff your constitution.
#
And that also then brings upon the moral dilemma of what do you now do?
#
Should a state be the reflection of society?
#
And if this is what society is, where are we and how are we?
#
We are also in a sense like Nehru liberal elites.
#
Though I'm a very different kind of liberal, I'd say.
#
But nevertheless, we are elites.
#
How are we to think about this?
#
Well, you know, I don't think Genie can be put back in the bottle.
#
And I don't think that it's particularly productive to think of the present in terms of what it lacks and what we have lost.
#
You know, that world is gone.
#
Democracy has acquired a new shape.
#
And so we have to think of, you know, how can we, you know, practice democracy to realize its kind of ideals and it's really it's when you kind of distill it down to its essence.
#
The promise of democracy is self-rule, self-rule and equality that we are all equal.
#
So we have to think of some different institutional mechanisms, different kinds of ideologies in order to bring that into being.
#
A phenomenon like, you know, Yogi Adityanath and so on, I would slightly disagree over there and say, well, he's not society.
#
He's one expression of society and that there are other expressions of society.
#
So in general, I would say, yes, you know, there has to be a way in which society is more fully present in the affairs of the state.
#
But that determination of what that society is, is itself a kind of a political and democratic process.
#
And now what's happening with Adityanath is that Adityanath is, you know, resorting to the same old kind of state power to impose his vision of society.
#
So we have to, in a way, I would say the democratic procedure would be to oppose that notion and come up with an alternative vision of society and work towards its fuller expression in the state.
#
And, you know, would you disagree with Amitkar's pessimism and say that perhaps society can be changed from inside, that it doesn't need state coercion for it to be changed from the top?
#
Absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, any kind of enduring social change has to come from within and has to be generated from below.
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So in that sense, you know, I mean, I don't think of just gloom and doom because, you know, like Black Lives Matter and, you know, the Dalit movement here.
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I mean, there are these are kind of signs of, you know, positive change where you may not agree with the whole range of things, but, you know, change comes in form.
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Some of you like, some you don't like. But, you know, they are in the kind of a right direction.
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So and I think, you know, the movement for democracy from those kinds of perspectives is something to be, you know, welcome.
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On that positive note, thank you so much, Gyan, for coming on the show.
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Thank you for, it was enjoyable.
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Bharatiya Sineh Itihas mein mahilaon ki jagah talashta, humara khas Hindi podcast, CINEMAYA.
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Nideshikaon ki filmon, kahaniyon aur nazariye ko samajhne ki hamari ek koshish.
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Mein hu Swati Bakshi aur mere saath suniye CINEMAYA, IVM Podcast app aur IVM Podcast dot com par bhi.
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Family businesses get a bad rap and one time they were looked down on for getting rich, for being too ambitious.
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Today they're still looked down on, but for not being ambitious enough, not agile enough, not modern enough, too traditional in their mindset.
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The biggest brands and business houses in the country started out as humble family businesses.
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It's the way India has done business.
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Join Sonu Basin in conversation with stalwarts of Indian family businesses on The Inheritors podcast series by Bloomberg Quint.
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Discuss the highs and lows, the needs and pressure points of building a business legacy that spans generations.
