For reasons of state, p.2
For Reasons of State, page 2
Much like what they did during the Emergency, the income tax authorities and the Enforcement Directorate have unleashed a reign of terror against the small businessman and trader even as the big boys of corporate India laugh their way to the bank.
The media is the more blatant case of being in a state of undeclared Emergency, differing with the one forty years ago in that some of the biggest conglomerates have now willingly offered themselves to serve as handmaidens and propaganda agents of the regime. Although there are myriad private channels today to counter the Goebbelsian propaganda spouted by the sole Doordarshan channel during the Emergency, few dare to do so, such is the dread of the powers that be. Yet social media, completely missing in the 1970s, allows dissidence and opinion to bloom today in a manner unimaginable when Mrs Gandhi suspended democracy.
Ultimately, regardless of the similarities and differences between then and now and whether one is worse than the other, the time has come once again to recall the assault on the democratic rights of people more than four decades ago. Because even though no Emergency has been declared today, its presence is palpable—felt by the rich and the poor, in the universities and the factories.
New Delhi
2018
Introduction
The trouble with the post-election situation in India in 1977 is that the tiny bushes in the foreground have hidden the forest behind. Also hidden, from the less probing eyes, are the myriad beasts that had prowled the jungle so menacingly for twenty months and may well be there still, albeit in an enforced hibernation, hoping for more suitable climes before they flex their muscles again. After the Emergency was relaxed just before the elections to the Lok Sabha, information had trickled down about cases of police brutality in Delhi and the states.
After the new Janata Party government was formed at the Centre, a large volume of reports has appeared on corruption, specially favours shown with or without political duress to companies associated with Sanjay Gandhi and his friends. The Maruti scandal has been hogging newspaper headlines and public discussions and, for the time being, till perhaps the various commissions start their proceedings, even the reports of excesses during the Emergency have tended to take a back seat.
Formidable as it is, Maruti is not the final personification, nor even the most characteristic symbol, of despotic rule under the Emergency. At best it betrays only the logical extension of the happenings that had taken place and in which the principals had acted by the rule of the bazaar to make cash capital out of the political and administrative situation they had so successfully managed to create. This has been brought about by the total depoliticization of society and by the perversion of the administrative system which had indeed for quite some time before the Emergency become ripe for being taken over by upstarts.
Officials and politicians of even the petty variety are explaining their activities during the Emergency as being born out of fear. But it is worth remembering that fear was only one, and in fact for the senior officers and politicians, almost the least important, of the factors responsible for the situation. Those who have closely watched the administrative process of the Union Territory of Delhi just before, during, and after the months of Emergency would know that the diabolical plan was not just a case of Sanjay Gandhi or his friends creating people who would do their bidding. It was a case of such people existing within the administration, simultaneously finding an extra-constitutional centre of authority and recognizing in it the powerhead that would help them in their own respective ambitions. The ambitions of the politician, the official and the bosses of the youth wing of the ruling party had become coterminous, so identical as to be indistinguishable from one another.
At a general level, it now is easy to see the strategy that had been adopted to utilize the situation. In the political institution of the Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee (DPCC), the Congress-run Delhi Administration controlled eventually by a nominated lieutenant governor, the superseded municipal corporation run by an official of the DDA, the Delhi State Industrial Development Corporation (DSIDC) for industries, the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC), the subordinate electricity producer and distributor Delhi Electricity Supply Undertaking (DESU), Delhi University (DU) and in Delhi Police which is controlled simultaneously by the lieutenant governor and the central government, there had existed a situation just before the Emergency which had created a coterie of officials bent on consolidating individual power. Internal rivalries and power grouping had reduced most of these institutions which ostensibly had a democratic functioning but in reality were administered on factors more personal to a state where they lacked the internal strength to resist any attempt at their perversion by outside forces.
The ‘extra-constitutional source of power’ recognized this factor and played on it skilfully. These forces in turn had recognized in the concept of Sanjay Gandhi just the additional impetus they needed for themselves. The implementation of the five-point programme became the yardstick of the competition between the various power groups. The number of trees planted, houses demolished and sterilizations done became the measure of closeness of these various groups to Sanjay Gandhi.
In such a scheme of things, normal channels of administration had perforce to be bypassed. Initially they were bypassed but later they were abolished altogether because they tended to cause the minutest of delays. Not only did this make the man at the top an absolute master of his domain, it also, more dangerously, tended to create smaller replicas of him in subordinate departments, to whom their immediate boss looked as the local ‘avatar’ of Sanjay Gandhi. The common man ceased to matter in this scheme of things. Whether his house was being bulldozed with only forty minutes’ notice or whether his vas deferens was being cut by inexperienced doctors in dingy rooms doubling up as operation theatres, the common man had become the inanimate object whose main value was in his contribution to better statistics about the successful implementation of programmes. The officials went about the job willingly, enthusiastically, brutally. The administrative agencies and the political groups had logically welded themselves into a machine that reasoned only mathematically, saw only figures, and did what fitted into its concept of reducing men, women and children into a mass that could be used for political and financial exploitation.
The book has concerned itself primarily with an investigation into the workings of this monstrous administrative machine during the Emergency and the devastation it has left behind. It does not touch on the myriad corruption scandals and underhand deals that had flourished under the aegis of the Emergency, for the uniqueness of the Emergency does not lie in this direction. Corruption has for years infested the social and political life of India and can at best be termed as one of the factors that made the imposition of the Emergency so seemingly easy.
The uniqueness of the Emergency lies in the tremendous powers that the State wielded over society without any moral will behind it. Despite popular confusion, the Emergency did not bring in a fascist regime. At no stage in the nineteen months were there any signs of political fanaticism, nor were there any attempts to whip up popular frenzy. The State neither sought to create nor had it any mass psychology to prop it up. On the contrary, the imposition of Emergency was a coup d’état—a virtual takeover of a bankrupt civil society by a coterie of individuals who cornered tremendous power by being able to represent the State.
The details and the immediate and long-term causes of the coup on 25 June 1975 lie beyond the scope of this book. It attempts merely to deal with Delhi under Emergency. Nevertheless, through analysis of the various administrative departments and their functioning, both immediately before and after the Emergency, a broad picture emerges of how and why the State developed such arbitrary powers.
The book has attempted to fuse a journalistic methodology with a literary flavour. Hours of tape-recorded interviews and secret official documents have provided the main skeleton of the book. The authors have fleshed the skeleton with many fictional details, but the fictionalization has been only of real situations, taking care that historical accuracy is adhered to. Any postmortem report which attempts to recreate an immediate image of the traumatic happenings in the capital under the Emergency encounters two main problems. The first is that one has to depend largely on eyewitness accounts of the incidents without any means of corroborating them. The second is the risk of running into the draconian libel laws of the country when investigating contemporary history. We have tried our best to check and recheck the same incident from three and sometimes four different sources and then used the one that seemed most credible and coherent. For controversial situations involving the reputation of high officials, we have banked largely on documented evidence. For the sake of authenticity, we have in many cases had to leave out vital incidents during the Emergency. One of these is the relevant question: Who ordered the firing in Turkman Gate? (There were four different high officials who could have ordered it.) We chose to be accurate rather than sensational. The book not only describes the happenings in the capital during those nineteen months but also juxtaposes high drama with an analysis of the causes behind it. Often the two have complemented each other.
The book starts with a Prologue titled ‘Bioscope’, because it presents an almost unending strip of cameos and images which go to build the surreal nightmare that the Emergency was. The ‘Story of Turkman Gate’ has been written as a narrative, with the characters of the piece living and acting out the story. And if any hitherto unknown incidents in the Turkman Gate massacre have been described in graphic detail, it is not because the authors possess a high degree of imagination but because two months of tough and continuous investigation at Turkman Gate yielded results.
The chapter called ‘The Bulldozers’ places the demolition at Turkman Gate in the context of the eighteen months of the campaign in almost all quarters of the capital by DDA bulldozers. ‘Out in the Wilderness’ builds up the misery and squalor of life in the resettlement colonies. The brutalization of Dwarka Prasad and his family in Mangolpuri is a real story. The vast vasectomy dragnet which was spread far and wide over Delhi has been described in ‘The Days of the Long Knives’. It tries to picture not only the trauma of the threat to the individual’s most intimate privacy but also shows how officials fought with each other to get their quotas increased. ‘The Dinosaurs . . .’ and ‘. . . And the Primeval Slush’ are two complementary chapters which describe the arbitrary police terror that raged day and night in the capital and the slime and muck it thrived in. ‘The Denouement’ is a record of the people’s final reply.
The authors record their thanks to W. Afroz, Madhu, T.V. Kunhi Krishanan, Dr Aurobindo Ghosh, Amitabh Mukhopadhyay, Sanjeev Aggarwal, Vinod Dayal, Raaj Kumar, many colleagues and Mrs Mercy M. John. The authors thank all the people who have helped garner information, especially the people of Turkman Gate.
Prologue
BIOSCOPE
Town Hall, New Year, 1976, ‘MOST IMPORTANT OUT TODAY’1
Office Order No. P 4 (30-II) 75-JSV:
In exercise of the powers vested in me under section 491 of the DMC Act, 1957, I hereby direct that all the powers conferred on me under the various sections of the said act for conversion of dry latrines into water-borne or flush-type latrines to implement effectual drainage systems within 10 days of the notice issued to close or demolish the dry latrines at the risk and cost of the owner/occupant shall, subject to my overall supervision, control and review be also exercised by all the zonal engineers (drainage) of the municipal corporation w.e.f. the forenoon of 2-1-1976. Signed B.R. Tamta, IAS, Commissioner, The Municipal Corporation of Delhi.2
Shahdara, 9 September 1975. Eighty-year-old Premlata Devi was in the latrine when the bulldozers came. ‘Come out, you old hag, we have to bulldoze the latrine,’ said the demolition men laughing outside. ‘Just a minute, I am coming, I am coming,’ cried the old woman nervously. ‘Come out this minute or we will run the bulldozer over the latrine with you in it,’ shouted the demolition men. Shaking with fear, Premlata Devi emerged from the latrine and tottered away from the spot to the jeers and laughter of the demolition men.
Town Hall. A press note issued by the municipal corporation to be published in newspapers on 10 December 1975:
The people living in several localities of the walled city (of Delhi) were taken by pleasant surprise when they saw Mr. Sanjay Gandhi accompanied by several civic officials inspecting their area this morning. Mr. Gandhi was accompanied by Mr. B.R. Tamta, Municipal Commissioner, Sardar Beant Singh, Zonal Assistant Commissioner of the city zone, besides some other officers.
Mr. Gandhi visited Shardanand Marg, Lal Quan, Farash Khana, Ajmeri Gate and the interior lanes of Phatak Namak, Mohalla Rodagaran and Excelisor Road Sirki Walan. The residents of these colonies and voluntary organizations gave him a rousing reception at various places and told him about their civic problems. The civic officials made a note of these problems.
Mr. Gandhi was specially shown the areas where the unauthorized encroachments were peacefully removed and nuisance of stray cattle was solved. He was very happy and congratulated the civic officials for their good work. He also noted of the highest standard of sanitation maintained by the civic officials in the congested and populated localities.
Early on 22 November 1975, the people living in and around Jama Masjid woke up to find a sea of khaki advancing towards them. First came the men of Central District Police marching in formation, carrying wide-bore guns that fire tear-gas shells. Behind them came the Delhi Armed Police (DAP), an ugly musket chained to each constable’s belt. Bringing up the rear was a huge contingent of Central Reserve Police. Mounted policemen on frisky stallions moved in arrogantly ahead.
There was a hush in Jama Masjid marketplace as shopkeepers watched in stunned silence. The traffic police had already stopped all vehicles and pedestrians from approaching the market, and the normal bustle of the bazaar had been replaced by an electric atmosphere of tension.
At 10 a.m., from within the vast body of khaki, emerged an army of 1000 labourers and sixty trucks. As Commissioner B.R. Tamta, Deputy Commissioner K.N. Sharma and other municipal officers directed them, the workers moved in with pick and rod. Even as the first announcement on the loudspeakers told the shopkeepers that they should remove their belongings before their shops were demolished, the first row of shops fell under the onslaught of the demolition squad. Four hundred shops fell that day—400 shops that were doing business in anything from biryani to spare parts, from transistor radios to pigeons; 400 shops that had been plying their trade for generations.
And all the while the police kept vigil, occasionally moving in to drag aside the odd shopkeeper who tried to save his wares from becoming rubble. At a distance sat a DDA official. The queue in front of him was of the shopkeepers who did not own shops any more. The official gave them slips of paper. Then, as the municipal trucks took away the debris, the shopkeepers climbed on other trucks for the long drive to distant Mayapuri, across the width of Delhi where they were told to set up their business anew. Three days later, Superintendent of Police R.K. Ohri and Commissioner Tamta were again at the spot when the men moved in for a fresh wave of demolition that left 250 more shops in a heap of rubble.
A senior officer who was busy with the exceptional chore of overseeing the Emergency operations in the city, one day received an important call. The voice at the other end had a disquieting message. Even as the pickaxes struck at the shops behind Jama Masjid, the old masonry of the masjid had disgorged a few stones and bricks. Work had ceased at once as the masjid caretakers brought divine imprecations on the heads of the officials. ‘Come quickly,’ the voice said, ‘the masjid wall threatens to fall.’
Minutes later, senior engineers had chalked out a plan of action. An eighteen-inch-thick wall was to be constructed to buttress the old masjid masonry. At breakneck speed the masons fitted the bricks and, within hours, the wall was ready.
The Masjid, Turkman Gate, 19 April 1976. The labourers’ picks dislodge a key stone in the masjid edifice. As mortar and dust collapse in a noisy cloud, the engineers decide to raise the wall, fast and quick. The wall is nearing completion when the bricks at the bottom, loosely set in soggy mortar, give way. Officials record the death of two workers, buried under the falling bricks.
Police bulletin, 20 July 1976:
Over 1100 police personnel coming from all ranks have undergone voluntary sterilizations in the last fortnight. Among those who have undergone operations are senior officers including two district superintendents.
On an average about 75 police personnel got themselves sterilized every day in different hospitals and camps. Senior Police Officers visit hospitals and other centres daily where police personnel undergo sterilization. The officers also pay frequent visits to the sterilized policemen in their homes to enquire about their wellbeing.
Earlier, a systematic drive was launched to motivate and educate all ranks of Delhi policemen about the benefits of the family planning programme.
The Delhi Police Welfare Society president, Sushila Mathur, wife of the Inspector-General of Police Bhawanimal, has done a yeoman job in propagating the family planning programme in Delhi Police.
