June 25, 1975 Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India, declares a state of emergency.
June 25, 2005 - 30 years hence we have forgetten. We have forgotten the dark days. We have forgetten the lessons. We have forgotten the learnings.
Post Independence a lot of events in the Indian history have been covered in the Indian school text books. But we dont find any worth while mention of or extensive discussion of the emergency days. Those days have been censored. Those days have been blacked out from public view.
Today we gloat - India is the largest democracy in the world. More than a billion people exercise their right to vote every 5 years. And despite every reason to abandon the democratic experiment, we have not done so.
But June 25, 1975 we almost did. The Allahabad high court had disqualified Indira Gandhi's election to parliament and had barred her from holding office for 6 years.
Indira Gandhi, then started to undo the democratic systems so painfully built and established by her predecessors. A state of emergency was declared and India was ruled by decree. Every opposition was quashed, every independent institution like the judiciary and the press were conquered and subjugated.
But today we dont mourn those 18 months. We dont stand in silence or pay tribute to those murdered institutions of democratic India.
The emergency rule has been completely censored. The people today, the present generation, are not aware of how close we came to dictatorship, how close we came to becoming like the rest of the non-democratic countries around us, how close we came to loosing freedom.
We mourn the assasination of the father of the nation. We mourn the death of soldiers in wars. Why, we even mourn the death of the leader who clamped down the emergency. But alas ! we forget to mourn the 18 months of agony faced by the nation.
10 comments:
the congress framed the syllabus and emergency is a blackhole they choose to forget, they dictate history, cover up the biggest insult to indian democracy and then say BJP altered history.
read 26-june-2005 business standard editorial by TCA srinivasa raghavan, its on the emergency pretty good, gives us info about the congress actions to stay in power.
@srivatsan
I read raghavan's column. Its bang on target.
I think the congress party has accepted that the 'emergency' is a big mistake (why else would they go about doing all this hush-hush!)
while there was a lot of things wrong with the emergency...it helped curb curruption and red tapism to a large extent.
siddharth emergency hasnt helped curb corruption and red tapism in india, EPFO reforms have been spoken about for 4 years and not a file has moved, now if ur theory is true shudnt this be implemented already? the measures rnt radical, simple stuff like implementing double entry book keeping are being put on hold!!EPFO still uses the single entry system
EPFO ???
Btw corruption did not go down....actually it went all the way up...right up to the top...to the PM's office...which was run by none other than the PM's son himself - Sanjay Gandhi.
employees provident fund office (EPFO) this is to provide pensions for middle class ppl once they retire!!
ah! but ofcourse. Gotcha.
A few facts about India,
1.India in many ways is a pseudo democracy. We have so many parties and the party that comes to power in the centre is not always a majority.
2.Only 30-40% of Indians vote in the elections.
3. Most of the people who vote are illiterate.
4. We as Indians also have this tendency to forget what needs to be done at present.Remembering the past for us is certainly a tall order.
mmm! I dont want to add more and make people jump on me and call anti-Indian or something.
eashwar,
Nice post.The present generation is unaware of so many things.Emergency naxalbari,jp movement or for that matter our freedom movement itself. There are lot of books on emergency. But not in our history books.The indian school curiculam needs big time cleaning.I used to wonder why i had to read pages and paged about robert clive, warren hastings administration.when i didn't know anythign about kattaboman or any other indian rulers who revolted against the british.
I agree with robbie.we need big time changes in our constitution.With the present system we are not going anywhere with our democracy.It is pretty mcuh a miracle that we are able to select some party and keep them in power for 4 yrs.
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