Shortly after I arrived at the hostel, the freshmen were subjected to ragging by their seniors. I had read enough anthropology, including Arnold van Gennep, to understand that ragging was a rite of passage to mark the transition from one status to a higher one. However, I had no experience of ragging in Denmark, where it was not part of student life.

In late July, around midnight, I was woken up and told to proceed to the top floor of the hostel. When it was my turn, I was told to stand straight, not to laugh, and to address my seniors as “sir.” I was asked several questions, such as: “How many steps are there on the staircase?”, “How many rooms are there in the hostel?”, “What are your hobbies?”, “How old are you?”, “Have you been together with a girl?”, “How many?”, “What did you do?”, “Show us!”, “Do you have any stamps?”, “Don’t laugh! We are not angry. We are just telling you about the hostel rules.”

Ragging continued for weeks. I was instructed to greet people properly and to show respect no matter my feelings. One senior insisted that I should greet him every morning with a loud “Srimanji namaskar”.  Otherwise, I was actually exempted from some of the ragging sessions.  Eventually, some of the freshmen had had enough of the ragging and started complaining. Not only did they have to endure the ragging. They also had to adjust to a new place. For some, the hostel was their first experience of life away from home. 

In early September, I received news that my scholarship under the Reciprocal Scholarship Scheme between Denmark and India had been approved. However, I was only provisionally admitted as an MA student, and the issue of whether my four years of anthropology studies in Denmark would allow me to enter an Indian MA course was still pending.

In Denmark, the study of anthropology had a clearly defined syllabus for the first two years only, followed by an exam. After that, the student had to find his or her own way without any exams, before submitting a thesis for the degree of “magister”. This would take another five years or so.

Thus, the Indian system, with its British roots, and the Danish system, with its German roots, were very different. In the following months, I spent a lot of time trying to convince authorities in Meerut and Delhi that I could be finally admitted and get the right kind of visa. Apart from the Danish embassy, which helped me when required, I even approached the Ministry of Home Affairs in New Delhi. Here, a high-ranking officer noted the “request under consideration” on my application. This deceptively simple note paved the way. 

When I look back on this whole process now, I must say that the authorities had to spend an awful amount of time on a single Danish student. Basically, they did not want to take a decision that would set a bad precedent for how to deal with future students seeking admission to higher education in India. In the event, not many students followed in my footsteps. Moreover, in the following decades, the Danish system has gradually changed in an Anglo-American direction.

Today, the difference between the Danish and the Indian educational systems has narrowed making the issue of “equivalence” a bit simpler. 

The JP Movement and the Emergency

While the students at Meerut University campus were not overly politically active, students elsewhere in India were mobilizing for Jayaprakash Narayan. JP, as he was known, was already a seasoned freedom fighter and an active anti-corruption crusader of a socialist and Gandhian hue when, in 1974, he advocated nothing less but a “Total Revolution.”

During a holiday, I went on a tour to eastern UP and Bihar with my then Danish girlfriend Anne-Birgitte Høeg with whom I shared an interest in India. In southern Bihar, we heard JP talk to a large gathering of workers in a coal mining area. It was an open-cast mine and there was coaldust everywhere. I managed to meet JP. He asked me what I was doing in India. I said that I studied sociology in Meerut. He replied that he had also once studied sociology.

Anne-Birgitte Høeg and driver of a Caterpillar (Michigan 175A) in the coal mine area of southern Bihar.

Later, JP came to Meerut, where he spoke on the lawns of Meerut College. This event also took place in good order. However, when in the summer of 1975, I went on a vacation to Jammu and Kashmir, a showdown was imminent.

During my stay in Srinagar, Durga Prasad Dhar, a follower of Jawaharlal Nehru and a close confidant of Indira Gandhi, passed away. Dhar had played important roles in Indian and foreign politics. He had also held key portfolios in Jammu and Kashmir itself.

I witnessed his body being taken through the main street of Srinagar. In those days, a Kashmiri Hindu could be shown respect in the heart of Srinagar. 

Ladakh, or “Little Tibet,” had recently been opened for foreign tourists. Thus, I was able to take a bus from Srinagar to Leh. It was a two-day journey. Among the passengers, someone confided, was the daughter of ex-Maharaja Dr Karan Singh, travelling together with a friend of hers. I am not able to vouch for this, but one of the two young ladies in the front row may well have been the Rajkumari. In those days, so it appeared, a Jammu princess could travel in a public bus.

The bus halted overnight at Kargil. In the evening, I met an army officer, who informed me that across the mountain ridge, right in front of us, was Pakistan. The officer asked me what I was doing. Hearing my reply, he told me, in no uncertain terms, that Meerut was a bad choice. Evidently, the reputation of Meerut had travelled to the furthest corners of the country.

When I reached Leh, the Emergency had been declared. I did not understand the import of this, but someone gave me a short lecture on the constitutional provision for the proclamation of emergency caused by war, external aggression, or internal disturbance. It was the JP Movement that had caused the internal disturbance that made President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed declare the Emergency at Indira Gandhi’s behest.

Leh in those days was seemingly a far-off place, but thanks to army engineers, road workers, daredevil drivers, and communication networks, news of the events on the plains reached even the roof of the world.

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A first-hand experience of Emergency

When I returned to Meerut from Jammu, Kashmir and Leh in the monsoon of 1975, I became an MA. final year student. In November, I received information that my admission to the university was no longer provisional. I had become a regular student.

The country, however, experienced turbulence. The Emergency had temporarily derailed democracy. In its stead, it promised a new order that would encompass daily life everywhere, including Meerut. From my notes, it appears that people remained divided over whether the Emergency was a good thing or not. There were those who argued that the Emergency was good, or even necessary.

Freedom, some would argue, leads to corruption and violence. Democracy caused indiscipline. The Emergency was a way to restore discipline. Discipline required the use of the stick – the danda. Since people had been “slaves” for so long, they had to be led like sheep. We do not deserve democracy, some would argue.

The intelligentsia had to keep quiet. To control the RSS and the Ananda Marga, the government needed a strong arm. The two organizations were banned in July 1975 together with the Jamaat-i-Islam and the CPI(ML).

The stick was also necessary to protect the poor against the rich. Moneylenders would charge Rs. 5 in interest per Rs. 100 in advance per month. Such a high interest rate should be banned, some would argue. Instead, the banks should provide loans.

Many of the themes running through the Emergency discourse were familiar everyday matters, but some of them were highly amplified by the Emergency. The most striking step taken by the regime in relation to ordinary people (including government servants) was the sterilization campaign. Male sterilization was promoted by Sanjay Gandhi as part of his five-point programme not long after he emerged as a “youth leader.”

In Meerut, we received sketchy news about forced sterilization, demolition of slums, and communal clashes in the Turkman Gate area of Delhi in late April 1976. Meerut was also covered by the sterilization drive, but this did not lead to confrontations like the in Turkman Gate area, or (after my departure) the one in October 1976 in nearby Muzaffarnagar. Being one of India’s riot-prone cities, one could have expected large-scale riots and communal clashes to have occurred in Meerut during the Emergency. As pointed out by Kayako Tatsumi, the sterilization campaign may well have alienated Muslims from the Congress party in Meerut, but it was only later, in 1982 and 1987, that deadly ethnic riots returned to Meerut.

It was, therefore, other concerns and disputes that defined the Emergency as I experienced it. Ragging, for example, was stopped. Already, on July 11, 1975, the U.P. Education Commission issued a circular strictly prohibiting ragging. The hostel Warden asked us to sign on to the rules. In the nearby Medical College, we got to know that five medical students had been thrown out for ragging.

In a similar vein, graffiti on the campus and in the hostel was removed. Entry into the Administrative building required written permission. No one was to enter during the lunch break. The clerks would work hard, remaining in their seats from 10 AM to 5 PM without unscheduled tea breaks. The students could no longer go on strike. There was a perception that servants could not be beaten without the risk of repercussions from the authorities.  

Those who had not paid hostel fees could be ordered to leave the hostel immediately. There was to be a daily check to verify whether the students were duly present in the hostel. As part of this overall disciplinary drive, the Hostel Warden issued a notice instructing that, “No student living in Boys’ Hostel will enter inside Girls’ Hostel to meet any resident of the Girls’ Hostel any time. If there is some urgent work and the boy or the girl is required to consult each other, they should stand outside under the staircases with the prior permission of the prefect.”

The curbing of goondaism was another key objective in the “Era of Discipline.”  In Meerut, according to The Hindustan Times, the police had arrested four persons under MISA (Maintenance of Internal Security Act), while 260 had been arrested under the Goondas Act, and another 900 for robbery, etc. This tripartite categorisation perhaps covered major politicians, goondas, and dacoits, respectively.

Dacoits were robbers, but who were the goondas?  According to the U.P. Control Of Goondas Act, 1970, goondas are such persons who, in the eyes of a District Magistrate, are leaders or members of a gang that habitually engaged in provoking riots or in undermining national integration. Goondas had a varied portfolio. They could be engaged in the immoral trafficking of women and girls, or house-grabbing. They could have been repeatedly convicted under gambling laws or the Arms Act.

Goondas, as per this law, were “desperate and dangerous men,” who “habitually passed indecent remarks or teasing women or girls,” but they were also men who would offer their services for a price to act as touts linking citizens and government servants, lawyers and clients, or indeed, students and college administrators. The Emergency gave the police a free hand to round up known goondas. During the Emergency, many Meerut goondas were “playing sitar,” i.e., they were in jail.

Those who had a negative view of the Emergency objected to the arrest not only of JP but of other well-known leaders and journalists such as Kuldip Nayar. The government, it was speculated, wanted to nationalize The Indian Express. JP’s Magazine called Everyman ceased publication. I had been a subscriber, and it had been regularly delivered to my room. The Economic and Political Weekly started publishing less regularly, some would not. To hear the truth, one had to tune into the BBC or Radio Pakistan. The Gandhi Peace Foundation was under a cloud of suspicion. Even small groups of people chatting on the pavement risked being arrested. The Emergency had restricted the freedom of association.

One could hear stories about how the police would misuse its added power. Thus, when the son of a police inspector sought a permanent position in a local college and was informed that the concerned post had not been sanctioned, the police responded by arresting a person from the college management. They released this person only when the son of the policeman had his contract in the college extended. All this could also have happened before the Emergency as well, but stories like this one served to illustrate the negative local impact of the Emergency.

Emergency Blues

Political tension notwithstanding, student life continued. Among the faculty was a Bengali family, the Banerjis, who would occasionally invite some of us home for a soiree. They kindly invited me to contribute to the singing and playing. My standard number was The Solitary Male Club Blues. One verse was about the Nauchandi fair. For decades, this fair had been the main attraction of Meerut drawing a hundred thousand people a day, according to the Meerut Gazetteer. The fair was associated with the Goddess Chandi, whose temple is there, and with a dargah dedicated to Baley Mian standing, where the Chandi temple once was. The annual urs of the dargah took place simultaneously with the fair, which thus expresses a kind of co-existence between Hinduism and Islam.

My verse ran:

When the summer is near

People go to the Nauchandi fair

There are lots of ghazals and sher

And many pretty girls are there

Some go to see the tamasha

Some go to see the naachna

One day Sanjay

May also come this way

Mr Gandhi

We welcome thee

You are free

To join the spree

On April 4, 1976, Sanjay Gandhi, in fact, came to Baraut, a town not far from Meerut. Special busses were made available from Meerut, and I went to see Sanjay and the other dignitaries, i.e. the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, N.D. Tiwari, and the Minister of Defence, Bansi Lal.

The roadsides were well decorated, and at the bus stand, I saw the flags of the Congress and the Communist Party of India (CPI). From the periphery of the venue, I managed to click a photo of Sanjay standing in a jeep as he approached. He was the only one standing up in his vehicle, and he was the last to speak, indicating that the rally converged on Sanjay rather than on the elected head of the state, or the prominent Jat leader, Bansi Lal, from nearby Haryana.

A video of Sanjay Gandhi addressing a meeting in UP during the Emergency 

Baraut was in the heartland of the Jat farming community, many of whom supported Chaudhary Charan Singh. At the beginning of the Emergency, some supporters of Charan Singh’s party, the Bharatiya Lok Dal (BLD), apparently changed their loyalty in favour of the Congress to be on the safe side. However, by April 1976, the Emergency was nearing its end. Rumours had it that Charan Singh had made a very long and fiery speech in the UP Assembly. He was jailed, but the opposition had not been crushed.  In this context, the Baraut rally hung suspended in the air. It was a staged affair propping up Sanjay Gandhi, but he could not quite sway the audience. People did not enthusiastically respond to the slogans.

EVERYMAN’S WEEKLY

Volume 2 No. 2 of Everyman’s Weekly was published on December 15, 1974. It was priced at 35 paise, and delivered at the hostel like other newspapers and magazines such as The Illustrated Weekly of India.

The lead article was about Dr MS Swaminathan, Director General of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research. He, or members of his research team, were accused of scientific malpractice by exaggerating the virtues of a new strain of wheat called Sharbati Sonara. The main text was an article by Joseph Hanlon reproduced from New Scientist. The scientific details laid out were complicated, but clearly not meant to be in favour of Dr Swaminathan.

Another article taken from The Statesman on JP in Bihar noted that JP’s concept of “Total Revolution” could mean anything. It is vague enough to attract both the Jan Sangh and the CPI(ML). The issue also dealt with relations between Yugoslavia and the USSR, Kissinger’s role in West Asia, child rearing, films, and sports. In the end, the issue carried a note about the elections to the Teachers’ Association at JNU, where a professor “backed by pro-government and miscellaneous communist elements” faced a lecturer, who had been a private secretary of JP. The lecturer, Parimal Kumar Das, won. 

A later issue from February 16, 1975, had a lead article entitled “Swelling tide of mass discontent” and an editorial note announcing “mass demonstrations and gherao of the (Bihar) Assembly on specific occasions during the budget session,” providing the workers in the movement enough time to organize the government of the people (Janata Sarkar) at village level.

At the same time, the weekly also featured longer articles on the sugar industry and a critical one on the CPI and its subservience to Russia. There was also a survey of the social background of workers, or satyagrahis, in the Bihar movement. It was based on responses to a questionnaire distributed by a prisoner to his fellow prisoners in the district jail in Chhapra in Saran district!

JP himself contributed with a speech called “If I am arrested, people should remain peaceful.”  His advice:

“I would also like to warn Indiraji not to take for granted the loyalty to her of the armed security forces – I am not speaking of the armed forces at the moment but of the various police forces. So long as she keeps democracy alive, observes democratic norms and practices, and respects public opinion, she can depend on the security forces. But if she thinks she can rule India as a dictator, she will be disillusioned in this respect too. Ninety percent of the Bihar police are with the movement. So, the CRP and the BSF have been deployed here. But they are also Indians…. They should no doubt do their duty. That is what I tell them. But if they are given orders that go against their conscience or are immoral, even the lowliest constable, as Gandhiji said, should refuse to obey such orders.”

In the eyes of the law, this may not amount to a call for insurrection, but it does sound like a thinly veiled threat. 

Two months later in the April 20, 1975 issue of Everyman’s Weekly, JP’s thinking on the armed forces remained on the front page. JP maintained his position, but this position was one that undermined stability. How can the poor policeman buttress the state and help it maintain representational democracy, and at the same time submit to the wishes of an unelected moral leader, who criticizes the government for not adhering to the Constitution and democratic norm, all the while advocating a “Total Revolution” fired by direct people’s power?