Early in 1977, Indira Gandhi surprisingly announced general elections and lifted the Emergency. She may have expected to win, but the Congress lost badly and the Janata Party formed the new government. If democracy had been “derailed” in June 1975, by March 1977 democracy was back on track.

To uncover the “excesses” committed during the Emergency, the Janata government set up the Shah Commission. It did reveal misuse of Emergency provisions, but its enquiries did not result in legal closure. Instead, the Janata Party disintegrated, and Indira Gandhi was voted back into power in 1980, whereupon the Supreme Court, obligingly, scuttled further proceedings against those suspected of excesses.

Indira Gandhi’s return to power did not inaugurate another Emergency, but a return to the status quo ante. The cycle had moved from a democratic order, where legislative, executive, and judicial powers were allowed to run counter to each other, to an illiberal or authoritarian order, where the ruler was whole-sole, and back again to a state recognizing the divisions of power.

Stig’s Stories # 8 is his reflections on two of these powers - the Indian press and the legal system - during the Emergency.

The Press: Free or committed?

In 1978, the Swedish historian Karl Reinhold Haellquist organized a seminar in Stockholm to take stock of the coverage of Asia in Scandinavian and Asian news media. Three foreign journalists had been invited. David Bonavia from the Far Eastern Economic Review, Aschim (or Asim) Mukhopadhyay, and Kuldip Nayar, who as editor of the Indian Express had himself been in the eye of the storm during the Emergency.

Nayar did not present a paper, but in his book The Judgement: Inside Story of the Emergency in India, he recounted the period in detail. When the elections were finally declared, he pointed out that “bigger nations were on Mrs Gandhi’s side,” while the “small Scandinavian countries did not lose hope in the Indian people reaffirming the faith in democracy.” Kuldip Nayar’s generous observation, tucked away on page 175, was quite a kudos.

Image: “Kuldip Nayar - An experienced man with a British inspired moustache”, Stockholm, 1978, (courtesy: Sydasiensbulletinen, 3-4, November 1978) 

At this conference, I contributed a paper about the coverage of the Emergency in the Indian press in which I argued that the Indian state used four methods to control news during the Emergency: censorship, institutional rearrangements, economic compulsion, and miscellaneous tricks. Institutional rearrangements included the compulsory merger of the four major Indian news agencies into an agency called Samachar.

This had international ramifications. Links to major Western news agencies, such as Reuters and United Press International (UPI), were temporarily or permanently cut. Instead, at the meeting of the Non-Aligned Countries in New Delhi in 1976, closer ties were established among the non-aligned to bring about a more positive view of the developing countries than what Western “cultural imperialists” were allegedly trying to impose.

Economic pressure included the denial of newsprint, which was in short supply and required a license to import. Limiting access to newsprint became so-to-speak the new black during the Emergency. Another form of economic pressure was the cuts in government advertisements on which newspapers were economically reliant. The economic guarantees that media houses need to pledge in order to obtain the license to publish were also hiked.

These old and new techniques of harassment made many newspapers and magazines (including Seminar) cease publication. Among the few that refused to toe the line and kept standing, were The Statesman and Indian Express. The government subjected the Indian Express to comprehensive and detailed (pre-)censorship of all content, including sports and even matrimonials. The newspaper went to court to which the government responded by cutting electricity alleging non-payment of electricity bills. Later the government accused the newspaper of non-payment of taxes.

At one point, the government pressured the owner, RN Goenka, to sell the Indian Express. The argument was that a “monopoly capitalist” like Goenka could not be allowed to own such an important news outlet. Instead, the government tried to have KK Birla take over the paper, the irony being that Birla was an even bigger “monopoly capitalist” than Goenka.

The main institution that tried to shield the press from government “excesses” was the Supreme Court. Its judgements, however, were sometimes censored. In this situation, people had to rely on rumours and hearsay with one important exception: the BBC radio service was able to beam to India even though its Indian office was closed. 

Soli Sorabjee has recounted some of these and other “punitive measures” in his book The Emergency, Censorship, and the Press in India, 1975-77, which was published shortly after the Emergency was lifted. It is only 61 pages long, but it vividly captures and exemplifies what happened in those years. The pendulum, however, could quickly swing back in favour of those who had opposed the Emergency. When his book was published, Soli Sorabjee had already become the Deputy Solicitor General of India.

This also applied to Lal Krishna Advani, who was jailed during the Emergency, but became the Minister of Information and Broadcasting in the Janata Party government led by Morarji Desai shortly after his release. According to Aschim Mukhopadhyay, LK Advani was of the opinion that if he were to choose between the freedom of the press, the freedom of the courts and political freedom, he would choose the freedom of the press. If people had been well-informed, the Emergency may have ended much earlier, he averred. As a minister in the Janata government, Advani did try to restore the freedom of the press.

One of the takeaways from the Stockholm seminar was that smaller Danish newspapers had a better coverage of India during the Emergency than the major dailies. Some of the bigger media could afford to post correspondents in Cairo, Tel Aviv, Beijing, Hong Kong, or Tokyo, but New Delhi was not prioritized. Therefore, smaller dailies like Information and Kristeligt Dagblad were able to match the bigger dailies in their coverage of India. To do this, they relied on contributions from students or academics, including me. Thus, I wrote one article about the JP movement for Information in 1975, and after I returned to Denmark in 1977, this newspaper published three more of my articles on the elections.

Image: David Bonavia presenting his paper. Next to him is the author flanked by Bo Utas, Swedish Persianist and comparative philologist. Stockholm, 1978, (courtesy: Sydasiensbulletinen, 3-4, November 1978). 

I also wrote an article about the elections in Kerala. This piece was not published, but I still remember it for the simple reason that I rightly predicted the outcome: the Congress and the CPI had a good election, and were able to form the state government. The opposition included the CPM and the BLD (precursor to the Janata Party), but they could not muster a majority.

To digress for a moment to the upcoming elections, the big question in Kerala as of 2024 may not be whether the CPM will be able to retain power, or whether the Congress will make a comeback, but whether the BJP will make a major inroad in the state. Today, I feel unable to predict the outcome.

Southern exceptionalism has a long-standing in Indian electoral history, and the South is emerging as a more well-defined political entity in 2024. That would point in the direction of a weak BJP performance in Kerala. However, having seen how the CPM has crumbled in West Bengal, I would not preclude a BJP wave. Election specialists, or “psephologists” as poll pundits used to be designated, are bound to make mistakes. I was no specialist on Kerala in 1977, but I knew that the Emergency had touched Kerala more lightly than in the north.

The seminar papers from the Stockholm conference were published in Sydasiensbulletinen. This Swedish newsletter started in 1977 in response, not the least, to the Indian Emergency. It was written by journalists, students, and academics on a largely voluntary basis, and it covered the entire South Asia. For years, the newsletter had a leftist bias. Thus, the Calcutta-based Marxist Ajit Roy wrote a column in each issue from 1982 to 2010. Roy was born in Dhaka in 1920, and he joined the CPI in 1940. However, when Joseph Stalin directed the CPI to be pro-Congress rather than anti-Congress, Roy got caught in the crosshairs, and in 1949 he was expelled from the party. In this situation, he seriously considered using his meagre economic means to travel to Moscow to bring his case to Stalin himself!

Roy later lost his blind faith in the wisdom and virtue of the dictator and became critical of both the CPI and the CPM. In 1981, he was a member of the Permanent People’s Tribunal in Stockholm, which held the USSR guilty of aggression in Afghanistan. Still, he remained a Marxist. In the words of Lars Eklund, who edited Sydasiensbulletinen and knew Roy well, it was the leftist comrades of Ajit Roy who, for thirty-four years from 1977 to 2011, kept the CPM in power in West Bengal with the charismatic leader Jyoti Basu as the Chief Minister of the state for most of the time. Despite its leftist leanings, the magazine published a variety of news and views. The fact that it covered all the South Asian countries in their diversity and mutual antagonism, forced it to be open-minded.

Remarkably, Sydasiensbulletinen still exists today under the name Sydasien. It may be the longest surviving Swedish publication conceived in solidarity with, or fascination of, the Third World. Its nearest equivalent in Germany is Südasien, and in South Asia itself, it may be the Himal Southasian magazine. A new venture called AwaazSouth Asia hosted by Jyoti Malhotra and others has a similar South Asian vista.

While this may go to explain how the Emergency spurred my interest in the press in India, I am surely not alone in this. For many people, the Emergency and its aftermath have remained a crucial experience. Here is how Satish Deshpande has recently recounted his memories of the elections in 1977:

“The important thing was to stand up and be counted. That is why the night of March 22 and 23, when election results were declared, stands out in my memory. At around 10 pm, a small group of us were walking from the Delhi University campus towards Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, where the newspaper offices used to be (The Hindu, The Times of India, The Indian Express, The Patriot).

There were one or two transistor radios (this was before mobile phones and the Internet), and as we listened, All India Radio broadcast the incredible news of victory after victory for the hastily assembled Janata Party. Somewhere between Kashmiri Gate and Daryaganj, we heard that Sanjay Gandhi had lost in Amethi and a little later that Indira Gandhi had lost in Raebareli. As we joined the large crowd in front of the newspaper offices where the results were being displayed on billboards, we felt part of History with a capital H.”

I do not remember where I was when the election results trickled in, but I agree that the end of the Emergency Raj felt like history with a capital ‘H.’ However, when looked at it from a longer perspective there have been many oscillations between authoritarian (or sultanistic, paternalistic or populist) regimes, and liberal regimes built on checks and balances. If my interest in the press in India was spurred by the Emergency, my interest in the courts had a long-term view.

The Courts: Liberalism in the Indo-Gangetic Plains

Many of those who write about law and the legal system in modern India do so with the Constitution in focus.

The Constitution is the Jewel in the Crown of the legal system. This makes the Constitution a natural starting point. My own interest in Indian law was spurred not so much by this gem, but by seeing the kutcherry in Meerut with its urban and rural clients, its munshis, touts, policemen, lawyers, judges, and the occasional mukhtar, and by hearing stories about protracted litigation and crime-without-punishment. The current Netflix series entitled Maamla Legal Hai graphically portrays this world of scheming actors bottom-up and inside-out as well as the beauty of justice, when miraculously delivered. 

Similar stories from India’s Cutcherries have been told for centuries. Already, in 1848, Panchkouree Khan published The Revelations of an Orderly: Being An Attempt To Expose The Abuses Of Administration By The Relation of Everyday Occurrences In The Mufassil Courts. It was written under the pseudonym Panchkouree Khan (which may be translated as Five Cowries or Five Cents) by one Mr Wyatt, who was a Eurasian deputy collector and magistrate posted in Benaras from 1841-53. Maamla Legal Hai takes place in the District Court of Patparganj in Delhi while Wyatt’s Orderly reported from Benaras nearly two centuries earlier. But the atmosphere is similar.

Image: Orderly making an announcement. Meerut cutcherry

There was a longer story here, which I decided to make the topic of my thesis (magisterafhandling). The thesis, A Study of Indian Lawyers, covered the roughly two centuries starting from the Crown Courts in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras at which barristers and attorneys practised. In 1793, Regulation VII created a class of vakils in order “that the pleading of causes should be made a distinct profession.” The vakils were to plead in the Company Courts outside the Presidential towns.

The second part of the thesis relied on historians, including CA Bayly and GFM Buckee, to portray the city of Allahabad, which became the seat of the High Court of the North Western Provinces around 1869. The last part of the thesis included recent anthropological studies from courts in Ambala and Bangalore as well as my own data from Meerut.

Theoretically, the thesis tried to unravel how lawyers became prominent in India’s independence movement. This gave the thesis a slant in the direction of comparative politics, but it was submitted to the Institute of Anthropology. Did it really belong to anthropology, or sociology, history, or political science? Had the Institute of Anthropology stuck to its disciplinary moorings, it could well have rejected it! The thesis was inordinately long, totalling 266 pages. In those days, there was no upper limit to the length of a magisterafhandling. This made some sense because it was typically the end-product of five years or more of independent studies, but today a PhD thesis may well be shorter than the magisterafhandling that I submitted in 1979.

This largesse enabled me to go to the India Office Library and Records in London, where, in 1977, I got hands-on experience with archival records. I also caught a glimpse of famous historians, including Eric Stokes, whose 1959 book The English Utilitarians in India helped me frame my argument. Stokes was about to publish The Peasant and the Raj in which he analysed the response to the 1857 mutiny across towns and villages in the Meerut area.

If the Emergency was a story about how the division of powers was temporarily abrogated, history offered examples of similar fluctuations. In Bengal, which was the epicentre of colonial legal and administrative reform, it took decades for a liberal order to crystalize. Subsequently, this dynamic played itself out over a wide geographical expanse as the British expanded westwards across the Indo-Gangetic plains.

Generally, the liberal and utilitarian ambitions weakened in favour of a more paternalistic form of government the further British power moved west. When the British reached Punjab, government officers would be revenue collectors, magistrates, and police. Such “single-seatedness” left little space for a legal profession. Paternalistic and authoritarian forms of administration were marked in Sindh, too, and they reached their apogee in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of the North-West Frontier Province.

Here, so-called Political Agents, rather than Deputy Commissioners, represented the government. The Political Agents kept the peace by distributing unaudited funds among tribal khans and maliks. The tribals were exempted from taxation. Hence, Tehsildars were not revenue collectors. Instead, they were designated as Political Tehsildars. In that role, they sat in the informal courts, or jirgas, where the tribal elders heard disputes.

When I wrote my thesis in the 1970s, the Supreme Court of Pakistan and the High Court of Peshawar had no jurisdiction over these areas.

Image: Urban lawyer, Mr. Sharma, in his home office in Meerut 

The Emergency was an aberration from Constitutional ideals and liberal practices. But it was not the only one in history.