Did the media actually crawl during Emergency?

I have no memory of the Emergency. The only impression I have of its excesses is through a friend of my father’s, the editor of a Bangla little magazine, Samatat. I remember eavesdropping on a conversation where he boasted to my parents that he used to move around Calcutta at night wearing knuckle-dusters during the dark days of the Emergency — ready to smash faces, in case he was harassed. I was amazed then. And I continue to be amazed now. I don’t think he ever used those. His magazine was too literary, had too little circulation, to come under the radar of the powers that be. But in my mind the Emergency became a monster forever. Today, on the 40th anniversary of the Emergency, I recognise in him a fearless journalist, who refused in his small, crazy way, to crawl.

In a raft of interviews, the veteran BJP leader Lal Krishna Advani, a former journalist, has now famously said that when Indira Gandhi asked “the media to bend, it crawled.” On the night the Emergency was declared, most major opposition leaders were arrested. So was Advani, on June 26, and incarcerated for 19 months in Bangalore Central Jail, along with Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Shyamnandan Mishra. Do people of big politics ever really know how little people in their everyday lives show courage?

I am a bit confused. Didn’t Mr Advani in 2002, as deputy prime minister, comment at a function organised by journalists that the period between 1975 and 1977 “was the most difficult phase for journalists.?” That such a situation “had not been witnessed even during the British rule?” That it was during the Emergency that everybody understood that journalism was “the lifeline of democracy?”

In a piece written for the Scroll this week, journalist Kalpana Sharma has written a vivid and haunting piece on what happened to the media during those days: No one could publish “dangerous” news, “rumours or anything objectionable that had been printed outside India,” no “prejudicial reports,” and always had to submit copies to “the censors”. Tens of thousands of journalists were arrested, among them Kuldip Nayar and Gour Kishore Ghosh, for violating these. The Indian Express and The Statesman suffered for printing blank edit pages. A lot of publications folded up, a lot complied and a lot waged lonely wars. The small English-language weekly, Himmat, that Ms Sharma worked for, survived the Emergency.

I remember Gour Kishor Ghosh in the 1990s. He was still writing for the Ananda Bazar Patrika. And he still looked angry, even when he smiled. But I remember the regard everyone had for him — not just for his penmanship (not everything was translated unlike the Sagina Mahato), his Magsaysay award for his protests but for his suffering during the Emergency. Apparently, he had shaved off all his hair when it was imposed. It was “bereavement” for the death of his freedom to write, he had explained in a letter to his 13-year old son. That, somehow, got published in Kolkata, a Bangla monthly, and led to his arrest. He wrote more letters from the jail — all translated, circulated and published clandestinely, as symbols of protest against abuses of authoritarianism — until he was weakened by a series of heart attacks.

That’s my own little memory. There must be millions of stories from across the nation. What we need is research, digging deep into the past and documenting memories — big and small — before coming up with grand sweeping comments that can distort what really happened, forever.