When will India wake up and realise its Emergency 2.0?

Only a forgetful culture makes a spectacle of remembrance. Because we forget so easily, we have calibrated history with numerous "anniversaries", which gather decadal momentum every ten years, somehow assuming even greater significance in the ritual of observing them than having an impact whatsoever in how they affect us now. Anniversaries are museumisation of memories, mostly traumatic, unspeakable memories of the near and distant past. Past that is the walking undead amongst us, but in glass coffins of state-led remembrance that often prevent critical reengagement.

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the proclamation of Emergency by late former prime minister Indira Gandhi. On the night of June 25, 1975, Mrs Gandhi, veritably ruffled by the oppositional build-up against the cult of her unquestionable supremacy, invoked Article 352(1) of the Indian Constitution citing "internal disturbance" and "rule by decree" was declared with immediate effect. The subsequent 21-month period has been described as the "darkest hour" in the history of independent India, a complete subsuming of democracy, suspension of all kinds of civil liberties, mass-scale incarceration of dissidents and political opponents, press gag and drills like Sanjay Gandhi's compulsory vasectomy.

The journalistic note-making notwithstanding, what exactly was the Emergency? Why is it routinely branded as the weakest moment for democracy in India when the aam aadmi perhaps found day-to-day life marginally improved, when official files and even oral anecdotes recorded "trains running on time", "corruption eradicated" from all levels of bureaucracy, "military pride" and "patriotism" touching the sky after engineering arch-rival Pakistan's defeat in the 1971 war of Bangladesh's independence? When the biggest banks were nationalised, privy purse nullified through ordinance and Indira Gandhi, the undisputed Imperator Furiosa of postcolonial India, barely taking a break from splitting the grand old party of Indian National Congress along loyalty and lineage, became indistinguishable from India the nation. "Indira is India, India is Indira" - sloganeered DK Barooah in 1974, and the heart that most earnestly believed in the phantasmagoria thus created was none other than Indira Gandhi herself.

Ramachandra Guha in The Indian Express and Gopalkrishna Gandhi in the The Hindu have underlined the philosophical underpinnings of Emergency. It was not only a political prison-house that put the Nehru-Gandhi idea of India in suspended animation, neither killing it completely (courtesy the core Constitutional safeguards that couldn't be altered), nor letting it breathe. Democracy was strangled because freedom was taken away and what was offered in lieu was the semblance of "order" and efficiency in place of chaos. Paranoia and megalomania, as rightly pointed out by Gopal Gandhi, were the foundation of such a delight and dependence on a manic need for order, which was just a euphemism for Indira Gandhi's obsessive urge to control everything. In her effort to script India in her own image, the vector of order was a tight whalebone corset that the country found itself wearing, though it was paraded as the much-needed crutch to help the rickety nation walk.

True, the excesses of Emergency are still unparalleled, technically. But between 1969, when Indira split the Congress, and June 1975 when she imposed Emergency (ostensibly advised by the West Bengal CM Siddhartha Shankar Ray, her confidant-in-chief), the cult of Indira was what drove the national narrative. It was, as it were, she was tapping into civilisational memory of monarchical whimsies, and the colonial bowing before the Empress Victoria. Indira Gandhi - at once Durga, Mother India, Indira Amma - had hypnotised not just her own country, she had won over the entire world with her charismatic presence enjoyed hearily by Lyndon Baines Johnson, the then president of the United States. Moreover, the collective orgasm over military pride happened on May 18, 1974, when India conducted the first nuclear test in Pokhran, effectively paving the first stone towards permanent nuclear militarisation. This, while Sanjay Gandhi, the "extra-constitutional power" of the Indira regime, was steadfastly working towards steering India away from parliamentary democracy to a presidential model, to consolidate ever more power in the hands of the One.

With the political climate dwarfing Jacobean court intrigues, India in the 1970s was waging a battle with itself. Indira Gandhi was wrenching India away from an ideal dreamt up by the founding fathers and mothers of independence, which deeply respected internal democracy and freedom of thought despite coalescing around the figureheads of MK Gandhi or Jawaharlal Nehru. Luminaries lit up the firmament of freedom struggle. But the Indira faction of Congress, though by far outweighing the slice that refused to accept her leadership, was a pale shadow of the INC, with politicians mainly ensuring their own longevity by blatant displays of sycophancy. Any opposition was duly punished, within and outside the government.

Hence, if the Jaya Prakash Narayan movement, that formed the bedrock of what today is the Bharatiya Janata Party, essentially was Indira's comeuppance, deriving its sustenance from the acidic soil of Emergency, what has become of it, especially under the current regime of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is deeply ironical, and in fact, a cruel joke of historical mirrorings.

The parallels between Indira Gandhi and Narendra Modi are not biographical or ideological but exist farther below, in the benighted reservoir of the subterranean instincts that violently suppress any sign of difference. Indira aligned with the secular Left: indeed her policies were pro-poor and doggedly anti-communal, almost militantly so because it was shifting the balance from a situation of patronage to that of welfare entitlements. Her political opposition was a motley group of capitalists, Hindutvawadis of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, and others from the "political right", as well as those who, while being systematically awed by Indira's strongman tactics echoing say a Soviet Union or a Cuba, were also haunted by the spectre of Sanjay Gandhi's political and social engineering skills, such as the notorious mass sterilisation drive to curb population. The assault on independence of judiciary was enormous. The demolition of slums and shanty towns of Delhi and Bombay has perhaps a faint echo in the present-day land grab plaguing swathes of central and eastern India.

Narendra Modi, on the other hand, is a messiah of the Right. He is a capitalist's wet dream, the prophet of profit-mongering. His is a divestment drive, and after Jawaharlal Nehru, he's easily the most travelled prime minister of India, with a planetary sway. Observing the first International Day of Yoga on June 21 (summer solstice, the longest day in the calendar) was essentially the icing on a supermassive cake of foreign policy adventurism embarked upon in just one year. This architect of the New India is shredding the so-called dead weight of history by not just hollowing out previous icons, like Nehru, or appropriating them to suit his "majoritarian raj" (such as those of Bose, Gandhi and Ambedkar), but also by establishing absolute control on an otherwise messy beast called the media.

Modi's grasp and hold of media will fill up several chapters in "how not to do democracy" some day. Unlike Indira Gandhi, or a say a Vladimir Putin from the current crop of world leaders, Modi's clampdown on media is pathologically covert, yet menacingly upfront. On the one hand, it is defined by economic and political choking of mainstream media, including most of the print publications. On the other, it is clogging up the so-called free and spontaneous spaces of social media, which is supposed to empower the citizens to become highly audible vox populi. Under the present regime, the algorithms of the cyber world are engaged in fortifying the already impenetrable hold of Narendra Modi, by floating and trending hashtags like #56Inchrocks, #ModiPrideOfIndia to artificially beef up the mythic torso of the man and the regime. Barring a few news-houses and small digital outlets, Indian media is now a lesson in spinelessness, with more holy cows than ever. And while some daring journalists and authors attempt to chronicle this era of crony capitalism (which of course preceded the coronation of Narendra Modi, but nevertheless formed the grammar of his rise), who can actually unspool the tangled wires that form the vascular systems of "parallel states" like the Ambanis and Adanis and yet be left unscathed? Heck, scribes in the heartlands are being burnt alive or mowed down under the wheels of speeding vehicles for simply doing their job. Where is the hue and cry over the tragic death of Jagendra Singh?

True, most will agree with LK Advani's assessment that "when asked to bend, media crawled" during Emergency. Barring the Indian Express, and a print magazine called India Today that was launched in 1975 and came out with its first issue in December that year, the fourth estate just crumbled like a pack of cards before the might of Indira. No one will contest the fact that the entire opposition had been jailed during a great chunk of those 21 months, and that the press gag meant not just not questioning or inviting governmental ire, but in fact incarceration, plain and simple. In the public eye, that was more glaring, more stark because it was yet unimaginable. However, in the present theatre of systematically groomed compliance, and the blitzkrieg of majoritirianism paraded as pride and shine of an India Risen, in the ostentatious marriage of boardroom Hindutva with institutional reconfiguration to turn India into a tabula rasa of militant nationalism, a country of smartphone-happy Lord Rams and Sitas, we are only a few sentencings away from the event horizon that will once again hurtle us into the black hole.

Yet, a prescient margin would say we are already in soft Emergency. It's like vaccination really. Once given a dose, one has become immune to the harrowing ideological and philosophical evisceration that it had brought about. Emergency-lite is now the accepted state of being, and reverence for the dear leader, the Deliverer from Chaos, is the cornerstone for yogic self-emancipation.

Emergency is an allegory of our time. It is a tale we tell ourselves so that we don't have to look at what's happening here and now.