How Salman Khurshid is wrong in defending Emergency
One expects lawyers to be logical. And if lawyers are also senior politicians, the responsibility on them to be rational, coherent and consistent gets bigger. Senior Congress leader Salman Khurshid is one of the true Lutyens' insiders, growing up here as his maternal grandfather Zakir Hussain was India's first Muslim President and his father Khurshid Alam Khan was a Congress minister, later becoming a governor. Khurshid went to the elite St Stephen's College, Delhi and studied Law at the Oxford, UK. For some time, he even taught at Trinity College in Oxford.
He won from Farrukhabad Lok Sabha seat in 1991 and became minister of state for external affairs in the Narasimha Rao government. He again became a minister of state (MoS) for external affairs in the Manmohan Singh-led UPA government, and since then, rising from MoS to cabinet rank and holding portfolios of water resources, corporate affairs, minority affairs, law and justice and external affairs. Twice, he has been president of Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee.
Those were Khurshid's educational and political backgrounds. He is also endowed with several other intellectual qualities. He has authored Sons of Babur, which has been staged as a play with Tom Alter acting in the lead role. Recently, he debuted as an actor in a video on the Shah Rukh Khan-starrer 2003 romantic drama Kal Ho Naa Ho, playing the role of Saif Ali Khan along with the then German Ambassador to India, Michael Steiner, and the latter's wife Eliese in the title song.
But Khurshid is not new to controversy either. In the latest of the series, on July 13 he defended Emergency imposed by the then prime minister Indira Gandhi and said the Congress need not apologise for it. "Why should we apologise? Why should we discuss Emergency? Certain things happened. After that, people of India voted Indira Gandhi as the prime minister. So, if we have to apologise, then people of India will also have to apologise...why did they elect her?...When people thought it was wrong, they voted us out of power. When they realised that the decision was right, they voted us back to power," he said.
There are several reasons for which the Congress should apologise to the people for imposing Emergency - for putting a blot on the nation's democracy, for crushing human rights, for committing excesses, for severely curtailing press freedom, for putting people behind bars without any rhyme or reason, for forcing men to undergo vasectomy and many other such unquestionably undemocratic acts.
A scar will always remain on Indian democratic traditions due to Emergency. Nowadays, even the slightest of harsh order by the Centre or any state is compared with Emergency, is labeled "dictatorial" and the opposition makes a hue and cry over it. The Congress itself has been alleging that Prime Minister Narendra has imposed an undeclared Emergency. Senior BJP leader LK Advani's "forces that can crush democracy are stronger…I don't have the confidence it (Emergency) cannot happen again" statement has become an oft-repeated jibe by the Congress at Modi.
Amrith Lal writes in The India Express how the media was censored, how most mainstream dailies barring The Indian Express and The Statesman towed the government line, while the two dauntless newspapers left the lead editorial space blank as a mark of protest. Several publications were censored or banned, India-based correspondents of several foreign publications were expelled, BBC correspondent Mark Tully was withdrawn and Kuldip Nayar of The Indian Express was detained for organising a protest of journalists in Delhi. According to the home ministry, 7,000 persons were held for circulating clandestine literature opposing the Emergency. Playback singer late Kishore Kumar was banned by All India Radio for refusing to support the youth wing of the Congress.
According to the Shah Commission, which probed the excesses of the Emergency, 1,10,806 men and women were detained and arrested under Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA) and Defence of India Rules throughout the country. Dozens of parliamentarians were put behind bars and several political inmates were tortured. The poor became victims of the target for compulsory family planning programme set by Sanjay Gandhi.
By defending Emergency, Khurshid has also given an opportunity to the Sangh Parivar and Modi supporters to justify the 2002 Gujarat riots. They may say in the same vein that the Congress should not seek Modi's apology for the 2002 Gujarat riots.
Khurshid may be criticised by the BJP leaders for asking Modi to apologise for the post-Godhra riots. "Has Narendra Modi forgotten what happened in 2002? Has he apologised for that?" he asked in October, 2013. He was reacting to Modi who, as the then Gujarat chief minister and BJP's prime ministerial candidate, had questioned Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi's statement that Pakistan's agencies had got in touch with Muslim youths, who were victims of Muzaffarnagar riots.
Why only Emergency? Tomorrow, someone from the Congress would go to the extent of saying that the party should not feel sorry even for the anti-Sikh riots of 1984. After all, even that was a reaction to the assassination of the then prime minister Indira Gandhi and it has become history. The Congress has won general elections twice after that - in 2004 and 2009. And did the then prime minister Manmohan Singh commit a mistake when he apologised not only to the Sikhs but the whole nation while speaking in Parliament on August 12, 2005?
Emergency is as indefensible as the anti-Sikh riots or the 2002 Gujarat riots. So, should India do away with demanding apologies from political parties and politicians for the acts of commission and omission during their rule? Only a person of Khurshid's stature can answer.