Having suffered the excesses of Emergency, Kuldip Nayar and others have written extensively on the subject. Coomi Kapoor, a fledgling reporter at the time, has little to add apart from the hand-written letter by Siddhartha Shankar Ray (Dark Chapter & Worse, Jun 22). I wonder how reliable the facts are in a book written 40 years after the event. Here are some prize errors. Indira Gandhi (born 1917) went to Somerville College, Oxford, for a year in 1937 and returned to India by 1941 while S.S. Ray (born 1920) did not go to the UK till 1946, that too to join Lincoln’s Inn. He was not an Oxbridge product and studied at the University Law College, Calcutta. So there is no question of “their friendship being renewed when they were both students in the UK”. In fact, it was Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed who attended St Catherine’s College, Cambridge, and met Jawaharlal Nehru when he was in England. The wording of the slogan about Hitler and Germany too seems to have been concocted. The actual slogan was ‘Adolf Hitler ist der Sieg’ (Adolf Hitler is the State). The other famous slogan was ‘Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer’. D.K. Barooah should be given his due for coining the alliterative ‘Indira is India, India is Indira’!
Prof D.N. Bose, on e-mail
Soon after the Emergency was promulgated in June 1975, my elderly parents were travelling to New Delhi from Howrah by the Rajdhani Express. Just as we were settling in our parents in the coupe allotted to them, armed security personnel very rudely asked us to alight from the coach as Siddhartha Shankar Ray was also travelling in the adjoining coupe. My father objected to this rudeness vehemently. However, the quintessential bhadralok that S.S. Ray was, he ticked the security personnel off and told my father to make himself comfortable. Kudos to the man.
Surendra Garg, on e-mail
We will never know if it was Sanjay Gandhi’s Emergency or Indira’s. But he did have a vice-like grip on his mother, often reducing the Iron Lady to a puppet. One wonders whether she was saddened or relieved when he died in an air crash (which was never probed). But she did display undue interest in retrieving a bunch of keys from the mangled remains and made a hasty retreat rather than brood at the crash site.
M.A. Raipet, Secunderabad
It may have been a bad time for the Opposition, the media and sundry others, but for the common man, it was quite okay. Trains were running on time, newspapers were blanks and the government employees were scared enough to actually do some work. It was what happened afterwards that was worse: the slow erosion of institutions, the complete corruption everywhere, and the misuse of freedom by Indians to spit and litter everywhere.
Dinesh Kumar, Chandigarh
Democracy needs democrats at all levels. Those who slaughtered democracy were by nature and upbringing feudal and considered it their birthright to trample upon the people and treat the country as their personal fiefdom.
J.N. Bhartiya, Hyderabad
India has been a difficult nation to govern for those who have been chosen, by themselves and others, to govern it. There have been plenty of conflicts within India between the government and her people. When it comes to the crunch, people have had to question their own patriotism because questioning the elected political class could prove counterproductive for everyone concerned. Yet, I wonder why this should be so. The voter is king, and the elected, even if they vote for themselves, can be voted out of power, at the whims of the voters.
Aditya Mukherjee, Belgaum
The political nadir we saw in 1975 was built on hero worship. The clock seems to have turned full circle and the same process is happening again. Worse, this time, it needs no formal declaration as an undeclared censorship is already in force.
Rakesh Agrawal, Dehradun
If Indian Express carried a blank space in its editorial, the Financial Express carried Rabindranath Tagore’s poem Where the mind is without fear, and the head is held high....
K.S. Jayatheertha, Bangalore
Having witnessed the dark age of the Emergency, I can vouch that Coomi Kapoor’s account is mature and honest.
V.N.K. Murti, Pattambi
Reading Coomi Kapoor’s excerpt was like watching a horror movie all over again.
Rama Krishna M., Kakinada
