Quote:-"The budget available per detenue for the daily food was rupees three."
That was basically starvation level, since most middle class eateries charged two rupees for a limited meal, and three was barely enough for a mal, a tea and a snack.
Quote:- "An atmosphere of fear and terror prevailed in the country outside."
True! Few dares speak against it. A silence was usually only broken with a loud agreement with official banal statement such as those in favour of sacrificing few for benefit of many.
"Political activity had come to a grinding halt."
So Very opposite of The picture since 2014!
"The dissenters were mainly political workers of the opposition party and the RSS. They kept repeatedly organizing Satyagrahas where a number of people courted arrest. It goes to the credit of Shiromani Akali Das that it offered its cadres for Satyagraha every day throughout the Emergency outside the Golden Temple and courted arrest. This earned Akali Dal a great respect in the entire country. The RSS which was unfairly banned also provided a large cadre for Satyagraha."
That explains the vicious silent campaign to decimate the former and very vocal fraudulent propaganda against the latter, with genocide of Sikhs perpetrated in name of riots '84, and frenzied propaganda in high gear against BJP, RSS and generally Hindus, increasingly ever since.
"The press was completely terrorized. Most editors and journalists surrendered and reconciled with the Idea of living in dictatorship. The Congress Party newspaper “National Herald” editorially commented that time had come for India to evolve into a single party democracy. Mrs. Gandhi herself called for the graduation of India from democracy to a “disciplined democracy”. To give it credibility at the cost of losing his own, Acharya Vinoba Bhave called the Emergency “Anushasan Parva”. "
Hence the use of the said party newspaper to perpetrate fraud in recent years by her elder branch of family, with various party spokespeople asking why anyone should bother about what is family property - which the paper never was! And hence, too, the complete loss of credibility for the once respected Vinoba!
"There were, however, dissenters in the media. The Indian Express and The Statesmen played legendary role in letting know their dissent against the Emergency. Ram Nath Goenka, C.R. Irani and Editor Kuldeep Nayar became the symbols of press freedom during the Emergency."
Yes, the ones with courage and integrity. What pressures were brought upon them then and subsequently through years, by the vindictive party and family single minded in pursuit of a dynasty and an aristocratic structure to convert India into an image of western caste system complete with royalty et al in all but name, can only be guessed.
Arun Shourie remains his true self as an investigative author.
Quote:- "Curiously, around the same time in January, 1975 “Motherland”, a daily newspaper edited by K.R. Malkani, had published a front page article based on the astrological prediction by Dr. Vasanth Kumar Pandit, a Jan Sangh MP and astrologer, predicting proclamation of Emergency, arrest of the entire opposition members, censorship on media and India becoming an autocratic State. When published, I found it difficult to believe this astrological prediction. During the Emergency, one of my co-detenues in prison was K.R. Malkani himself. Malkani told me that when arrested on the midnight of 26th June, while others were straightway taken to Rohtak Jail, he was, for three days, kept in a guest house in Haryana and taken to the jail after three days. During those three days, he was grilled by the intelligence agencies as to his source of information on the basis of which that article predicting the Emergency had been enforced. The agencies thought this was a major leak in the Government and were investigating the matter.
Malkani, however, consistently maintained that this was only an astrological prediction. Cumulatively, it was these facts that persuaded me to believe that the script for the Emergency was prepared sometime in January, 1975. The immediate trigger would have been the Allahabad High Court judgement and the insecurity caused by it to Mrs. Gandhi’s positon."
Very interesting in two separate ways, of which the obvious is mentioned by Mr Arun Jaitley here - that the emergency machinery was set up prior to the publication of astrological prediction, else why suspect the astrologer of having inside information? And yet, the facade of the decision being spontaneous has been maintained ever since, by congress!
What other such similar events were not as spontaneous but in fact prepared carefully by congress and yet named otherwise in fruadulent propaganda to the contrary maintained for decades? Obviously '84 comes to mind, but that is in all likelihood just one of the scores of such examples.
Quote:- ".... in the Nuremberg trials, it was established that Reichstag fire was the handiwork of Nazis and Goebbels had conceived it. Hitler continued to maintain that his actions were within the four corners of the Constitution. Mrs. Gandhi imposed the Emergency under Article 352, suspended fundamental rights under Article 359 and claimed that “disorder was planned by the opposition in the country”. The security forces were being asked to disobey illegal orders and, therefore, in the larger interest of the nation, India had to become a “disciplined democracy”.
Both Hitler and Mrs. Gandhi never abrogated the Constitution. They used a republican Constitution to transform democracy into dictatorship."
One, those that use invoking constitution as holy book forget that it's amenable and only as good as the motives of those that wrote it or can amend it. India had the infamous 42nd amendment during the emergency, and a few more draconian amendments and bills proposed during the recent UPA regime would have had the majority terrorised with threat of an accusation by someone putting them in jail without habeous corpus or any other help, for ever, as long as the accuser was of a powerful minority. Needless to say this proposed bill did not include a possibility of, say, a Jew or a Tibetan or a Parsi or a Buddhist , Jain or Sikh accusing someone of the more numerous minority!
https://www.republicworld.com/india-news/politics/arun-jaitley-asks-the-most-damning-question-about-emergency-here-it-is
