Who cares? Here's what the post-Emergency generation thinks about its 40th anniversary

Before the ‘Emergency’ surfaced as a prosaic, undramatic sub-section of a chapter in my ninth standard history textbook, the word usually invoked an arresting, dystopian image in my head. Formed with images borrowed from Hollywood war films and comics, the ‘Emergency’ was about helicopters swooping down on colleges, stone-faced soldiers marching through playgrounds and people walking around cities sullenly. These images were generally set to the sound of the morning siren aired daily at 7 am by the neighbourhood south Kolkata police station or the growl of Army trucks, culled from American disaster films. For a generation that didn’t live through the turmoil, the Emergency figured in their lives as dinner-time anecdotes at times, as sarcastic analogies at others, or simply as rambles of ‘old people’. [caption id=“attachment_2312192” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Representational image. AFP[/caption] “Dad’s imposed Emergency at home,” a high-school friend had smirked, two days after she was grounded for bunking tuition classes. She wouldn’t have been the first Indian born long after the era to have flippantly used the event as a metaphor for things unpleasant, or simply annoying. To a generation whose biggest ’emergency’ is a mobile phone running out of charge, a political event that took place at least a decade before they were born, is only so relevant. However, it is still one political event that figures in our vocabulary and in our popular culture, despite it having taken place 40-years ago. It perhaps has to do with the fact that the generation before ours has compelling reasons to bring the Emergency up in conversations. Curfews? Black-outs? Civil War? Sushmit Roy Chowdhury, a 31-year-old employee of KPMG, based out of Hyderabad remembers being slightly disappointed at how colourless the Emergency was from his father’s accounts about life in Jalandhar. “He was in college and he said that things around him had suddenly turned more efficient; trains and buses ran on time, teachers would show up for classes, everyone suddenly seemed to have pulled their socks up, but there was still a sense of unease hanging in the air. “Otherwise, things were pretty much normal for him; which is in stark contrast of the image I had in mind of curfews and deserted streets and sirens going off, which are probably more befitting of a country at war than of what the Emergency was,” Roy Chowdhury said. Except for people who have taken academic interest in the social, economic and political implications of the Emergency, most others seem to be on the same page as Roy Chowdhury, translating the word visually with a little help from films. It didn’t quite help that as teenagers, the idea of forced vasectomies seemed like a nightmare. Sanjay Gandhi, therefore, for many stuck out as a dapper villain - a white kurta-clad man who herded unfortunate people who hospitals and literally cut them up. Aditi Jain, a 30-year-old marketing professional based out of Delhi, said that the first memory of a conversation around emergency she has also involved a discussion around Indira Gandhi’s assassination and the ‘dark powers’ of Sanjay Gandhi. “My Dabudo (maternal grandfather)​ was having a conversation with my mother about Indira Gandhi. Either it was about her assassination or they were discussing the idiocy of Sanjay Gandhi. I was very intrigued by the use of the word ‘Emergency’ in that context and imagined doctors rushing to the Gandhi household,” Jain said. For others, the very first impressions of the period was of an event that gave us our first example of autocracy after independence. Ravindra Sinkar, a 36-year-old head of finance and law of Brick Eagle, remembers that the ‘Emergency’ often came up during conversations at home back in 1989, when the second non-Congress government had assumed power in the country. “The political conversations then was all bout the genesis of the Janta movement. Understandably, the excesses of the Congress during the Emergency came up,” says Sinkar. Umaire Effendi, a 24-year-old journalist too remembers a conversation around Emergency first coming up when his father set out to introduce him to the internet. “The state of not knowing as he called it, was the first time I heard about the Emergency,” Effendi said, recalling how his father explained it was impossible to know what was going on in the country, with the clampdown on the media. And since there was no internet, Effendi’s father remembers living anxious days trying to tell rumour from fact. Some like Aly Basith, a 25-year-old lawyer based out of Hyderabad, there is a fairly scarring memory of the time, handed down by his mother. “Immediately after the emergency was lifted. my mother was driving home and her car was pelted with stones, and attacked by a mob of Congress supporters. She had to speed away into the airport to seek refuge from the mob,” Basith said, adding that his opinion of the time obviously matured later as a student of law. Emergency? *Yawn* [caption id=“attachment_2312194” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Indira Gandhi during the emergency. Getty Images[/caption] However, few from this generation can actually put a date to the Emergency. For example, Jyothy Karat, a Bangalore-based photographer admits to having heard her father talk relentlessly about the Emergency, but the stories of the time coalesce with stories of several other political events of the past. “When you say emergency, Indira Gandhi comes to mind. No clue about the years. May be 70s? My father has a tendency to narrate family histories in the context of the country’s geopolitical landscape. I never paid too much attention,” Karat said. Jain too can’t put the exact years the Emergency remain imposed, though both know that it was in the 70s. You can’t blame them. Though reams of newsprint will be devoted analysing the Emergency, people with even deep interest in contemporary politics don’t see much sense in referring to the time while discussing the merits our demerits of the political narratives before us now. “Frankly speaking our generation doesn’t give a hoot about the emergency or for that matter even about the Babri Masjid demolition,” Sinkar said. Basith explains why he and his peers don’t discuss the era often. “It appears that the Emergency has been resigned as an unfortunate period that happened ages ago. People seem to believe that it cannot happen again or will not be employed again in the manner it earlier was as it will be political suicide and that our judicial institutions now provide a robust defence mechanism against any probable mischief,” he said. Jain and Karat too admit that the Emergency doesn’t come up too often in most conversations.Except maybe, when someone declares some state should be put under ‘Emergency’, out of sheer outrage. ‘When the Badaun rapes happened and incidents kept happening in UP and Akhilesh’s crass comments came out, I felt and strongly advocated that a state of Emergency be declared in the state of UP. Some part of me feels that we are too rowdy to deserve a full democracy yet,” 28-year-old Mumbai lawyer Arunima Chatterjee Ghosh said. The Modi factor Of those feel that the debates on Emergency received a new lease of life after the social media boom and the interest in the new Narendra Modi government, the first non-Congress government the country has had in a decade. Roy Chowdhury, for example, said that while conversations around the Emergency wouldn’t take place frequently even a few years back, now they aren’t as rare. However, those conversations are always centred around the Modi government. Interestingly, Sinkar too drew a parallel between the discourse around the Emergency to the more recent Babri Masjid demolition. “The only times the discussion has come up, it had to do with a Modi supporter wanting to come up with a counter-argument for Modi’s role in what happened in Gujarat in 2002,” says Roy Chowdhury. LK Advani may have fanned the flame a little more in a recent interview.  “At the present point of time, the forces that can crush democracy, notwithstanding the constitutional and legal safeguards, are stronger,” Advani had said, without directly naming a person or a party. Effendi corroborated  this. “People talk about a possible Emergency in the future (even more so after Mr. Advani’s comments). When it does come up, there’s a lot of anger voiced by the people who’ve lived through the period, and trepidation by the people who know enough about it,” he said. However, everyone seems to agree that the Emergency means nothing to our generation - at least to the middle class. The details of the time are fuzzy for us and the prerogative to learn about it is missing, perhaps due to the interesting political turns of our own times. For others, the Emergency is a ghost the media loves. And no one else really cares about any more. “The media uses the Emergency as a stick to beat Congress with, the same way they use Babri demolition to beat BJP with,” Sinkar quipped.