Who said no good ever came of the Emergency? Jug Suraiya remembers

Editor’s Note: What do you do when you are  a young reporter in the middle of the Emergency? Jug Suraiya earned his stripes working for the Junior Statesman (JS) in Calcutta in the seventies covering everyone from Mother Teresa to Germaine Greer. It was a heady time. The Statesman’s new managing director or MD was Cushrow Irani, one of the youngest MDs in the media business. Suraiya was supposed to be capturing the pulse of a restless young population. The MD sent him off to Patna to interview Jayaprakash Narayan for JS to figure out what his message was for the youth of India. Soon all hell broke loose. Suraiya recounts what happened in his new memoir  JS & The Times of my Life (Tranquebar Press).  I don’t think it was my interview with JP that did it. (Yes, I did call it ‘A Sensation of Swaraj’.) At least I hope not. But shortly after it was published, Mrs G imposed her infamous Emergency. [caption id=“attachment_42763” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Indira Gandhi is seen here with Pierre Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister between 1968 and 1979. Reuters Archive”]  [/caption] Opposition leaders were arrested, the press muzzled. The country seemed to echo with the sound of jackboots on midnight stairs. The MD was ecstatic. Here was his long-awaited opportunity to become a martyr. From faraway Delhi came rumours about the excesses of the Emergency. These consisted largely of horror stories regarding autorickshaw operators who had forcibly been vasectomised. If even half these stories were true, autorickshawallas were a species doomed to be phased out of existence, like the great Indian Bustard or the Mauritian dodo. Newspaper editors and others had been arrested for their opposition to the Emergency. But there were few such cases in Calcutta, an invidious state of affairs which pricked the MD’s amour-propre. Each morning the MD would come to the JS, tucked away on a mezzanine floor of the Statesman building. Striding into Desmond’s cabin, he would ask for the JS team to be summoned. All of us would troop into Desmond’s cabin, including Johnny Angel. The MD was nothing if not democratic about these things. The MD would address the congregation. ‘Desmond, boys, they’re coming to take me away. I expect them at any moment. But even after I’ve gone, remember: Keep fighting the good fight, keep the flag of freedom unfurled. That’s all. Thank you and God bless till we meet again.’ Then, heels clicking counterpoint to the silent strains of ‘We shall overcome’, the MD would march out, presumably into the arms of the waiting constabulary. They never came. In the afternoon Desmond would phone the MD’s secretary, Gaver, to ascertain his fate. ‘The MD’s gone,’ she’d confirm. ‘To Lalbazar lock-up?’ Desmond would ask. ‘To the Bengal Club for lunch,’ she’d reply. And the next day the entire sequence would be repeated. Why the MD wasn’t arrested will remain one of the abiding enigmas of the Emergency. Certainly The Statesman, together with the Indian Express, had been highly critical of Mrs G’s government. But though various pressures were brought to bear, including attempts to discourage advertising in_The Statesman_, the authorities refused to arrest the MD. Perhaps it was bureaucratic oversight, or maybe plain bloody-mindedness. Or it could be that they’d heard about the taste he had developed for first-class Swiss Air service and felt that the accommodation they had to offer wouldn’t come up to scratch. Suppose they sent him to chokey and he later did one of his front-page ‘Caveat’ columns on how godawful the catering had been? Best not to risk it. I had no such protection. Moreover, just before the Emergency was declared, I’d written an article—Will The Real Sanjay Gandhi Please Stand Up?—on the resistible rise of Mrs G’s No. 2 son. Aruna Dasgupta, then a JS correspondent in Delhi, later told me that an exercised minister for information and broadcasting had brought the piece to the notice of Sanjay, who reportedly retorted: ‘Will someone please teach the mantriji how to read English?’ I don’t know if this instruction was heeded, but there was no night-time knock on my door, no tramp of boots on my stairs. Every week we took JS editorial copy to the censor’s office, where sizable chunks of presumably objectionable matter were blue-pencilled. Since we were not allowed to leave blank spaces, alternative copy had to be generated, often at short notice. Once I did a piece on the overnight train journey to Puri. I said that the bedding roll supplied by the railways had been nice and clean. Two days later, the railways PRO called me from Delhi. Would I like to travel to the capital, free of cost, and see how nice and clean the bed linen was on the Rajdhani? I thought of a free trip to Delhi. I though of those rumoured autorickshawallas. I didn’t think I looked particularly like an autorickshawalla in need of a vasectomy. But you never know. All in all, I deemed it best to decline the invitation. Apart from newsprint, air waves too had to be filled up with politically correct content. All India Radio rang me. Would I do a 30-minute talk on the Botanical Gardens? ‘What can I say for 30 minutes about the Botanical Gardens?’ I asked. You can give the Latin names of all the plants and trees; some of them are pretty long and should take up quite a lot of time, suggested AIR. I did the talk and was paid Rs 150 for it. Who said no good ever came of the Emergency? I learnt a lot of Latin names I’ve never had to use again. One day I was stuck for ideas for my weekly column, Rear Window. I decided I’d write on the Emergency. But during the Emergency you weren’t allowed to use the word emergency. So I looked up Roget and wrote a piece titled State of Exigency. It was all about how the Exigency had led to a great scientific breakthrough as represented by the world’s first fully functioning gobar gas plant. In fact, under the Exigency, the whole nation had become a fully functioning gobar gas plant. I kept my fingers crossed and hoped the censor did not have a thesaurus as well-thumbed as mine. I needn’t have worried. I was condemned to remain free during the dark, dire days of the Exigency. With the MD, that made two of us.