ON June 26, 1975, the Government of India organised a coup against the people of India. A new noun entered the Indian political vocabulary as a result: Emergency. This book, of four chapters, documents the manner in which that coup was organised, nurtured and finally ended.

Democracy that the people had begun to take for granted was curtailed by the imposition of the Emergency in June 1975. All those who had been charged with nurturing democracy and freedom — politicians, government officials, judges, and journalists — collectively contributed to the demise of democracy. The people looked on with mixed feelings. A façade of legality was maintained but soon enough the subordination of the rule of law to the executive was used by many in power to settle private scores and line their own pockets. A year and a half later, in January 1977, the government withdrew the Emergency as suddenly much as it had imposed it. The subsequent elections resulted in the quondam ruling party being almost entirely wiped out.

The end of the Emergency allowed for an opportunity to journalists to write many quickies. Kuldip Nayar's version was called The Judgement. As with most quickies, it was short on details, high on rhetoric, low on logic and the author made no bones about the axe that he was trying to grind. But at least it whetted the public's appetite for information on what was going on in the then regal courts of Delhi. For, in those poverty-struck days without television, telephonic connectivity and few newspapers, people were starved of information. In the plains of North India, most information was being carried much as it had been done during the Indian Mutiny of 1857: by word of mouth. Most of the information was about where the police was going to lay a naka for catching men to emasculate. For, during the Emergency, sterilising humans had almost become an obsession with the Prime Minister's son and thence the government.

It is the story of takeover of power by the mother-and-son duo, Indira Gandhi and Sanjay, that forms the crux of Nayar's narrative. Indira, he says, always had an authoritarian streak. When the Allahabad High Court nullified her election on a technical ground that had been used to unseat many before her, she felt aggrieved. Her younger son Sanjay suggested the short-circuiting of all democratic processes to ensure her continuation as Prime Minister. She and her colleagues concurred. President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, beholden to Indira for his post, agreed as well. So did the judiciary. The Civil Services found this a grand opportunity to reimpose a garrison state on India of the kind that only colonial India had seen.

To this narrative of collective failure, Nayar adds the numerous details of people opposing the Emergency. In his desire to discover heroism where none existed, Nayar even ignores the observation of Lal Krishna Advani, then a senior leader of the Bharatiya Jan Sangh and a vehement critic of Indira, the Emergency and the Congress, one of the persons who was jailed during the Emergency, that all that Indira asked was for people to bend but they began to crawl.

When the book was first published in 1977, perhaps such oversight, if not ignorance, was understandable. One can only deal with this much and not more in a quickie. But if no effort has been made to update anything, falsehoods are repeated, even after four decades, then one wonders about the reasons for reprinting the book, mistakes and all. Thus àpropos nothing, Nayar tells us of Sanjay Gandhi slapping his mother “six times”. We only have Nayar's statement for it.

Even more irresponsible is Nayar’s repetition of the charge that JP was poisoned, while ignoring entirely the narrative of the concerned doctor, the much-respected Professor Chuttani of the PGI explaining the treatment given to JP at the PGI. That narrative is available in the public domain.