Emergency Diaries

Elsewhere, there were stinging poems of defiance for those who cared to read. Inspired university students unafraid of incarceration were picked up from their hostels in the dead of night. Multiple forms of underground activism were beginning to take root. If people in Punjab were walking out in loud and visible signs of protest, courting arrest each passing day, those in other states were found strategically intuiting innovative ways of engaging with a doddering repressive State.

To the small credit of the ruling dispensation, though, it must be said that it did not deploy the by now openly used tactic of dividing people along communal lines to manufacture consensus in support of its suspension of people’s constitutional rights through coercion, censorship and plain threats and lies…

A few personally witnessed incidents come to my mind as I look back. They are symptomatic of the times we lived through.

Scene 1 — late 1975

Two DTC buses with a load of unwilling writers stop in front of a street in Karol Bagh. An eminent Hindi writer, the gentlest soul I have ever known, gets off the bus to fetch another eminent Punjabi writer to be carted to 10 Safdarjung Road in a show of demonstrable solidarity with Indira Gandhi… Thereafter, the evenings become uncannily quiet and a darkness descends over the poet’s house and sits heavy forever, resulting in poetic expressions of self-loathing. The poet keeps returning to mourn the ‘people with cleft tongues’ who acquiesced in silence.

Scene 2 — early 1976

I am at Delhi’s Ambedkar Stadium to witness the final of the Rustam-e-Hind championship. One of my then favourites, Vijay Kumar of Amritsar, is a finalist. Dara Singh has been invited to conduct the match as referee. People are having irreverent fun, openly cracking jokes about the choice of a freestyle wrestler to oversee an Indian style wrestling final. The spectators from Punjab have been literally confined in a distant, rundown corner to prevent possible showdowns between supporters of the finalists.

Suddenly, the public address system comes alive announcing the arrival of Sanjay Gandhi, exhorting people to welcome him with loud cheers with a caveat that they should not move from their seats for they may invite public humiliation if they did.

Midway through the announcement, the far end of the confined Punjabis rises in revolt, raising colourful anti-Sanjay, anti-Emergency slogans. All hell breaks loose as the baton-charging militia pounce upon the spectators. I run for my life on Delhi’s Fleet Street — the Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg — and keep running till I reach Kamani auditorium on Copernicus Marg….

Scene 3 — the same evening 

Dodging the usher, I quickly disappear into the basement green room of the theatre. Pandit Bhimsen Joshi is warming up his vocals with Mahmood Dholpuri on the harmonium. He is singing a small bandish in Raga Piloo in which the woman is speaking about her village on the banks of river Jamuna.

A little later, the performance begins in the main auditorium with Panditji doing a slow, reposeful alaap. Midway through the rendition, a posse of officials with faraway looks and garrulous party workers accompanying VC Shukla — the then IB minister — walk in, creating overall disruption. The organisers stop the concert and invite the minister to come on stage to light an already-lit lamp and speak a few words of encouragement.

The embarrassed VIP sheepishly complies and comes back to take his seat, expecting Panditji to pick up from where he had left. The maestro now begins the short composition in Piloo I thought he was going over in the green room. Instead of describing the woman waiting at the river bank, pointing his fearless finger towards the minister, he raises his voice singing Kabir with unprecedented conviction, reprimanding the ignorant man on how utterly worthless it is to live in his city devoid of compassion and morals.

The audience rises in ecstasy and long applause. The minister beats a hasty retreat. The singing continues amidst loud claps, giving an uneven beat.

Scene 4 — late 1976 

Winter is fast catching up. Night has descended pretty early. On my way back from the university, I take the road that passes by the Tees Hazari court. A police patrol van stands lazily still. A little away from the visibly bored policemen, there are two dead drunk Sardars on a cycle-rickshaw raising graphic slogans against the Emergency. The rickshaw-puller, a man from the Hindi-speaking belt, enthusiastically joins in. This protest is soon transformed into a Bacchanalian carnival of protest. The police have lost their ability to move. No one is afraid.

Those were the days of critical challenge that visited our body politic and its institutions. Those were the days that showed us how to stand with uncompromising courage. We thought the scars would heal in time. Perhaps, they did, or simply entered a new masquerade where there are no easy closures. In retrospect, they look very slight in comparison with where we stand today.

However, by opening up the unwritten pages of the book howsoever briefly, the Emergency did open up possibilities of infinite manipulation by a self-obsessed ruling dispensation of a docile State in future. As we look back, we suddenly begin to realise how overwhelmed we are by a surveillant eye pretending to not look. How a life may get inscribed in a dysfunctional panopticon where much of our energy is geared towards not falling under its gaze. One wonders if there is a way out of this huis clos of side-glance pretence...

— The writer is an acclaimed musician based in Delhi

After the Imposition of Emergency

— Pash. Translated by TC Ghai

The only truth about this mysterious death

Is that someone is dead

All else is rumour

The enjoyment of juicy gossip

Or the calm before winter.

Now there will be mourning,

Or the lighting of celebratory lamps

Behind closed doors.

And a desolation as in a cotton field

After the bolls have been picked

A desolation that was there,

Even when this man was alive,

Shrieking with the hinges on our doors

As we opened or shut them.

There is no truth whatever in this

mysterious death

Except that graves will not change their nature

And man in the middle of his last lap on

the swing

Folds over with excitement,

Squeezing between his thighs

The twin emotions of fear and joy,

And the prayer for a safe descent

Seals our ears with lead.

And the fear that Thursday will after all lose

To Friday’s first drum-beat

Prompts someone to turn a murderer.

Even then the gun-wielders alone are

not to blame

But we too in whose eyes the collyrium

Dams the flow of tears.

Whatever it is, the truth is he is dead

All else is rumour

The enjoyment of juicy gossip.

(Courtesy: Dr Rahul Ghai)