‘Emergency Chronicles’ is an amazing book that documents the darkest chapter of independent India’s history. But first gentle reader, allow me a personal interlude. At midnight on 25 June 1975, I was a high school student and ordinarily it should not have made such a deep impact on my psyche but for two incidents that remain etched in my mind. My father, Viren Chhabra of ‘The Statesman’ was having dinner with Kuldip Nayar and his wife, Bharti, at their home. They discussed the state of affairs in the country. When he was leaving my father told me, “I saw a policeman pretending to read a newspaper in the dark, he also noted down my car number. I called the next morning to warn them that Kuldip might be arrested. Bharti said, ‘Viren, after you left, they came’.”

Later, the police came for my father at his office at ‘The Statesman’. He was then responsible for printing the newspaper and director of their publishing house, Nachiketa Publications. He told me, “It was late in the evening when a policeman entered my office; he had a warrant for my arrest. I thought fast knowing that there was no bail during the Emergency. I started showing him the body of work I had printed and published. One of them was a book by staff photographer, Raghu Rai. The policeman left with the book and without me.”

Thousands of journalists, trade unionists, teachers and activists were not so lucky and were incarcerated; the Emergency left a deep impression on my mind and so I devoured ‘Emergency Chronicles’ by Gyan Prakash, a professor of history at Princeton University. The book opens with the daylight abduction of a young student, Prabir Purkayastha from Jawaharlal Nehru University and reveals that even though it was a case of mistaken identity – the police was looking for a slim, bespectacled, Devi Prasad Tripathi – he was taken away without so much as a warrant of arrest. While Prabir and his fiancée, Ashoka Lata Jain, the SFI student leader, had earlier filed for a civil marriage registration at the court of the ADM, Pradipto Ghosh, he issued a warrant against Prabir as he explained later ‘the practise was not to issue detention orders on the basis of subjective satisfaction of a Magistrate, but to issue them on the directions of our superior officers.’

Indeed, in exposing this servile attitude lies the intrinsic value of the book, for it explores through interviews and documents how the Emergency while promulgated by the diktat of Indira Gandhi – who did not exactly share her father, Jawaharlal Nehru’s deep faith in the values enshrined in the Constitution – had historical roots and records how we conduct ourselves.

The Emergency also raises the point that unless we work to maintain norms and the roots of democracy, we are in peril. The book has deep implications for the future for as the Shah Commission later revealed, both sins of commission and of omission were committed, leading to the decline of institutions that continues today. Gyan Prakash painstakingly reveals that the Emergency and the unbalancing of the Constitutional equilibrium was some time in the making. He describes the rage on the streets and anger at the lack of jobs for youth as something palpable.

There are revelations of Jayaprakash Narayan’s emergence as a socialist in America and his correspondence with ‘Indu’ – Indira, for whom he claimed affection. He clearly states he has differences with her domestic policy which he didn’t have with ‘Bhai’ – Nehru. However, we do not get to understand what went into Indira Gandhi’s head and her own motivations, as her papers remain closely guarded by her descendants and are closed to the public. This is strange because private papers of a PM must be available to researchers after so many years to make sense of events. Nevertheless, Prakash searches on with a torchlight into independent India’s darkest hour. There are amazing vignettes. President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed informs his secretary that R.K Dhawan had come over with a draft Emergency proclamation, which he had signed.

Then ‘the President had a tranquiliser and promptly went to bed’. If only it had been so easy for the people of India, who lost their sleep with their freedom. But the legalese shows a ‘meticulous suspension of the law by the law’, which makes us wonder why we in free India are so adept in obeying the law while flouting its very spirit. Then the book proceeds to Sanjay Gandhi who is portrayed as a troubled youngster unable to pass his high school exams and when his Prime Ministerial mother sets him up to train at the Rolls Royce institute, he is unable to complete the course there leaving him free to chariot the course of free India.

The Emergency with its ‘nasbandi’ – forced sterilisations and the glamorous Rukhshana Sultan who presided over this (I remember she came to my high school as a chief guest and urged us innocent young students, to come and see the wonderful family planning work in the Walled City) – all this is documented with a historian’s precision. Prakash also documents the work of artists – photographer Raghubir Singh’s book, ‘A Way Into India’ and documentary filmmaker Sastry’s ‘I am 20’ along with Rahi Masoom Raza’s novel on the Emergency.

Photographs of the Ambassador car, Sanjay Gandhi and Rukhshana document the era. There is a touching account of Pramila and Madhu Dandavate – Pramila whom I happen to have had the privilege of knowing and who in the 1990s took up the Peoples’ Union of Democratic Rights (PUDR) report on custodial rape and got two policemen dismissed – and how they fell on poetry to survive in the prison cell. However, what I miss is a more detailed account of the control over media. ‘The Statesman’ and ‘The Indian Express’ carried blank editorials.

Kuldip Nayar, Sumanta Banerjee, Barun Sengupta and several other journalists were arrested; we would have benefitted from their published accounts. Daily censorship orders were conveyed on the telephone and after the initial rounds of arrest, most newspapers submitted to the censorship of the chief censor, H J D’Penha. However, there was a lot more – control of newsprint and the stoppage of advertisements and so much else that in overt and covert ways still puts immense pressure on the media. What remains unanswered is why we never learn.

Many of the people who were jailed during the Emergency and protested against the suspension of civil liberties and freedom of the press are in power today.

The country is now facing an undeclared state of emergency with students being arrested under false charges of sedition – a law that was unleashed by the British – 77 mob lynchings in the name of the cow; the pressure on the media – which is in danger of fast losing its independence – along with the killing of rationalists Kalburgi, Dabholkar, Pansare and the journalist Gauri Lankesh. The Emergency is an era of darkness that we must learn from, for we face the danger of repeating history. Let us remember so we never forget.