Independent India, 1947-2000 by Wendy Singer

Author:Wendy Singer [Singer, Wendy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, Asia, India & South Asia, Modern, 20th Century, General
ISBN: 9781317876199
Google: b0mjDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-10-08T01:45:32+00:00

As a main tactic to promote these policies, Indira Gandhi advocated order and efficiency. Slogans about arriving at work on time and increasing productivity covered wall spaces, billboards, and other public areas. But the most controversial and ultimately most disastrous programmes associated with the Emergency were efforts for the beautification of Delhi and the promotion of family planning, both with innocuous names and sinister consequences. The beautification of Delhi brought destruction to slum colonies that displaced hundreds of thousands of citizens. Communities of labourers were driven out of the city to camps, while their hutments were destroyed to make room for development in Delhi. Living in camps outside the city, they now had to commute into Delhi for daily labour. And as the Shah Commission, which evaluated the consequences of the Emergency, reported, this disproportionately affected Muslim communities, especially around the Kashmiri Gate neighbourhood [Doc. 31, pp. 160–1].

The family planning programmes promoted sterilization, giving government workers targets for the number of sterilizations they should accomplish in a given month. As a result, the system prompted large-scale coercion. In a wide-ranging series of interviews Emma Tarlo has shown that many citizens acquiesced to sterilization in order to gain access to ‘basic civic amenities, such as work, housing, hospital treatment and education’ (Tarlo, 2003: 176) [Doc. 32, pp. 161–2]. The implementation of these programmes, especially in an atmosphere that restricted free speech and public dissent, magnified the already appalling consequences and provoked powerful resentment and frustration among the people. In moving ways, the novelist Rohinton Mistry, in A Fine Balance, captures the capriciousness and tragedy of these campaigns, when he untangles the roles of all the various players from political bosses to government workers to local doctors and forced patients. He shows how all of them are caught up in power struggles, corruption, and lack of access to information (Mistry, 1995).

The independence of the judiciary was also challenged. For example, the High Court in Delhi overturned the detention of the Indian Express journalist, Kuldip Nayar, who had been arrested during the first days of the Emergency. After a series of such rulings, Justice S. Rangarajan was transferred to Gauhati in the far northeast of the country and Justice R. N. Agarwal was made a sessions’ judge.

Jaya Prakash Narayan continued to record his dissent in a diary from jail and letters to Mrs. Gandhi and other politicians. He was released after four months of imprisonment and published his diary clandestinely in 1976. A. K. Gopalan, an MP and leader of the Communist Party, was also arrested in West Bengal and later released. He immediately made his way to Delhi and reported his experiences and critique of the Emergency in a powerful speech in Parliament. However, his speech was not published outside of Parliament at the time [Doc. 33, pp. 162–3]. Central to his concern was the support that the Emergency seemed to have from the Soviet Union and from the CPI because of its Soviet ties. He wanted to separate himself as a Communist and a democrat from the draconian measures of the Emergency.

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