Image courtesy Al Jazeera
India turned 72 on August 15. It's now "running" 73, as we like
to say in India.
But this August 15 has been a strange one.
In the building where I live in Mumbai, there is a ritual flag hoisting every
year. The flag is tied up, hoisted on a
bamboo pole on the terrace while residents, including the little kids gather
around. The oldest resident is invited
to unfurl the flag.
This year, a retired dentist who lives
across the corridor from me was persuaded to do the deed. He tried.
But the flag would not unfurl.
Finally, after some effort at undoing the knot, that should have
unknotted automatically, the flag went up and hung limply.
At this, the gathered crowd burst into the
national anthem, at the end of which one resident lustily shouted, "Bharat
Mata ki Jai". No one responded.
A woman standing next to me declared it was
the happiest day for her life because "Kashmir is finally ours". She says she is a Kashmiri Pandit. A man
chipped in that the flag should have been hoisted in Lal Chowk, Srinagar.
The rest of the gathered assembly quickly
lost interest in the proceedings and instead drifted towards a table laden with
delicious snacks -- from South Indian idlis, to North Indian jalebis, to
Gujarati gathia and the universal Indian samosa.
After consuming this symbol of national
integration, the satisfied gathering headed back into their respective
apartments.
The ritual of flag hoisting is meaningless
at one level, especially if you are not imbued with patriotic fervour. Yet for our building, each year it is a
reminder of our differences -- of caste, community, religion, language, class
-- as well as our ability to somehow tolerate all this, share food and laughter
momentarily and get on with our lives.
This year, however, I did wonder how long
this veneer of tolerance would last.
The reason is August 5, 2019, which in my
view will remain one of the darkest days of the last 72 years. And that is how old I am.
It made me think back to what I felt on the
morning of June 26, 1975 when the full import of the State of Emergency that
then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had declared dawned on us. During the night all the leading opposition
leaders had been arrested. Press censorship was imposed. And human rights suspended.
The lines of communication, however, had
not been snapped. Landlines worked, the
only form of telephones available at that time. The telegraph office was
functioning. Journalists could send out information through teleprinter, press
telegrams, or phone-ins. That much of
that information could not be printed eventually because of press censorship is
another story. But we could communicate.
Yet, because newspapers could not publish
these reports, and the only source of information was the sanitised government
owned radio, All India Radio (AIR), people turned to the BBC and Voice of
America to get news of what was happening in India. It is then that we learned that thousands of
people had been arrested.
All you needed was a portable transistor
with a long ariel. I can remember hanging out of my window at home to try and
catch the news from these sources.
Anyone who travelled abroad for work, such
as airline crew, for instance, was requested to bring back any newspapers or
periodicals that carried Indian news.
These stories were then diligently retyped,
cyclostyled, and then distributed, usually be hand. A group of my friends named our four-page
leaflet Mukti with all this
regurgitated news from international sources. We posted it to people we thought
would be interested. We would take the
extra precaution of dropping the brown manila envelopes with Mukti in postboxes located in different
parts of the city so that the exact location of the source of this product
could not be traced.
These memories came flooding as I read the
stories of how journalists
in Kashmir are struggling to get the news out in the absence of any form of
communication, cellphones, landlines or Internet. That they are walking
or driving to places, meeting people, putting together stories, saving them
on pen drives, then taking them to a press where they can be printed.
Regular and popular newspapers like Rising Kashmir and Greater Kashmir have been reduced to two or four pages. Their web
editions don't exist at the moment. But
somehow, through the ingenuity of these journalists, they have found ways to
continue to produce their papers. Many
of them have been spending many nights in their offices away from their
families, missing Eid as this touching story that Bashaarat Masood, the
correspondent of Indian
Express recounts.
This story of printing curtailed newspapers
also brought back memories of Himmat
Weekly, of which I was the editor, in 1976.
Censorship had also resulted in printing presses shying away from
journals like ours that were continuing to be critical of the government.
It forced us to appeal for funds from our
readers so that we could buy even a small printing press. A tiny room in an industrial estate in
Prabhadevi, central Mumbai, with two treadle machines (that could only print
one side of two A4 size papers) was part of the deal.
Himmat managed to raise the funds, bought
the space and the machines, and named it Anil Printers, in memory of Anil
Kumar, a young man from Delhi who worked with Himmat and died prematurely in a
road accident leaving behind his 8-month pregnant wife, Padmini, who worked as
a journalist with Himmat. On August 14, Padmini passed away in Pune, leaving
behind many memories of those times that were challenging but also stimulating.
But to come back to Anil Printers, the
machines could not have printed the 24 page weekly that we produced. Neither could it have typeset the matter as
it only had some typefaces that could be set by hand.
Yet, to justify carrying the print line of
Anil Printers, we had to print at least two pages there. The rest of the paper
was typeset and printed at another press on the condition that each page of
copy sent to them had the clearance stamp of the censor.
By choosing to print the last forme at our
own printer, we were able to avoid submitting our editorials and the back page
column by the editor-in-chief Rajmohan Gandhi, to the censor. The other printer
did not have to worry, as the legal consequences of this matter, if it violated
censorship guidelines, would be on our heads.
But we still had to typeset the
matter. We found a way around this by
finding someone in south Mumbai who agreed to do this on a linotype
machine. The matter, which consisted of
columns of type set in lead, was then carried by hand by one of our peons, by
bus over a distance of 10-15 kms to Anil Printers.
There we would proof read this last and
most important part of the journal, make corrections with the help of the
handset types available (resulting in a distinct difference being visible
between the machine set and hand set type), and then printing the pages on the
slow and ancient treadle machines.
Once the ink on the pages had dried, they
were packed and carried to the printer where the rest of the magazine had been
printed. Here the magazine was bound and ready for dispatch.
Each week it was something of a miracle
that by Wednesday morning Himmat Weekly was printed and ready to be sold on the
stands, or dispatched by parcel post to different parts of the country.
The parallels between that period of the
Emergency and what is going on in Kashmir today are patently obvious.
The opposition has been locked up as in the
Emergency.
Jammu and Kashmir's special status has been
revoked using the law and Parliament, much as Mrs Gandhi did when she
proclaimed the Emergency.
Although there is no direct press
censorship today in Kashmir, blocking all means of communication is, in fact, a
form of censorship. It has prevented any information about what Kashmiris feel
about these developments and what is happening there from reaching the rest of
the country.
Once again, as in 1975, the first detailed
reports indicating anger and resistance came through the international press --
the BBC,
Al
Jazeera, the New York
Times and the Washington
Post.
After strenuous denials, and even accusing
these credible news sources of telling lies, the government backed down.
The absence of free flow of information
during the 20-month Emergency allowed the rulers to delude themselves that all
was normal. In the last 11 days, repeatedly, India's rulers and a pliant press
has declared that all is well in Kashmir.
In the initial months after Emergency was
declared, very few took the risk of taking on the might of the State. Yet, there was resistance from the start. It
was building up behind closed doors, in whispered conversations, in undetected
locations. People were planning and strategising what should be done, not least
to ensure that news of the gross human rights violations taking place were
broadcast through the underground network.
When Mrs Gandhi lost her seat and the
elections in 1977, she was astounded as were her advisors. But not the people.
It was their way of rejecting unequivocally what she had done to the country.
To assert that freedom and democratic rights were not a luxury; they guaranteed
that the voices of the most marginalised and oppressed were heard.
Today, going by an increasing number of reports
from journalists who are not part of the government's spoon-fed media -- which
is being hosted in a posh hotel in Srinagar and taken on helicopter rides to
"see" how normal and peaceful is the state -- are indicating
that the same kind of sullen resistance is building up. How long it takes to explode remains to be
seen.
But to come back to August 15 and
Independence Day, being an almost Midnight's Child, I had declared when I was
18 that I was as old as "free India". The key word was "free",
not just independent of foreign rule.
Today, I cannot use that term when close to
8 million people in this country are un-free, unable to speak, and with a
government and the majority of Indians unwilling to listen to what they have to
say.
We were all brought up to recite Rabindranath
Tagore's famous poem that ended with, "Into that heaven of freedom, my Father,
let my country awake".
Where is that "heaven of freedom"?
