The editorial we didn’t see on Emergency@50: Authoritarianism with anaesthesia in 2025

Broken News

Published in Newslaundry on June 26, 2025

 

Anniversaries are a ritual in India. This week, it has been interesting to watch how the 50th anniversary of the Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi at midnight on June 25, 1975, is being observed. 

 

There are several people in the governing party, the Bharatiya Janata Party who opposed the emergency. And in the opposition is the Congress Party, held responsible for the Emergency. As a result, the occasion has been reduced to one of the BJP finding more ways to slam the Congress by pitching the ‘Samvidhan Hatya Diwas’ to counter the opposition’s campaign to uphold the Constitution. This is politics as usual. 

 

But how does all this rhetoric help us to understand what the Emergency was all about, what we should learn from it, and whether what’s happening in India today reflects a difference or a similarity to the events that unfolded 50 years ago? 

I ask this as someone who was a journalist at that time, working with Himmat Weekly, a news magazine founded by Rajmohan Gandhi. Hence, I found this statement of Union Home Minister Amit Shah, while speaking about that period in our history, particularly ironic: “Just imagine the moment you became subjects of a tyrant within a day. You were a journalist or a student but suddenly became a danger to the country.”

Perhaps the selective amnesia that afflicts most politicians made him forget people like Umar Khalid, a student leader who questioned the Modi government’s intent in bringing in the Citizenship Amendment Act. Khalid was arrested in 2020 and continues to languish in jail without trial, without bail, for more than six years. He must have wondered how he suddenly became a danger to the country. A country where the government had not declared an internal Emergency.

Or Siddique Kappan, the Delhi correspondent of a Malayalam news portal who was arrested while on his way to report the rape of a Dalit woman in Hathras in October 2020. He was incarcerated for over two years, is out of bail, but still has the cases hanging over his head.

Or the Kashmiri journalists who have been in and out of jail. Why does this government consider them a danger to the country? Read this report in Kashmir Times on these journalists, their battle for bail and the multiple cases they have had to fight. How can this happen if the people who fought the emergency opposed precisely this kind of arbitrary action at that time?

These are the questions we should be asking on the anniversary of the Emergency. Though there is little evidence of them being asked except editorially in Indian Express which has run an extensive series on the Emergency.

Even there, it is political scientist Suhas Palshikar who raises several pertinent questions in his edit page article on June 25. He emphasises that the anniversary should be a time of introspection and asks whether the “Emergency template” has really been discarded. For instance, like the “foreign hand” that Indira Gandhi saw lurking everywhere, today there is the American billionaire George Soros, and if you protest you are labelled anti-national or an urban Naxal. Palshikar concludes: “The essence of the Emergency is being normalised in India’s current moment.”

To understand this better, just look at the state of the Indian media. During the Emergency, censorship was imposed. Everyone was required to check if what was published adhered to “guidelines” issued by the government that kept changing as the Emergency progressed. If the authorities thought you had violated them, your publisher could be fined or jailed, your printing press could be sealed, and you would find it difficult to continue.

As has been recorded in several books and articles over the years, mainstream print media, and there was only print in those days, conformed and fell in line. Indian Express did resist, as recounted in this piece by Coomi Kapoor who was working with it as a reporter at that time. In her first-person account, Kapoor writes about the way the government used all avenues of pressure, including the income tax department, trying to seize the printing press, and denying advertisements from the government and public sector companies to bring the paper in line.

If all this sounds familiar, it is the template this government has followed in the last decade to get the media to conform and relay the official narrative without asking too many questions.

During the Emergency, the Indian Express could withstand such pressure for some time because of its feisty owner Ramnath Goenka and because it had the financial ability to withstand it. 

What is not acknowledged adequately is the role played by many smaller publications, in English and in the regional languages, that also tried to resist censorship. They did not have the deep pockets of mainstream media houses like the Express group. And as a result, many of them had to fold up. 

 

Himmat Weekly, for instance, where I worked, also ran blank editorials after the Emergency was declared. It also tried to bypass censorship by deciding that we did not have to submit a copy to the censor as the government had declared “guidelines”. We thought we were too small and inconsequential to attract the wrath of the government. But in doing so, we were clearly delusional as in an authoritarian regime, even small pinpricks of opposition or questioning will not be tolerated.

Himmat survived the Emergency, just about. It was deprived of advertising; it had fines and notices slapped on it for “violations” of censorship guidelines that seem ridiculous today (such as using a quotation from Mahatma Gandhi about freedom), and had to hunt for a printer who would risk printing the magazine.

I have recounted the Himmat story over the years several times as illustrative of what happened to many other small publications (read here, here and here). And to point out that the story of resistance to authoritarianism is not just about prominent politicians and big media, but also of small independent publications and ordinary people. This is a history that sometimes goes unrecorded and unacknowledged.

For instance, few know about A D Gorwala, a retired civil servant who brought out a small journal named Opinion. When Emergency was declared, he refused to submit to censorship and continued till he was ordered to shut down. In his last issue, he wrote:

“The current Indira regime, founded on June 26, 1975, was born through lies, nurtured through lies, and flourished by lies. The essential ingredient of its being is the lie. Consequently, to have a truth-loving, straight thinking journal to examine it week after week and point out its falsehoods becomes intolerable to it.” 

Others like Minoo Masani’s Freedom First, or Janata Weekly, whose editor G G Parikh is now 100 years old and still as feisty as ever, also resisted. And there were many others across India.

The reason we need to heed such struggles is to understand what we are witnessing today. 

Take the media. Mainstream media has mostly fallen in line. The resisters are the small independent YouTube channels run by journalists who once worked in mainstream, or digital news platforms that perform the kind of “journalism of courage” that we so sorely need today. 

As Palshikar points out, aspects of the Emergency have been normalised. It has happened gradually in a way that most Indians seem to have been anesthetised. We have accepted that governments have a right to suppress dissent, to jail opponents, to put pressure on the media to conform, and to use all the power it has in its hands to ensure that its actions are not challenged.  

And yet, 50 years after the Emergency, we are lamenting that Indira Gandhi did precisely this.  

The Blank Editorials Of Emergency: When Silence Speaks

Published in Outlook magazine on September 19, 2024

Link: https://www.outlookindia.com/national/the-blank-editorials-of-emergency-when-silence-speaks

Ironic is it not, that a film on the Emergency was held up by what we call the Censor Board (officially the Central Board of Film Certification)? For it was during this infamous Emergency from 1975-77 that the Indian media, at that time essentially the print media, faced direct censorship for the first, and only time, since Independence.

On June 26, 1975, when the Indira Gandhi-led government declared a state of Emergency and announced that there would be press censorship, none of us knew what this meant. Censorship? How? Who would execute the policy? What were we as journalists supposed to do?

At the time, I was working with a small independent news magazine called Himmat Weekly, founded by Rajmohan Gandhi who was also the editor-in-chief. I had joined as an assistant editor, and as the name suggests, our remit was to have the courage to call out the powerful and write about the powerless. Within six months of the declaration of the Emergency, I became the magazine’s editor as R M Lala, one of the founding editors, stepped down.

On that first day, our small team of mostly young journalists had to decide what to do. Should we submit to censorship? Or shut shop? Or should we find a way around it, even if it meant taking considerable risks given that practically all the Opposition leaders had been swept up and thrown in jail and even journalists and other critics were not spared. Perhaps it was our youth, our ignorance or sheer bravado that made most of us feel we should fight censorship and continue to publish as long as we could.

Much like the other, and better-known instances of defiance, such as the The Indian Express printing a blank front page to inform its readers about censorship, Himmat Weekly too ran blank editorials in its first two issues. Only to be told that even leaving a blank space violated the censorship guidelines.

These “guidelines” trickled down to the press during the days we were not informed that we had to clear all our copy with an official. As a result, in those initial weeks, publications took chances to see how far they could stretch the meaning of these guidelines.

The guidelines were vague. The first one, for instance, stated: “Where news is plainly dangerous, newspapers will assist the Chief Press Adviser by suppressing it themselves. Where doubts exist, reference may and should be made to the nearest Press Adviser.” In other words, we were left to decide what was “dangerous”.

But that window closed quite rapidly. The bigger newspapers were sent a representative from the censor’s office who sat in the newsroom in the evening and checked copy. We, who were small, and one had hoped so insignificant, that we could escape the eye of the censor, had to physically go each day with our typed copy to the censor’s office, wait till he decided what could and could not be printed, and scramble back to find enough copy to fill the magazine.

The guidelines were not set in stone. They morphed and changed as new advisories were sent from the centre through the Information and Broadcasting Ministry, then headed by V C Shukla. The nature and volume of these guidelines came to be known only after the Emergency when a commission of inquiry under Justice J C Shah was established. The Shah Commission report revealed that new guidelines were sometimes issued verbally and a phone call from the ministry in Delhi to the censor could lead to action against a publication deemed to be defiant or running material that was “prejudicial”.

For instance, Himmat Weekly was hauled over the coals for printing this quote from Mahatma Gandhi: “The restoration of free speech, free association and free press is almost the whole of Swaraj.” We were informed that this was “prejudicial” and asked to pay a fine of Rs 20,000—a huge amount in those days for a small magazine that could barely break even. Instead of paying it, we went to court. Another story that got us into trouble was for reporting that on October 2, 1976, Acharya Kripalani and others, including Rajmohan Gandhi, had been detained for going to Raj Ghat on Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary.

On that first day, our small team of mostly young journalists had to decide what to do. Should we submit to censorship? Or shut shop? Or should we find a way around it, even if it meant taking considerable risks.

I give these examples to explain the arbitrary nature of censorship and how power is wielded during times when no one can ask questions. The person in-charge of censoring the press in Maharashtra was a senior journalist, a former editor of The Indian Express. Many of us had known him in his earlier avatar. Yet, as fellow journalists, we could not argue with him or demand an explanation for why he decided what was “prejudicial” or violated the ever-expanding list of censorship guidelines. He knew he had the power, and we knew the price of defiance.

Despite this, small journals like Himmat Weekly, Freedom First edited by Minoo Masani, Janata Weekly, whose publisher Dr G G Parikh is now 99 years old and still as feisty as ever, and others found ways to get around censorship by taking calculated risks.

In spite of our limited reach, these journals remained under scrutiny during the entire period. Himmat Weekly was forced to find another printer as the place where we had printed the magazine from its inception was told that it risked being shut down if it continued to print magazines like ours. We survived, just about, by raising money from our readers to buy a small printing press. By shouldering the legal risk of any fallout from the content we carried, we were somehow able to persuade another printer to print the bulk of the magazine.

Censorship worked in other ways too. The government had divided publications into the following categories: positively friendly, hostile, and continuously hostile. This determined who would receive government or public sector advertising. For journals like Himmat Weekly, obviously in the third category, this meant that the few advertisements we did get from some public sector companies and banks stopped. Given our precarious financial situation, which fluctuated each week depending on the advertisements we received, this was a virtual death blow. Yet, the magazine managed to survive for the entire period.

This form of indirect control on the media did not disappear once the Emergency ended in 1977. Even today, governments, at the Centre and particularly in the states, leverage advertising to exert editorial control. The only difference now, as compared to the 1970s, is that the private sector has grown and is a substantial source of revenue for the media. But then that leads to another kind of editorial control evident in the virtual absence of rigorous investigative reporting in Indian media on the many transgressions of big business.

Furthermore, efforts to exert direct control on the media have accelerated in the last decade under the Modi government. The pressure on independent digital news platforms is especially apparent. Even if their reach is much smaller than the bigger media houses, they are under scrutiny, much as small magazines like Himmat Weekly were during the Emergency. Although the current government has backtracked on some of the regulations it had planned to introduce to control independent media, such as provisions in the Broadcasting Services (Regulation) Bill 2023, the desire to control is evident.

Censorship during the Emergency blocked out the voices of dissidents. But it also silenced the voices of the poor and the powerless. Today, almost five decades later, we must ask ourselves: is the Indian media, bigger and more diverse than during the Emergency, really all that different?