2015

Forty years may seem to be a long period. But it is not long enough to efface the memory of a jungle raj which followed the imposition of the emergency in 1975. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, mother-in-law of Congress President Sonia Gandhi, should have stepped down after the Allahabad High Court disqualified her for using the official machinery during election. The Supreme Court’s vacation judge gave her reprieve by pronouncing a stay order.
Still she was not certain about the final (…)

Nations which do not remember their immediate past are in danger of repeating the same tragedy. This thought comes to me when on random questioning of the significance of June 26, 1975 (the Emergency Day) from the age- group of 35 and below (who constitute two-thirds of the population of India) one draws an overwhelming blank look, and not so encoura-ging even from those in the 35-55 age-group. Even newspapers never frontpage it—some do not even carry the information, and a few may just (…)

Not a leaf stirs in my kingdom without my leave. See how quiet my people sit. —Atahuallpa the Inca
To those whose only preoccupation in life is to survive, June 26, 1975 was like any other day in oppressive June—the sun cruel, the wind searching, the dust blinding. But to some at least of those who heard the Prime Minister on the radio that morning, had no paper to read before they went to work, and learnt about the midnight arrests only by way of rumour, June 26 looked ominous, (…)

The Editor’s Notebook in Mainstream (June 28, 1975) after the promulgation of Emergency and the imposition of press censorship appeared as follows:
Tagore for Today
Somewhere in the excitement of National Emergency, the editor has lost his notebook. However, Rabindranath Tagore has, in the abundance of his generosity, lent him his own notebook:
Freedom from fear is the freedom I claim for you, my Motherland!—fear, the phantom demon, shaped by your own distorted dreams;
Freedom from (…)

Day against Intolerance : June 25, 2015
The 25th and 26th of June mark not only the declaration of the internal Emergency at the behest of the Indira Gandhi regime in 1975. June 25 is also the day in 1934 when a lethal bomb was aimed at Mahatma Gandhi and his cavalcade by the Hindu conservative and orth-odox elements in Pune when he was on his anti-untouchability tour. For some years, especially from 1977 onwards, the anniversary has been observed as a day of protest against the Emergency (…)

It was in the wee hours of Jun 26, 1975 — around 4.30. I was sleeping soundly when the telephone by my bedside started ringing. [I was then in Gauhati (spelt Guwahati now) working as Patriot’s Special Correspondent in Assam.] I woke up. I thought that the caller must have dialled a wrong number and decided not to take the call. After a couple of minutes the ringing stopped. I had just switched off my bed lamp and closed my eyes when the telephone started ringing again. This time it went on (…)

June 25, 1975: 6 am: The telephone rings and there is the voice of a dear senior journalist friend—something that is not unusual as he often used to surprise me with some important information before the day started. But this was something that was extraordinary and would have been unbelievable if it had not come from him. I was told that late last night Jayaprakash Narayan and Morarji Desai had been woken up in their sleep and taken to some unknown place by the police. A little later came (…)

It was in late 1959 that I met N.C. (Nikhil Chakravartty). I was sent by Comrade P. C. Joshi to deliver some document to him. At that time he had just started IPA (India Press Agency) and used to sit in the INS Building on Rafi Marg. When I met him, he expressed a great deal of warmth and asked me to meet him off and on. At that time I lived in North Avenue. My meetings with him began and I learnt a great deal from him. My mental horizon was widened. Whenever I came from Patna to Delhi, I (…)

by Nirupam Sen
This month is Nikhi Chakravartty’s death anniversary. I have known very few journalists (perhaps my personal, idiosyncratic application of Lenin’s dictum: “Better fewer, but better”). Nikhil Chakravartty was among these few. I discussed some domestic and foreign policy issues with him often and, very occasionally, visited him at his Kaka Nagar flat. For me, too, the red door was intellectually welcoming, reassuring and opened to the Left. For him too, as for Robert Burns, (…)

by Jaya Jaitly
When a good person is no longer in our midst the feelings they leave with, and the aura of their personality remains like a soft breeze in one’s life. There are many ways in which people touch the lives of others, and as I remember Nikhil Chakravartty, I recall his intellectual purity, gentleness, and honesty in friendships. An intellectual is a loaded word and I have written at length about many current-day intellectuals as conceited and opinionated people who believe their (…)