The Woman My Grandmother Loved.

Chapter Twenty One

India, 1975

3rd January 1975: Lalit Narayan Mishra, great freedom fighter and minister of railways died at a railway hospital. He was injured in a bomb blast that had happened in the Samastipur Railway, a day earlier.

10th January 1975: India accords recognition to the Palestine Liberation Front.

March 1975: Fast unto death by Moraji Desai demanding the dissolution of the Gujurat Parliament. The Parliament was dissolved and fresh elections were ordered in June.

12th June 1975: The petition filed against Indira Gandhi by her competitor of the 1971 elections in Rae Bareli, Raj Narain accused her of using corrupt means to bring about her victory. Justice Sinha of The Allahabad High Court gave its verdict, convicting Indira Gandhi guilty of resorting to electoral malpractices and thereby declared her candidature as null and void. She would not be allowed to hold office or seek elections for six years. She was given 20 days to appeal to the Supreme Court.

24th June 1975: Supreme Court decides that while Gandhi cannot vote in Parliament, she can still be allowed to speak. Her powers as Prime Minister is stripped and she is to remain only a titular head.

25th June 1975: At midnight, a state of emergency is declared all over the nation. This will be remembered in the future as one of the darkest periods of the Indian democracy and will be considered a time when India was close to becoming an autocracy. Citing imminent danger to the security of India in her letter to the President, the Emergency under Section 352 of the Indian Constitution was then declared. This allowed the Prime Minister to rule by decree, suspend all elections and curb civil liberties. President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed had signed the ordinance which allowed the Prime Minister to rule.

The power cut in Delhi was sinister and in the most literal way a triumph of darkness over light. The darkness that ensued, when the nation's capital was stripped of electricity was done to ensure that there would be no functional printing presses, and thus any Anti- Government news would not reach other parts of the country. Veritas, like all other newspapers, had received the news about the news censorship that was to follow. The next day, there were only two newspapers on sale. These were the Hindustan Times and The Statesman.

They were to adhere to certain guidelines decided by the government and refrain from posting anything which could be considered inflammatory or essentially against the Gandhi ministry. The number one on the list of guidelines issued was: 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.

The press was to themselves decide what could be considered as dangerous and what could be passed on. This was a trying time for newspapers and journalists all over the country because with such censorship at play, there was no way for the truth to get out to the nation. The Chief Press Advisor was a post created to censor the news and essentially decide what could and couldn't be printed. At this time, the Indian newspapers were also prohibited from publishing anything that the foreign media had printed with regard to the situation going on in the country. Foreign correspondents were sent back with threats and such. During the Emergency, newspapers like The Indian Express and The Statesman left their editorial pages empty as a mark of protest. This kind of protest was soon followed by other newspapers, called 'the white-out', and was soon declared a crime under the guidelines. The sister branch of the Indian Express called the Financial Express published the poem Where the mind is without fear written by the Bengali Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore. The Times of India published an obituary for the Indian democracy as Dem O Cracy, beloved husband of T. Ruth, father of L. I. Bertie, brother of Faith, Hope, and Justica (sic) expired on June 26.