The Hindu Business Line : A tale of two civil societies

I wonder what thoughts are passing through the minds of India’s much vaunted intelligentsia while watching the way Pakistan’s lawyers, students, political parties, the media and generally the civil society are valiantly standing up to the Martial Law-like rigours of the Emergency imposed by the President-cum-Army Chief, General Pervez Musharraf. It should not be surprising if it is squirming in its seat, recalling how it quickly and quietly became a willing wit ness to all the indignities heaped on the nation during the infamous Emergency of 1975-77.

Overnight, in a blitzkrieg-like operation, all the political leaders, including the legends of the freedom struggle such as Jayaprakash Narayan, Morarji Desai and Chandrasekhar and respected members of the Opposition such as Messrs. L. K. Advani and Madhu Dandavate, were rounded up in their thousands and thrown into prison without any compunction.

Mr M. G. Devasahayam, who was the Deputy Commissioner of Chandigarh where Jayaprakash Narayan was kept in custody, has described how his health was nearly ruined for want of medical attention to his kidney ailment.

More than a lakh persons were detained without any charges for indefinite periods under the draconian Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA).

Public memory being notoriously short, many might have forgotten that for a party headed by Indira Gandhi boasting secular credentials and solicitude for minorities, a sizeable proportion of those detained were Muslims.

The greatest cruelty perpetrated was deliberately incarcerating the leaders and other detenus in prisons far away from the States to which they belonged to deny them even the notional solace of visits of relatives and friends under the jail rules.

The very first order to issue within minutes of proclaiming internal emergency was to gag the media. Every despatch by every reporter, columnist, or contributor was to be submitted to designated Press Censors in various locations before they were published. There were tragic-comic stories of some of the witless Censors baulking and bristling at innocuous statements and scissoring them out.

No right to life

Even quotations from Mahatma Gandhi, Tagore and Nehru were banned. Also blacked out were a statement by the Chairman of the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Commission criticising the working of public sector undertakings, news about a member of a former royal family, Begum Vilayat Mahal, squatting at New Delhi railway station; a report about junior lawyers marching to the Delhi High Court; a London report of the arrest of a famous Indian actress for shoplifting; and the news about a meeting of the Wild Life Board, which considered the grant of a hunting licence to a certain Maharaja’s brother.

Notifications were issued suspending fundamental rights and the right to judicial remedies such as writs.

The Supreme Court, under a pliant Chief Justice, A. N. Ray, ruled that even the right to life was snuffed out during the Emergency and upheld all laws passed by a Parliament denuded of the entire Opposition conferring on the Government the power to prolong its term at will and bar any judicial challenge to venal or arbitrary acts by Constitutional functionaries such as the Prime minister.

And how did the intelligentsia, the media and the civil society react to these diabolical assaults that came, as Mr N. Ravi said in a recent article, close to extinguishing political democracy? As has been crisply summed up by many commentators, not a dog barked. The stakeholders in democracy were asked to bend but they were ready to crawl.

How come a polity such as that of Pakistan has shown such admirable guts and the civil society of a country whose freedom heroes bared their chests to receive British bullets went into a coma except for certain honourable exceptions? Any answer, anybody?

B. S. RAGHAVAN

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