Historical comparisons are always problematic but here’s one that’s hard to avoid: The situation in Kashmir today is the closest India has come to a repeat of the terrible conditions we last saw during the Emergency of Indira Gandhi.
That Emergency ran for two around two years, from 1975 to 1977, and saw the mass arrest of opposition leaders and political activists. These were not radicals or extremists – or to use contemporary language – Naxals, whether urban or rural. The men and women arrested then included former ministers and chief ministers, MPs and MLAs, and also scores of ordinary political workers.
The media was tightly controlled through formal censorship, and the courts, though supposedly independent of the executive, functioned as an appendage of the government. The Supreme Court plumbed the lowest depths during that period when it ruled in the infamous ADM Jabalpur case that a citizen who feared for her life or liberty because of something the government had done would not have the fundamental right to approach a court for redress.
This meant that if the government went after you, the doors of the courts were closed for you and your family. The reason I believe the situation in Kashmir today is like the Emergency is because upwards of 4,000 people have been arrested – in per capita terms, that’s probably many more than Indira Gandhi locked up in her day – and millions of people have been subjected to a communication lockdown which bans them from communicating with each other via the internet or mobile phones, and yet – the country’s courts are not in a position to offer any proper help.
In this episode of Beyond the Headlines, we will see how the only difference between Indira Gandhi’s Emergency and Narendra Modi’s undeclared emergency is that the courts have not closed their doors this time. You are free to knock, and free to enter. But once you do, no matter how urgent and pressing your plea, the court will show no urgency in even listening to you, let alone offering you relief.
