Predicament of the press during the Emergency

There were good people in those bad times who stood up and spoke truth to power, and put themselves and their business at risk. There are such good people in the bad times even at present. Is the Press then, in our own times, any different from the ignominy its barons heaped on the institution in the 19 months after June 25, 1975?

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SUBSCRIBERS in Delhi did not get their newspapers in the morning on June 26, 1975 (47 years ago this day). Even those who had known of a massive public rally addressed by almost all the leaders of the opposition parties the previous day at the Ramlila Maidan, from where a call to gherao the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her cabinet colleagues at their residences in Lutyen's Delhi beginning June 29, 1975, could not know the arrest, through the night, of those very leaders. The newspapers, through which they ought to have known of the arrests and the declaration that night of an Internal Emergency in place by a Presidential Proclamation in accordance with Article 352 of the Constitution, were not printed that night.

The regime could ensure this with a mere telephone call to the Delhi Municipal Corporation to switch off power supply to the newspapers, whose editorial offices with printing facilities were in the city's Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg. A cabal consisting Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's son, Sanjay Gandhi and including the then Lt. Governor of Delhi, Kishen Chand, Navin Chawla, an Indian Administrative Service officer posted as Chand's Private Secretary, and Om Mehta, then Union Minister of State for Home, met at the Prime Minister's Residence to work on the conspiracy. The Justice J.C. Shah Commission of Inquiry that went into the Emergency and things that went wrong in the months after June 25, 1975, brought on record that the disruption in power supply in the intervening night of June 25-26 was caused by a deliberate act by this cabal.

In its First Interim Report submitted on March 11, 1978, the Commission referred to the meeting of the quartet at the Prime Minister's residence in the evening on June 25, 1975 and said: