In a landmark decision on June 15, 2011, the Central Information Commission directed the President's secretariat to make public all documents relating to the Emergency, including written communications between then President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Shortly after the Emergency was declared on June 26, 1975, the Congress government introduced the 42nd Amendment to the Constitution.
The Amendment suspended the fundamental rights of Indian citizens guaranteed under Article 19 (1): the right to freedom of speech and expression; the right to assemble peaceably; the right to form associations or unions; the right to move throughout the territory of India; the right to reside anywhere in India; and the right to practise any profession, occupation, trade or business.
Forgive a personal digression: in September 1975, three months into the Emergency, two plainclothes officers from the CID visited me with a neat file of my articles published on the editorial page of The Times of India. When they discovered I was still at university and not a subversive violating the Emergency's censorship laws, they left silently.
The 15 years between 1975 and 1990 were the most traumatic in India's independent history. During this period, two Prime Ministers were assassinated, a pogrom killed over 3,000 Sikhs in Delhi, Punjab was wracked by terrorism, Parliament overturned the Supreme Court's verdict on Shah Bano to appease Muslim fundamentalists and the government opened the locks of the Babri Masjid to allow puja to appease Hindu radicals.
The Jammu & Kashmir assembly poll was rigged, creating deep grievances among Kashmiris, laying the ground for Pakistan-sponsored insurgency in the Valley in 1989. As the bloodsoaked decade ended, violent protests against the Mandal Commission made caste as permanent a divisive force in Indian politics as religion. India in 2011 is a very different country from India in 1975. Literacy has more than doubled from 35% to 74%. GDP has leapt nine times from8.42 lakh crore to over70 lakh crore. A large middle-class has emerged. Small towns have surging populations of aspirational young men and women. The media is unrecognisable from the suffocating mediocrity of Doordarshan and All-India Radio.
It is unimaginable today that the entire Opposition can be jailed, journalists muzzled, the Constitution subverted. Today the dangers are more insidious: the nexus between big business and politicians; the proximity between senior editors and po-litical parties; the encroachment of criminal elements into electoral politics. It is this enemy within that is as dangerous today as subversive forces were during the Emergency in 1975-77. The system does not need to be subverted from outside anymore; part of the system has itself been subverted. The result: deep-rooted, institutionalised corruption and misgovernance.
The recent decision of the government to remove the CBI from the ambit of the RTI underscores an authoritarian mindset unacceptable in a democracy. And yet cynics rail against the "tyranny of the unelected and unelectable". But the tyranny of the elected - as the Election Commission (EC) will confirm - can be far greater. Nearly 25% of MPs in the Lok Sabha today face criminal charges; 74 of those MPs have serious chargesheets framed against them, including murder, kidnapping, rape and extortion.
Consider the winners in the recent assembly elections: 75 MLAs in West Bengal, 36 MLAs in Tamil Nadu, 8 MLAs in Assam and 2 MLAs in the tiny Puducherry declared in their mandatory electoral affidavits that they have "serious criminal cases pending against them including charges of murder, kidnapping and extortion." In West Bengal alone, 17 of the Congress's recently elected 42 MLAs have criminal cases pending against them.
Who does the voter elect when the choice in her constituency is between five criminals from five political parties? Is this not the tyranny of the elected? It doesn't end there: the EC has placed a cap on election expenditure of .Rs 40 lakh per Lok Sabha candidate. In reality, candidates from major political parties spend an average of .Rs 10 crore each - mostly in cash - per election. Is that the price to become "electable"? The second argument advanced by the government and fired off compromised media shoulders is that in the Westminster system Parliament is supreme.Of course it is - but only insofar as Parliament itself represents the sovereign will of the people on which the Constitution itself is based. The peoples' collective will is thus supreme.
Parliament is answerable to that will. To demand the highest standard of integrity of our parliamentarians is the absolute right of the citizen and the absolute obligation of the state. Tellingly, the infamous 42nd Amendment to the Constitution during the Emergency laid out only the duty of citizens. Citizens today rightly want to lay out the duties of the state through reformist legislation.
Cynics say democracy will be undermined and voters demeaned if activists demand timebound legislation against corruption, black money and other ills. Such pressure does not undermine democracy. It strengthens it. The UPA government labels anti-corruption activists sympathisers of the BJP. In the 2009 Lok Sabha election, the BJP won 18.80% national voteshare to the Congress's 28.55%. Out of 714 million eligible voters, the turnout was 59.70% nationally - and out of the 426 million Indians who voted in 2009, 78.43 million voted for the BJP.
Employing specious innuendo to disparage both anti-corruption activists and the principal opposition party, which represents nearly a fifth of the country's electorate in Parliament, is offensive. Thirty-six years after the Emergency was declared, it is this mindset that undermines Indian democracy and demeans Indian voters.
Source:https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/comments-analysis/emergencys-lessons-for-democracy/articleshow/9156791.cms
