'What does Indira Gandhi want from me?'
'At this age, what will I do to her?'
June 25-26, 1975. At the stroke of midnight, the President of India signed a document sent by then prime minister Indira Gandhi.
It said, 'In exercise of the powers conferred by clause (1) of Article 352 of the Constitution, I, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, President of India, by this Proclamation declare that a grave emergency exists whereby the security of India is threatened by internal disturbances.'
That moment has been described as the darkest day in India's independent history.
This was 50 years ago.
More than half the population in India may not have any idea of what happened thereafter.
Above all, who a man named Jayaprakash Narayan was who almost single handed fought the Emergency.
M G Devasahayam, a retired IAS officer from the 1968 batch, is one of the senior-most retired civil servants in the country.
Before joining the IAS, Mr Devasahayam was commissioned in the Indian Army in 1964 and participated in the 1965 War and counter-insurgency operations in Nagaland in 1967-1968.
As the collector-cum-district magistrate of Chandigarh during the Emergency, Mr Devasahayam was in charge of the then 'Enemy Number 1' of the State; prisoner Jayaprakash Narayan.
His new book, Emergency and Neo-Emergency: Who Will Defend Democracy? has just been published.
"JP was like Mahatma Gandhi at that time. I knew providing security to such a person was not going to be easy," Mr Devasahayam tells Rediff's Shobha Warrier.
Part one of a multi-part interview:
You had written some time ago about the father and the daughter who were instrumental in changing the course of India's history, a few decades apart.
Yes, Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi!
Did any of you have any inkling of what was to come on the 25th of June 1975?
None of us had absolutely no inkling of what awaited us on the 26th morning of June 1975.
I used to play tennis in the mornings, from 6 am to 7:30 am. After I was back home, I listened to the All India Radio news at 8 am.
As usual on the 26th morning also, I played tennis and was back home before 8 and switched on the radio to listen to the news.
To my surprise, I heard the voice of Indira Gandhi speaking and not the news. In a tense voice, she spoke about the threat that was there to democracy, the emergency situation we had, etc.
I wondered what threat she was talking about, and what emergency.
Then my wife told me there were calls from the senior superintendent of police, and it was very urgent. I called him back immediately. He asked me, 'Saab, did you know what happened at night? Gadbad ho gaya.'
I asked him what the gadbad was.
He said, everybody was saying they have declared Emergency, and I don't understand what is happening. Have you any idea?
I told him I was just back after playing tennis!
That was how the day began!
Then he informed me that soon after midnight, Punjab chief minister Giani Zail Singh had called Chandigarh chief commissioner N P Mathur and said, 'Emergency ho gaya hai. Press ko discipline karna hai.'
The press in Chandigarh is The Tribune, the only newspaper there. The editor of The Tribune was one Madhavan Nair, a fiercely independent journalist.
Both the chief ministers, that of Haryana and Punjab were very uncomfortable with him.
Zail Singh wanted to raid The Tribune, seal it and arrest Madhavan Nair, and teach the newspaper a lesson.
Because the newspaper was critical of them?
The media was performing its role then. The media of those days was not the godi media of today. They used to criticise fiercely.
When Zail Singh wanted to seal The Tribune, Mathur said, the order could only be passed by the district magistrate, who happened to be me.
The morning The Tribune had come with big headlines like 'Morarji Desai arrested. Jayaprakash Narayan arrested. Emergency declared'.
This irritated (then Haryana chief minister) Chaudhary Bansi Lal. He threatened us by saying, he would ask the Haryana police to stop the newspaper if we didn't do anything. Anyway, we did not allow that to happen. We protected The Tribune.
That was the 26th morning.
And that was how the Emergency started in Chandigarh.
At 10 am, we civil servants met to discuss the situation. We had no idea what the Emergency was. So, we started asking each other. We asked the deputy director, IB (Intelligence Bureau) and what he said was, they were waiting for more information from Delhi. Everybody was clueless.
At noon, he sent the two-line proclamation signed by President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed.
We asked ourselves, what threat are they talking about?
The truth was, there was no threat. There was no emergency situation anywhere.
Only by noon, we got the news about the Ramlila ground meeting addressed by Jayaprakash Narayan, Morarji Desai and the others where they had asked Indira Gandhi to resign. They had given her an ultimatum. This was after the Allahabad high court judgment that declared her election invalid.
The two chief ministers started breathing down our neck to do something as they wanted to show their loyalty to her.
The entire responsibility fell on the shoulders of the district magistrate as he is in charge of law and order.
So, I appointed an officer to censor news under the Defence of India rules. I also imposed Section 144 restricting as I didn't want to impose MISA (Maintenance of Internal Security Act of 1971).
At 4 pm, I convened a meeting of all the college and university principals as the situation could spark unrest in the campus.
I would say it was an imaginary emergency situation. We had to pretend that there was an emergency situation. Then, we had to act and report to the chief ministers.
As arrests under MISA could be done only with the signature of the district magistrate, I told everyone that I would not put my signature on any paper to arrest anyone under MISA unless they establish solid evidence that somebody was anti-national and his presence outside was dangerous to the security of the country.
Next day, it was back to normal. The concept of emergency was not there in Chandigarh.
When did JP come to Chandigarh to be under your supervision? How did it happen?
That's a different story. Only after JP came to Chandigarh that we started feeling the weight of the Emergency.
It happened on the 1st of July. JP was arrested from the Gandhi Peace Foundation and taken to the AIIMS guest house where he was kept in one room. Morarji Desai was in another room.
But they felt very uncomfortable keeping JP in Delhi as he had a very uncanny way of mobilising people. He could create major problems for Indira Gandhi. So, they wanted to keep him away from Delhi but not too far away too.
They found Chandigarh as the best place.
And you never anticipated JP coming to your city?
I never anticipated.
They found Chandigarh close to Delhi, and Bansi Lal and Giani Zail Singh are two loyalists of Indira Gandhi.
It was a Union Territory which was directly under the control of the central government.
More than that, JP had health issues, and Chandigarh had the PGIMR, the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research.
I came to know about this only on the 1st of July when the director of the DPI dropped into my office and said, 'Deva, you are going to be a very important man, a VIP. The most important person of the Emergency, the 'enemy number 1' is coming as your prisoner'.
JP was like Mahatma Gandhi at that time. I knew providing security to such a person was not going to be easy.
I had to act immediately. As he was coming as a prisoner, I had to get the sub jail ready. It was modern but had no air-condition facilities. So, I told the PWD people to convert one room with AC and other facilities needed for a VIP.
I had very high regards for him. So also N P Mathur who was from Bihar and knew JP personally. We knew he was a good person, and we felt we should look after him well.
By evening, instructions came directly from the PMO that JP would not be put up in jail, and that he would be only in the PGIMR.
When we contacted the director PGIMR, he said they had two guest houses and he would make one ready for JP.
We prepared the jail for him in the morning, and in afternoon, we got the hospital guest house ready!
Now, we waited for our prisoner's arrival.
The senior superintendent of police and I went to the air force station to receive JP as he came in a special aircraft from Delhi.
At 9:30-10 at night, the aircraft with JP landed. He was accompanied by a SP from Delhi and a doctor from AIIMS.
How was he then? Was he calm?
He was quite calm but completely perplexed. He did not know what was happening. He did not know why he was taken away from Delhi to Chandigarh.
We took him to the guest house and I explained everything to him, and left by 11 30-12 midnight.
I told him, I would come and see him again the next day. But he didn't know who I was. Rather, I would say what I said did not register.
The relationship started only the next day, the 2nd of July 1975.
The next day when I went to see him, he recognised me and asked, 'Did you not go back to Delhi?'
He thought I accompanied him from Delhi. So, I had to explain to him that I was the district magistrate. I told him, 'Sir, I am your custodian now! The entire responsibility of taking care of you is mine'.
Under the relevant provision of the CRPC (Code of Criminal Procedure), we had to declare the PGIMR guest house as the prison, and then we completed all the formalities.
That was how his prison life during the Emergency started.
What was his reaction when you said you were his custodian?
In fact, something very interesting.
He said, 'What does she (Indira Gandhi) want from me? This is the fourth place I am taken to in the last one week. At this age, what will I do to her? I am 73 years old and unwell. What is wrong with her? Why is she pestering me? I don't understand.'
I could feel that he was distressed.
Indira Gandhi was like a daughter to him. They had an extremely good relationship for many years. JP was more than a brother to Jawaharlal Nehru.
More than that, Nehru's wife Kamala and JP's wife Prabhavati were like sisters. They were very close.
You can say, Indira Gandhi grew on the lap of JP.
That was the kind of relationship they had. He spoke about her as 'the girl'.
Naturally, he was distressed about the way she treated him.
Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff
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