In 1975, Congress leader and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, paternal grandmother of Sickularism's favorite crown prince Rahul Gandhi, imposed a 21-month "national emergency" on the country, suspending the fundamental rights of citizens and restricting the powers of parliament as well as the courts.
India, that is Bharat, should never forget. The Opposition leaders were put behind bars across the country.
The Emergency, a period of sustained authoritarian rule, lasted from June 25, 1975, to March 21, 1977. The move authorized Indira Gandhi to rule by decree, suspend elections and to curb civil liberties including press freedom.
In a blog in 2018, the then Finance Minister Arun Jaitley (under PM Narendra Modi) recalled that the Emergency was promulgated to curtail opposition protests seeking IndiraGandhi’s resignation as the prime minister after the Allahabad High Court ruled against her in an election malpractice suit.
Jaitley refers to an episode whereby the Gandhi administration removed certain judges from the Supreme Court and appointed its own replacements to head the top court during this stormy period of undemocratic rule.
"The court was packed with the government’s preferred judges. A dangerous thesis was propagated by Law Minister H.R. Gokhale that the judiciary must follow the social philosophy of the government and judges must be appointed on the basis of their social philosophy," Jaitley wrote.
He has also courted controversy by comparing Indira Gandhi with Hitler.
PM Modi, known for his anti-Congress rhetoric, has in the past always attacked the Emergency, describing it as a "black night that cannot be forgotten."
BJP spokesman Sudanshu Trivedi once charged the Congress with pushing a "Nazi mindset" by bestowing on one leader and her family almost cult-like status.
"In 1934, Hitler's associates used the phrase 'Hitler is Germany and Germany is Hitler,' and the same spirit was rekindled by the Congress in 1976 when its president Dev Kant Barooah used the phrase 'India is Indira, Indira is India.' This reflect a Nazi mindset," Trivedi had said.
It is interesting to note that Indira Gandhi's Emergency rule was immensely unpopular with Muslims as the regime imposed family planning.
In order to popularize a two-child-per-family trend, the administration coined the slogan "Hum Do, Hamare Do -- We two, our two" and imposed measures such as surgically sterilizing young husbands and wives in households that already had two or more children.
Indira's second son and Rahul Gandhi's uncle Sanjay Gandhi was at the forefront of this "crusade," a move Muslims publicly opposed as being against their faith.
Other minority groups were also antagonized by Indira's rule. Legend has it she once declined to meet a Catholic leader on learning he only represented 2,000 voters.
In that sense, it can be said she was a "people’s leader" — but only so long as these people voted for her. She was extremely populist and able to strike a balance with all sections of voters.
In Assam, her party’s electoral policy in the 1970s was reportedly aimed at "winning over Alis (Muslims) and Coolis (tea garden workers)".
Regarding Muslims, she was so eager to win their widespread support she even pushed to promote Urdu among Muslims in Kerala and West Bengal — the two states where local Muslims prefer to use their mother tongues of Malayalam and Bengali respectively.
Urdu is the language traditionally used and favored by Muslims in South Asia.
By the 1970s and 1980s, she had even developed a rapport with the Communists, a faction of whom backed her emergency. Later, she would work well with long-surviving Marxist Chief Minister Jyoti Base of West Bengal.
During the emergency and in the years after, it came to light that she preferred a system and political loyalists who would take orders from her son Sanjay.
Indira Gandhi was also very fond of the likes of Devkanta Barooah — who echoed certain Nazi sentiments and coined the phrase "Indira is India" — and she was willing to take orders from her trusted lieutenants like Yashpal Kapoor.
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