The Urdu newspaper Pratap was launched in Lahore just days before the Jallianwala Bagh massacre – the popularity and support it received instantly was unprecedented. Its editorials were hard-hitting and its tone intrepid and unapologetically nationalist. The paper’s ringside view of events leading to India’s independence is only second to what its editor Virendra witnessed. His journey though had a detour of nineteen years that he dedicated to India’s freedom. During this time, Virendra was jailed nine times by the British and was a hardened member of the revolutionary club led by Chandrashekhar Azad and Bhagat Singh.
Below are excerpts from the book Pratap: A Defiant Newspaper, authored by Chander Mohan and Jyotsna Mohan.
On Delhi’s Fleet Street – Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg – electricity was abruptly cut off. Despite nightfall, the sweltering summer heat was oppressive as newsrooms panicked, unaware that this was just the beginning. The next morning, 26 June 1975, India woke up changed.
The President has proclaimed the Emergency. This is nothing to panic about. I am sure you are all aware of the deep and widespread conspiracy, which has been brewing ever since I began to introduce certain progressive measures of benefit for the common man and woman in India.
With these words on All India Radio, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi chaperoned the nation into an era whose dregs still shadow her inheritors. On a momentous midnight, her father had held India’s hands as he promised the country its tryst with destiny. Just before the stroke of another midnight, while the country slept, his daughter took away the civil liberties of her people, ‘advising’ President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed to sign the Emergency proclamation and suspend democracy. Historian Gyan Prakash writes that on 25 June 1975, at 11.35 p.m., a pajama-clad President handed his secretary a ‘top secret’ one-page letter from Indira Gandhi, and a little later, after signing the draft Emergency proclamation, the President swallowed a tranquilizer and went to bed.
Egged on by a tight-knit coterie led by her elder son, Sanjay, in four years, Indira went from embracing greatness – ‘Empress of India’ and ‘Iron Lady’ among monikers generously bestowed on her – to erring into the arms of authoritarianism. After a shaky start in 1966, she had learned quickly on the job, commanding control and populism to dismiss the contemptuous Opposition, who called her ‘Gungi Gudiya (a mute doll)’. All this, only to allow absolute power to corrupt her absolutely.
The year 1971 belonged wholly to her; Bangladesh was liberated, a landslide win shored up by the election slogan ‘Garibi Hatao’ was a victory straight from the heart of the masses, and the ‘D’ word – Goddess Durga – uplifted her persona by mythical degrees.305 Was Atal Bihari Vajpayee among those who compared Indira to ‘Durga’?
In his biography of the former prime minister, Abhishek Choudhary refutes it as fiction and writes that Vajpayee was missing from Parliament on the evening he allegedly called Indira a goddess reincarnate. Choudhary also quotes Mrs Gandhi’s friend Pupul Jayakar posing the same question to Vajpayee and receiving a vehement denial. The assertions that he indeed praised Indira Gandhi so loftily however stick and Vajpayee’s flip-flop reputation ensures the jury is still out on who called her ‘Durga’.
The only way for Indira to go was up. Until it wasn’t. And the fall was debilitating. The Emergency knocked out an unsuspecting India, enacted thirteen days after the Allahabad High Court declared Indira’s 1972 election from Rae Bareli null and void. She was also disqualified from holding any office for six years – a judgment upheld by the Supreme Court on 24 June. The next day, Jayaprakash Narayan’s call for an anti-government rally wasn’t answered by the usual bandobast – rather, hours later, the Emergency was imposed, and key Opposition leaders were either in custody or floundering around to find a safe hiding place. The rest is history and extensively written about in history books.
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The Opposition crackdown and a call from the Ramlila Maidan to overthrow the prime minister didn’t even make it to the news. Delhi and India’s fourth estate – barring two newspapers that briefly benefitted from a fortuitous slip – had been immobilized. No newspapers were published from Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg the morning after democracy was attacked. Press freedom was not just curtailed – in the coming months, it was caged and foreign correspondents were expelled or forced to leave.
The orders were draconian – regional and vernacular press across India’s towns were raided with gusto, and newspapers, in bundles, were seized. The Justice Shah Commission of Inquiry set up by the Janata government to probe Emergency excesses notes:
The government disconnected electricity to the newspaper offices on the night of June 25, 1975, when an Emergency was imposed. Shri BN Mehrotra, who was the then General Manager of Delhi Electric Supply Undertaking was given oral orders on the night of June 25, 1975, by the Lt. Governor of Delhi, Shri Krishan Chand, that electric supply to the newspaper offices in the city should be disconnected … According to Shri Kishan Chand, the then Lt. Governor of Delhi, the instructions for disconnecting power supply came during one of a series of meetings at the Prime Minister’s House on June 25, 1975, but he was unable to recollect as to who gave the specific orders. The Commission further notes, ‘The illegal act, however, was the only way before the regime to prevent newspapers reporting the detention of almost all opposition leaders and the declaration of the Emergency.
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At the Pratap office in Jalandhar, events had unfolded as they had in Delhi – if not a touch sooner. As both the Hindi and Urdu newspapers were being put to press, the midnight knock came and a stranger’s booming voice cut through, ordering the printing of the papers to stop with immediate effect. A clueless newsroom erupted in pandemonium – Indira’s address to the nation was still several hours away.
‘I quickly called up journalist Kuldeep Nayar who was a family friend and he straightaway got on the line cautioning others which is how leaders like George Fernandes were forewarned and went underground,’ recounts Lalit.
The press was in chaos, the fundamentals of news-making were jettisoned and what fell within legally permissible levels of publishing was not even on the table. Virendra’s pushback against the Emergency proclamation was to put his kalam down. The columns that should have held his editorials in both Pratap and Vir Pratap were left blank. Censored reports were withdrawn, but no replacement was sent. And Pratap Bhavan was not inclined to fill in the white spaces. Unsurprisingly, within days the government knocked on the doors again and there was a clampdown on its protest; the two newspapers were informed that leaving middle-page spreads blank was unlawful.
During this time, Virendra and his sons were forced to engage with low-ranking government officials who acted as censors. Their knowledge of press workings was laughable but that didn’t deter them or dampen their determination from clamping down on press freedom. These men had clear instructions and erred on the side of caution; some of their actions were borderline ridiculous. But they had been flung from dreary bureaucratic anonymity to what was entirely an unexpected moment – an indefinite one – in the sun and, in that power play, there was no questioning them. A protest was as far as complaints by the press could stretch – and all objections were overruled as predictably as the scorching sun that June in Punjab. Every line that went to print was stamped upon with the censors’ signature. By then, a central Censor Room was functioning from the first floor of Parliament House. The Shah Commission report states:
Censors worked there in two shifts from 10.30 am to 3 pm and 3 pm to 10.00 pm. It was also decided that there would be no name board affixed on the door to show that it was the Censor Room … the actual work of censorship on a day-to-day basis went even beyond the scope of the guidelines. Orders were arbitrary in nature, capricious, and were usually issued orally.
Jalandhar in 1975 published ten newspapers in three different languages – Urdu, Hindi and Punjabi. Says Lalit of this time:
The censors were from different government departments like labour and excise, among others, and they didn’t understand the media business. [They] were told when in doubt, cut. This went on till somehow, they got fooled by their own propaganda and started easing up after elections were announced which is when we went all out against the government. Having remained staunchly defiant in the face of colonial torture, Virendra was as unmoved by the Emergency diktats as he was adamant. ‘I didn’t get any editorial censored during the Raj, I am not going to do it now,’ he declared. Once the government clamped down on his blank editorials, his kalam simply went silent. It was months later that he took a call to publish daily snippets of his past – a composite of many lifetimes – instead of allowing his writings on the present to be censored. It is this collection that later formed the basis of his memoirs Veh Inquilabi Din.
I stopped writing editorials for our two newspapers, Pratap and Vir Pratap, as I was not prepared to submit them to the censors for clearance. For about eight months, I did not write a single line. Friends suggested that since no one could predict how long the Emergency would last my total withdrawal from writing was not advisable. Therefore, from 29 February 1976 I started writing a series of articles in which I narrated the events of the two decades before Independence which, though connected with my personal life and work, were of some political significance too.