Remember, remember not the Fifth of November but our own gunpowder, treason and plot.
We see of no reason why this censored out season should ever be forgot.
[25th June marks the 40th Anniversary of Indira Gandhi's declaration of an internal Emergency.What happened at Turkman Gate? How many countless lives were lost and destroyed by forced sterilisation? Who ultimately was the figurehead running India then? The deeply censored and scarcely talked about event has been clouded under a veil. Until now.]
. "In our curriculum, it is conveniently sidelined and very easily put under the carpet. We as a generation have no clue of what has happened at that time and how crucial that was and how till date we are facing repercussions of the Emergency and in many ways, still living it,"
India, Indira Gandhi, Emergency 1975,
India, Indira Gandhi, Emergency 1975,
"I am not against the Nehru-Gandhis, but the government has the responsibility of honouring other heroes too. Clearly, the schemes and projects have been named after three members of this family disproportionately."
India, Indira Gandhi, Emergency 1975,
"However, it is not merely the absence of available histories that has transformed the experience of the Emergency into a non-event for the overwhelming majority of India's under-45s. There appears to be an unbridgeable gap between those for whom the Emergency was a political landmark and those for whom it is a meaningless shibboleth. There is a discernible absence of an enduring mythology and political folklore surrounding the Emergency that spans the generations,"
"The dilution of the democratic momentum after 1977 ensured that no permanent opprobrium was attached to those who played either junior officers or foot-soldiers of the Emergency. All regimes after 1977 seemed more than willing to indulge those who ratted on their colleagues to stay out of jail. Their re-entry into the orbit of anti-Congressism ensured a cross-party stake in the promotion of amnesia,"
India, Indira Gandhi, Emergency 1975,
'Unsettling Memories: Narratives of India's Emergency'
'."The Emergency does not lie alone in India's pool of forgotten moments. Neither is it unique. Such moments share at least one common factor: they do not fit comfortably into the national picture of how things are meant to be," "Not only does it threaten the precarious image of India as 'essentially non-violent'—an image increasingly difficult to sustain—but it also implicates the state as the key agent of violence. More threatening still, the Emergency challenges the discourse of democracy which claims an unbroken hold over India's past from the present day right back to the attainment of Independence in 1947,"
India, Indira Gandhi, Emergency 1975,
'Absences which serve to discourage the construction and survival of memory, and substitutes which serve to redirect memory along alternative routes,'
India, Indira Gandhi, Emergency 1975,
'Autumn Of The Matriarch'
Want to read more riveting stories from the period? Click on any of the images below to be directed to more from our Emergency Series
