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A Nation in Motion

Knock, knock!" we'd say during those years, particularly when my friend Dinesh M was within earshot. "Who's there?" "Dinesh." "Dinesh who?" "The Nation Is On the Move."

I know, I know: pretty lame. But in those two years, it expressed pretty well our feelings for the situation we found ourselves in. There were all those inspiring messages plastered on Delhi's buses at the time. This one always struck me as particularly ironic. Come to think of it, it retains much the same irony today.

"The Nation Is On The Move." Ha, ha. Wasn't very funny, but then neither was our "knock, knock" ditty.

The two years, of course, were those of Indira Gandhi's Emergency, which got revved up a quarter century ago. No doubt mine is only the 937th column you will read this week on the Emergency. But bear with me. After all, I want to know if The Nation Is On The Move.

Now it's true that we have Indira to thank for a lot of what we see in the country today. Sloth in banking and insurance, corruption in the judiciary and police, tension between religions that she was the first to turn to political advantage, the degradation of all our institutions: the list is long and much lamented, this column isn't (Or not yet).

Still, we don't hear much about one legacy she left, what I believe is her most enduring contribution to our political landscape. Indira G perfected the art of making us believe one thing when the truth -- the stuff that was actually happening out there -- was entirely another thing.

She had dumped the whole opposition in jail. Newspapers appeared with large blacked out blocks (when did you last see those, you Gen-Xers?). Yet Indira made out that democracy was in its fullest, finest flower in those years (Well, one more slogan told us so). Her son Sanjay was running amok sterilising and terrorising people, demolishing their homes: really being the ordinary two-bit bully he was. But Indira was busy prescribing discipline to the rest of us (Well, yet another slogan told us so). She was also busy destroying the country in every possible way. But she took every possible chance to warn us darkly of that sinister "foreign hand" (Did still another slogan tell us so? I can't recall). As a nation, we progressed not an inch in any direction -- socially, politically or economically. Yet those DTC buses, at her behest, proclaimed the God-given truth: The Nation Is On The Move. Oh yeah.

In the Emergency, everything got infused by doses of such phoniness. If a judgment in Allahabad was going to unseat Indira, that was a dire threat to the country ("India is Indira and Indira is India", a mercifully forgotten half-man at her side bleated once). If Sanjay was beating up people randomly, well, he was only "taking action" against the people who were pulling India down. This was an impatient young man; he wanted "change" and would make India modern. A "doer", not a "talker". And wait a minute, wait one hutment-smashing minute: wasn't there still-yet-once-again-one-more-another DTC bus slogan that urged us to "Work More, Talk Less"?

Who was to know that to Sanjay, "Work More" meant "Beat Up Even More People Than You Normally Do"?

More than his mother, Sanjay was the central figure in the topsy-turvy land that was India under the Emergency. And that fact had a curious justice to it. This was a man who, until the Emergency came along, was known only for the ignominious failure he was, best captured in his "People's Car" project. Luckily, Suzuki took it over and we now have Marutis chugging all over the country; but in 1975 our money was being poured into Sanjay's pockets, with no car, not even a toy, not one damned wheel, to show for all those rupees.

But phoniness prevailed. Overnight, failure was whitewashed. Sanjay became the new man of action, the brash and braying hope for a new India. As Khushwant Singh noted, he appealed "to all those young boys who had not passed their examinations." If Sanjay could reach the exalted level of power where he could simply "do" things, why could they not aspire to the same? Why could they not aspire to be him?

Why, come to think of it, bother with examinations at all? The Nation Is On The Move. No time for trivialities.

But looking back, and here's the greatest irony, the nation was indeed on the move. Though it probably was not the kind of motion Indira meant.

No doubt, in one direction, we were on the move into a barren la-la moonscape filled with bleaters ("India is Indira" and all that) and Sanjay clones. But in a far more important direction, we were on the move with Jayaprakash Narayan and his followers: in student action on campuses across the country; in a rush of door-to-door campaigning by ordinary people like my 65-year-old aunt with no previous interest in politics. In a groundswell of anger that flung Indira, her son and their gang of pasty-faced sycophants out in 1977.

Thing was, Indira G always wanted us to believe the doggerel she painted on our buses. Of course, she herself knew very well that it was garbage. But as the Emergency wore on, things changed. Perhaps because she had surrounded herself with benders and bleaters, she herself began believing her numberless inanities. And they turned right round and bit her. Like "The Nation Is On The Move" did. For once, in that heady election of '77, her own attempts to bamboozle us with slogans backfired.

The lady was certainly no stranger to slogans. For years, she had worked assiduously to associate her name in our minds with that memorable one: "Garibi Hatao." Even today, people remember her for that. Even today, you'll find people saying, but at least she cared for the poor! For as one Indira admirer wrote some years ago, it had "become her battle cry". We remember that cry even though dear Mrs Gandhi did precisely nothing to actually hatao the garibi. Nothing, as in zero. And that fit right in with the vast celebration of phoniness her Emergency was.

And this enormous phoniness is why, in many ways, the Emergency stood for a definite darkness in us all. We like to think it isn't there, or that at least it is well hidden. But it is never very far away. Here's how a Delhi University professor described it to author Shiva Naipaul: "I recognise that darkness in myself... Sometimes, when you look around you, when you see the decay and pointlessness... suddenly there can come an overwhelming hatred. Crush the brutes! Stamp them out! It's a racial self-disgust, a racial contempt some of us develop towards ourselves... I detested Sanjay Gandhi, but I fear I understood him -- better than he understood himself."

Somewhere in there is the lesson from Indira's Emergency, 25 years on. It takes very little, and less every day, for that darkness in us to show itself. When it does, as during the Emergency, we step into a dim make-believe world. In that world, lies become the truth (I'm losing count of the people who tell me, "Don't you know, the bomb blasts in Bombay started the riots?"); there's always someone else to blame (if some Indians are murdered, it's because of conversions); the "foreign hand" is alive and kicking (the Inter-Services Intelligence, the Pope, China, the United States, the Central Intelligence Agency, the British Broadcasting Corporation's "negative portrayal" of India, take your pick); and inanity poses as progress (one chief minister proudly proclaimed his government's biggest achievement -- changing Bombay to Mumbai).

Too many of those young boys who didn't pass examinations have grown up into the Sanjays of today. They beat up, instigate, riot, vandalise and murder. They face no consequences. They are only taking action, after all. They are even today's patriots, setting an example for the rest of us just as Sanjay once did. And as there were with him, there are facile explanations and rationalisations of their crimes.

It happens in Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Bihar, Gujarat and Punjab. Thuggery officially winked at, our dark side taken shape, is on the rise everywhere.

So indeed, The Nation Is On The Move. All aboard, but where to?

Dilip D'Souza