hi all
On this day 39 years ago (mid night of 25/26 June 1975), Prime Minister Indira Gandhi imposed emergency in India. The fundamental rights were suspended. All the senior opposition leaders, including Jayaprakash Narayanan, Vajpayee, Advani, George Fernandes were imprisoned. George Fernandes was handcuffed and taken to the prison. Many leaders went underground and worked against the emergency to consolidate the people.
Press censorship was imposed. All the newspapers and magazines had to show their contents to the designated officials of PIB and take the clearance before publishing. When the media was asked to bend, some of the leading national media houses (who now claim to be the champions of press freedom) chose to crawl.
Indian Express (under the leadership of Shri Ramnath Goenka) and Thuglak (Editor: Shri Cho S Ramaswamy) were bold enough to write against the Government. When the contents were rejected by the censor officials, Indian Express brought out blank pages in between to convey the seriousness to their editors. Generally other publications used to fill up those rejected contents with non controversial items. (See the photo shots in the article - link given below)
The most popular cartoon magazine Shankar;s Weekly was forced to close down their magazine in August 1975 after 27 years of successful publication. (See the touching photo shot of the last cover of the magazine)
Even the records of emergency excesses were destroyed later by the subsequent Governments. Mr Era Sezhiyan (92), a veteran Parliamentarian has now published the Shah Commission Report on Emergency, from his personal copy.
Many Indians in the age group of less than 55 or 60 may not have any opportunity to experience the challenging days of Indian democracy. They may not know how senior leaders like Jayaprakash Narayanan boldly fought to bring back democracy. That was considered as 'Second Freedom Movement'.
Please read my 3 Part article with rare pictures in the following links. Already, I published this article in the June 2012 issue of our ezine PreSense.
Srinivasan
Prime Point
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Posted by: Prime Point Srinivasan <prpoint@gmail.com>
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