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I think I met my first Catholic Religious human rights activist sometime in 1976 in the rural areas of the “steel belt” that runs through what was then undivided Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Jharkhand where all the big steel plants, coal mines, and the steel trade is located. Those were turbulent times. Indira Gandhi had declared a state of national Emergency [1975-77], almost suspended the Constitution, got the Supreme Court to rule that that there could be no cause for habeas corpus and that normal human rights as we understand them, the right to life and liberty and the rule of law, would not be available to the common man. Indira Gandhi was a Prime Minister fighting to save her regime after the Allahabad High Court overturned her election to the Lok Sabha. But it was his younger son, Sanjay Gandhi, aided and abetted by a coterie of self-serving senior officers and a gang of Youth Congress leaders, who had emerged as the real, albeit extra- constitutional, centre of authority. Their actions saw forcible sterilizations of men as old as sixty, and as young as sixteen, and demolitions of Muslim qasbas, and about 1,400 clusters, scattered across the city of Delhi, which were bulldozed out of existence. Close to 200,000 families were hastily given barren and tiny plots of land in about 40 so called resettlement colonies, and lived or months without adequate water and toilets, and with tarpaulin sheets to save them from the heat, the cold and the rains that are always so excessive in Delhi. By the way, barring a muted voice or two, I did not find the Church in India, Cardinals, archbishops or their organizations in any denomination; pass a resolution against the Emergency.Safety first, for sure, and always be on the right side of the ruling party. Nothing much has changed. But John Dayal digress. This is not about the Emergency, though one is sore tempted to write more on the because of the recent Congress party autobiography in which it admits the excesses, and even puts a bit of the blame on Sanjay Gandhi, whose wife Maneka Gandhi and son Varun are now leading lights of the opposition Bharatiya Janata parity. Another leading light of the BJP and a former Union minister in Atal Behari Vajpayee’s government, Jagmohan who was once a Sanjay Gandhi acolyte, has risen to the defense of his old chum and master, writing a fiery piece in the editorial page of the Hindustan Times. I know something of the Emergency excesses and had written about them in a book For Reasons of State, Delhi under the Emergency which I authorized with my then colleague in the Patriot newspaper, Ajoy Bose, later of the Guardian, UK.
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