by NIRANJAN RAMAKRISHNAN
Mrs. Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India, 1966-77 and 1980-84. She was assassinated in 1984. PHOTO/Manas
The evening of June 25, 1975 had been euphoric. We had just returned from a mammoth public meeting at the Ramlila Grounds in Delhi. I recall the evening, eating mangoes or custard, listening to Bismillah Khan on All India Radio, playing Rag Malkauns . The Delhi night was pleasant, my cousin had come to stay with us, and we sat on the lawn outside our home in Moti Bagh, recollecting the developments of the day.
The entire national opposition had been at the meeting, capped by the Sarvodaya leader and hero of the Freedom Struggle, Jayaprakash Narayan. “This is not Pakistan!”, I recall JP saying, warning the government against declaring martial law to thwart the people’s will. “This is not Bangladesh. This is a democracy.” He called on Chavan and Jagjivan Ram, ostensible seniors in Mrs. Gandhi’s cut-’em-to-size cabinet, to examine their conscience and resign rather than continue under a leader whose election had been voided by the court. He called on the army not to obey illegal orders. Evidently he did not anticipate cravenness on the part of the police and the civil services (in the end it was the Chief of the Army, two years later, who would turn down an illegal offer by Mrs. Gandhi to share power).
There was a united call for Mrs. Gandhi to resign, failing which a national civil disobedience movement would commence. The dais groaned under the collective weight of India’s opposition. There was Acharya Kripalani, acerbic, sharp and brilliant, above party affiliation but possessed of a unforgiving disgust for the Congress . I recall Morarji Desai and Asoka Mehta of the Congress (O), Lal Krishna Advani and Atal Behari Vajpayee of the Jan Sangh (the former still relatively new in national politics), the Socialist leader Madhu Limaye speaking in his gravelly Maharashtrian monotone, explaining how the law stood. There was Piloo Mody of the Bharatiya Lok Dal. I don’t remember if Charan Singh was there, but he must have been. Present too were the smaller fry, there only because they were from Delhi. Of these, I remember the Jan Sanghi Madan Lal Khurana, characterizing big-money support for Mrs. Gandhi’s administration by describing its makeup, “Oopar Tata, neeche Bata, aur beech mein ghata hi ghata! Ironic, for he could have been describing his own party in 2003.
My friend Subbarao and I were there (in the audience, not the dais…), but not paying too much attention to the speeches. We had just finished our post graduation in Physics, and were busy talking about our interview calls from BARC, the Bhabha Atomic Research Center in Bombay. Anyway, the speeches were hardly gripping – not even Vajpayee’s, for I have absolutely no memory of it. And all that counted was the electric atmosphere around us. The air crackled with an inchoate anticipation. Mrs. Gandhi’s exit seemed imminent.
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