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The initial reaction of most people to the Emergency was admittedly very positive. Everyone was tired of the strikes and bandhs organized by people like George Fernandes. They disrupted normal life for most working people and served very little purpose in making things better for most people. lt only benefited trade union members and their leaders. For once the government was seen to be standing up to the trade unions. Later, Mrs Gandhi called a meeting of industrialists. As part of the delegation from the Associated Chambers of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), l also went to her office to listen to her appeal for cooperation from industry. Everyone was impressed by the fact that she felt it necessary to call businessmen to explain her rationale. It was presented as a temporary phase to put down the disruptive forces which had been let loose by the agitation led by Jayaprakash Narayan against her continuing to be Prime Minister. 

But the one person who educated me on the implication of the Emergency on the day it was imposed was my late colleague, Shamdas Gursahani, who was our Legal Director. In the midst of the general euphoria among operating managers, he told me: ‘T.T., the implications of this are very ominous for a company like ours and people like us. If you walk out of this office and a police officer or someone like that asked you for a bribe and you refused to give it, he can arrest you on the spot under the Defence of India Rules (DIR) on a trumped-up charge of your having spoken against the government. It is then his word against yours. And you never know where the Courts will take it.’

I had not realized the potential effect of the loss of personal liberty which was part of the Emergency. He put it vividly and brought it home to me that DIR arrests did not need a warrant. I began to realize the enormity of the problems that could lie ahead. We had always boasted to our foreign visitors that India was a democracy unlike many other Less Developed Countries (LDCs) and that we had the rule of law with a strict separation between the executive and the judiciary. It was with some shame that we had to admit and tell them that it was all undone. There was no law above the DIR and the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA) under which there was not even a habeas corpus The era of “committed” judges, “raids” on offices and homes, businessmen who were “with us” and those who were “not with us” (and therefore against us) had set in. Censorship of newspapers could be extended to all mail. So we had to be very careful with what one wrote or even said on the phone.

I remember writing a letter to the Overseas Committee (OSC) member telling him about the implications of the Emergency as Gursahani had explained to me, and warned him that we may not be able to correspond so freely in the future. Pretty soon we were to face problems in outlying places. In one area, in Madhya Pradesh, one of our salesmen was arrested because he did not respond to demands from a petty official. We had to move government machinery at many levels before he was released and placed on trial. Raids of business premises and residences of businessmen sent very strong signals to everyone on how to behave and respond to demands from the officials and party functionaries. The level of “contributions” expected from business houses escalated. There was almost a competition among a class of them on how big a sum they had been assessed to pay as it were a measure of their importance and clout in the government. 

On a more mundane level, family planning through coercive measures had its effect on our operations in the north. At that time it was common for buses to be stopped on roadways in Punjab to conduct vasectomy on passengers. Young boys and old men were given vasectomies forcibly at railway stations in order to fulfil the quota that had been allotted to government and public sector employees.

Excerpted from Page 201-203 of ‘To Challenge and To Change’ by T. Thomas