In pictures: Heroes of India's Emergency & the rise of non-Congress leaders
Authored By Wion Web Desk
Published: Jun 23, 2018, 23:00 IST | Updated: Jun 23, 2018, 23:00 IST
There were those who dared to raise their voice against Indira Gandhi and the Emergency. They braved the hardships and eventually put democracy back on the rails in March 1977. Here's remembering some of those heroes and honouring all of those who ensured that the Indian democracy survived its most difficult test.
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Jayaprakash Narayan
He was known as Lok Nayak- the people's hero. He had called for Sampoorna Kranti- a total revolution in the Indian political system after the Allahabad high court held Indira Gandhi guilty of electoral malpractices. What gave him tremendous credibility was the fact that Jayaprakash Narayan had never contested an election or hankered for public office. So when he led the fight against the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi, thousands joined in. It was his mammoth rally at Delhi's Ramlila ground that shook Indira Gandhi and led her to impose emergency. Gandhi sent him to jail where his health began to fail.
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Morarji Desai
In the elections of 1977, immediately after the Emergency, it was the Janata party which came to power. It was made up of people JP had welded together. Morarji Desai became prime minister. To his credit, he overturned a slew of directives of Indira Gandhi and brought about constitutional amendments to make it harder for emergency to be declared in future.
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George Fernandes
The man who was the unlikely poster boy of the Janata Party and the resistance to the emergency was George Fernandes. He disguised himself as a local fisherman, a Sikh and also as a Sadhu, to evade arrest, and travelled extensively, garnering support and set up an underground resistance. His stated objective was to remove fear from the minds of people, unleashed by the brutal crackdown on anyone who was opposed to the government. He was eventually arrested but contested the general election from inside jail and won the Muzaffarpur seat in Bihar with a huge margin.
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LK Advani
But the man, who captured the essence of Emergency was Lal Krishna Advani. Addressing the atmosphere of fear in which the media operated, his words are etched in memory: when asked to bend, they chose to crawl.
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Atal Bihari Vajpayee
Both L K Advani and Atal Bihari Vajpayee were jailed by Indira Gandhi for almost 20 months. After the Emergency, both leaders emerged to build the Bharatiya Janata Party from a scratch, a credible political alternative to the Congress. In recent years, Advani has mentioned that enough safeguards haven't been built into the constitution to ensure that another Emergency doesn't happen again.
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Lalu Yadav
The swift crackdown on the opposition leaders has also been referred to as the 'night of the long knives'. clearly drawing parallels with the manner in which the opposition was crushed by the Nazis in 1934. But despite the many arrests and curtailment of civil liberties, there were several youth leaders who emerged to the forefront. Lalu Prasad Yadav, Ram Vilas Paswan, Arun Jaitley and Mulayam Singh Yadav to name just a few were all arrested but gained enough prominence to emerge as important leaders in the Post-Emergency era.
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