As the tittle says ".A personal history", it IS a personal history. In true journalistic fashion she has provided a vivid account of those dark days. Coomi Kapoor has done a brilliant job in recounting the horrors of the Emergency. We need to know in sufficient detail what the Emergency meant to the people of that time.
And I can not write just a sentence or even a paragraph to summarise the Emergency. The present generation needs to know what the Emergency really was. This hilarious line captures the end of the Emergency.īut the 21 months of Emergency weren't hilarious at all. "Mummy meri car gayee, beta meri sarkar gayee." * I can't not link to this brilliant profile of Subrmanian Swamy. This is an indispensable read – your bookshelf will be the more vigilant for it. Her tone is impersonal, even when documenting personal struggles. Kapoor does an excellent job documenting the horrors of Emergency, the failure of institutions to protect democracy (the bureaucracy, the Supreme Court, large swathes of the media), and the brave and ideologically-varied political opposition to it.
At the same time, it also highlights the importance of always being watchful for signs of an establishment that’s dismissive of dissent, and of standing up to it – institutions can often crumble when presented with the iron fist of power. Kapoor’s book shows the folly of such easy references – the sheer scale of the repression, the hundreds of thousands of arrests, the horrific slum clearance and family planning programmes, the suffocating censorship of every publication – all this is hopefully beyond the ambitions of the present dispensation, and its actions so far pale in comparison. It is fashionable to compare recent events that portend bad tidings – the everyday lynchings and the Governmental silences and justifications in response to them, the draconian laws passed through the Money Bill route or promulgated through ordinances – to the Big E. While Kapoor does detail her extended family’s predicament in the 19 turbulent months where India faced its biggest danger as a democracy (including a full chapter on the escapades of her brother-in-law, Subramanian Swamy*), the bulk of the book is devoted to providing an overview of the Emergency, the immediate events that lead up to it, the clamping down on any dissent, the sinister 5- & 20-point programmes and their consequences on India’s poorest, detailed profiles of Indira & Sanjay, and the aftermath of the event. If – like I was – you are slightly hesitant to buy a book that declares itself a personal history of the Emergency, since you’d rather read an impersonal one, don’t be.
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