By Brij Mohan Toofan 1988, 124 pages
Ajanta Publication Delhi, India
Available from South Asia Books
P.O. Box 502 Columbia, Missouri 65205
Written by a politically active, long standing socialist from India, this book carries an introduction by Madhu Dandavate another veteran socialist and the present Finance Minister of India. It is one man’s chronicle and a potent reminder of the dark days when for over one and half years, democracy was silenced in the world’s most populous democratic nation. From June 1975 to December 1976 Indians had no rights, only duties. All constitutional Guarantees were suspended. As a personal diary which captures the fears of one man and the difficulties of survival of a protestor in a dictatorial regime, it is moving. As a source of history or as historical narrative, it is fragmentary and of limited use,
The title is misleading for it implies that the book details the active struggle of millions against the dreaded emergency laws that Indira Gandhi foisted upon the people. The flavor of that bloody struggle, the shame of ‘Surrender and the taste of war do not come through, nor is there any final exhilaration of victory. One senses more the death of democracy on a clean sterile operating table. The author hints at protests in Bihar but never mentions once the hundreds of thousands of Sikhs in Punjab who flooded India’s jails in noncooperation with the dictatorial regime in Delhi. More than anything else, these actions of the Sikhs sowed the ‘Seeds for the later attempts by Indira Gandhi to destroy them in 1984. Those actions led to her death instead and have now brought India to the brink of Fragmentation.
How did the emergency affect the common man? How did life change? Toofan repeatedly plucks at dark shadows and murky events but provides little hard evidence. He talks to marriage celebrations and Diwali Festivals as if the only hardship was that sugar was not available in the black market, Toofan mentions many secret meetings but fails to tell us that was achieved there. Some of these meetings must have been dramatic, stormy or even controversial but there is little hint of that in this book. He mentions the difficulties of travel and the many aliases he used but the drama of close encounters and of the chase is missing. Was the emergency only socially burdensome? No great sense of physical suffering of the common man who threw out Indira Gandhi in the elections in 1977.
There appears to be little criticism of the President of India who signed the law the state of emergency in India at Indira Gandhi’s behest. The book, short on specifics, long on polemics, repeatedly comes down hard on India’s Communist Party and on Indira Gandhi. It appears from the book that the only good and honest people left were the socialists. Apart from the diatribes against the vileness of Indira Gandhi and the Communists (with which I tend to agree) and the virtue of the socialists, not much evidence is presented.
At times, the language is awkward and non sequiters abound, such as: “It rained today and the mercury went down considerably but the heat in the woman Prime Minister’s head is getting volcanic every day.” Mixed metaphors are generously distributed throughout and the writing is often tedious. On reading this book, one bemoans in Orwell’s words, “the reduced expectations of language and the substitution of attitudes and feelings for ideas.” There are so many unconnected thoughts and undeveloped ideas, incomplete and dangling sentences that the book would have profited from editing. The tone of the writing is generally pessimistic with little faith in the resiliency of India’s pluralistic society.
Since Toofan was one of the inner circles of Indian political leaders, a discussion of why Indians did not revolt in masse or how Indian political society fell within 40 years from the ideals of Mahatma Gandhi to the cynicism and corruption of Indira Gandhi would have been enlightening. Instead we have one man’s diary of petty nuisances, as Toofan himself admits, on an “endless, purposeless and tiresome journey,” A pity indeed.
Nevertheless, Toofan’s book is a welcome commentary on that shameful period of Indian history.
I J. Singh New York University.
Article extracted from this publication >> April 13, 1990
