Emergency’s Reality Czech

The talk at the modest inn was all about politics. On how Vaclav Havel, the playwright who led the bloodless revolution, was going to change the face of their society. On the quaint town square there were pro-democracy banners and graffiti. And the mood only picked up as you reached Prague. The central Wenceslaus Square was packed with processionists chanting, Jize Havel (long live Havel). For a nation going through such revolutionary change, what was most remarkable was the absence of anger.

There were no slogans against anybody, no abuse, no cathartic rage of the kind one had seen the previous week in Bucharest as well as Moscow. The Czechs were at peace with themselves and the change. Of all the Europeans now breaking out of the Iron Curtain, the Czechs and the Hungarians had accepted the Communist mantra the least of all, which is easy to understand given their history of successful entrepreneurship. Even in that tumultuous January of 1990 my one abiding memory is of 100-ft red banners hanging from the top of old buildings on the central square with the words “Mr Bata welcome back to Prague” (or words to that effect) written in golden paint. Mr Bata, who was then fighting a deadly battle with the unions at his shoe factory in Calcutta, is among the most famous Czech entrepreneurs — of course he made his fame and money as an immigrant overseas.

I cherish two other memories from that visit a decade and a half ago. One was a visit to the Czech Communist Party office. Once again, what intrigued you was the absence of rancour, bitterness, anger. There was acceptance of change. There was also anticipation of democracy, and a belief that once things settle down, there will be room for Communists in electoral politics. These were genuine, true-believer Communists, but they were also Czech nationalists and they still had the intellect to distinguish between ideology and sovereignty. The other memory is a conversation with a young (then jobless) engineer in one of the pro-democracy processions.

“Look, Prague,” he said, “it is supposed to be the most beautiful city in Europe and now it looks so dirty and rundown. But please come back in a few years.”

And what will I see in a few years? I asked.

“See these buildings. We will take them, one wall at a time, one window a day, scrub and fix them, and out of this will come a city prettier than Paris,” he said.

How pretty Prague has turned out to be, you have to go and see. But it is an important piece of statistic that last year Prague got more tourists than Paris.

But that is not all that has changed. Fifteen years of reform have already taken the Czech per capita income to the $7,000 bracket. A nation that ran the dreadful Trabants and Ladas, a much more damning symbol of European Communism than the Ambassador ever would be of Nehruvian socialism, has now revived its industry so comprehensively, its Skodas are competing with the best around the world, also in India.

But as my guide and driver now complains, there is a problem. After so many years of banishment, the Communists are again beginning to win some seats in their elections (41 out of 200 in the Chamber of Deputies), he says and wonders, with great dismay, how could people have forgotten or forgiven the days when there were no freedoms, you couldn’t travel, study what you wanted, when one day there were no Pampers for your baby in the market and on the other, no detergent. “May be,” he says, “may be, we did not deserve a velvet revolution, we should have a bloody one, so people would not have forgiven so easily.”

I try to lecture him on democracy being the great healer, on how it can embrace the good and the bad, subsuming the bitternesses of history, on how the left and the right can share power in a diverse society, the usual Indian spiel. But he is not impressed. “Have you spent a couple of years under Communism? Just a couple of years, my friend, even a month. If you did you would never talk like this. You Indians are very fortunate you always had democracy, even when you had socialism.”

As I walked around my office this morning wondering what to write for this week’s National Interest, somebody said, write on the Emergency. Today is its 30th anniversary and, remember, the Express was in the thick of it. And that set me thinking, was the Emergency our brief, 19-month tryst with Communism of sorts? It was the most authoritarian period of our history, alright, but we often forget it was also the most “socialist”. The top tax rate was 97 per cent. The most awful amendments in labour and business-related laws were made in this period and have survived to date to haunt us and our children. But also, as commemorative articles on the Emergency appear in our papers next week, you might notice these would all be about the denial of political freedoms, authoritarianism, censorship and so on, and not about economics. It is a most remarkably peculiar Indian phenomenon, where there is almost zero tolerance for political authoritarianism but no such questioning of economic authoritarianism of the kind we suffered between 1967 and 1977. The Indian Express Economics Editor Ila Patnaik gives me stunning evidence of how this was the darkest decade for our economy as, apart from bank nationalisation, some of the most ghastly economic laws, the MRTP Act, Small Scale Reservation Act, FERA, Amended Industrial Disputes Act to finally apply it to many more units, Urban Land Ceiling Act, quantitative and tariff curbs on imports, all happened in this period. Not surprisingly, much of the reform since 1991, carried out mostly by Congress-led governments, has involved rolling back or softening these suicidal laws. So how come when so many of us bitch and wail about the political excesses of the Emergency nobody would talk about any of these?

So here is a theory. Could it be that starting with the euphoric early days of Nehru, we were caught in a neat trap. Nehru built a system where we were offered the political freedoms of a free-market democracy but economic freedoms of a benign socialist system. And because we had a reference point only for political liberty (having been a colony) and none for entrepreneurial freedom, we were so easily taken in. In a way, what Nehru gave us, and Indira built on, was the opposite of what the Communists are doing in China today, offering their people the economic freedoms of free-market democracies and the political restrictions of Communism.

It was a bit complex for me to explain to my Czech fellow traveller but do think about it as we remember that dreadful Emergency. Could it be that our dark memories are mostly about the denial of political freedoms because, once again, we had such low stakes economically that we never realised what we lost out on? All the sections of our power elite that suffered then —politicians, judiciary and the media — rode the post-Emergency anger to build in constitutional and moral protections in the system so their freedoms and powers would never be denied to them again. But, more than 10 states have still not repealed urban land ceiling, the UPA cannot even float a trial balloon on amending the Emergency labour laws or the Coal Act which is now holding our power plants to ransom, and every year the finance minister stealthily takes another few score industries out of the small scale reservation which has primarily contributed to making India uncompetitive. Maybe there is a lesson here somewhere. And hopefully, for the sake of the wonderful people of the Czech Republic, their Communists are not reading this.

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