Musical chairs

Indira Gandhi levelled similar accusations against the media. Of course, there was no TV and AIR was a government mouthpiece. Media, then, meant the newspapers. Some of the famous quotes from her are now the parivar’s stock-in-trade. Ironically, it was a leading light of the parivar who said about the press of that time that ‘‘when the government asked them to bend, they crawled’’.

Mrs Gandhi declared on June 19, 1975 at a speech at the Boat Club rally that ‘‘when I visit foreign countries they tell me that we are allowing too much freedom.’’ A week later, she imposed Emergency. Among the things she accused the media of was that it had exaggerated the finding of the Allahabad High Court against her. Today those words echo in the speeches of some of the parivar members on the reporting of Gujarat — that it is all exaggeration of small incidents, that nice things are happening in the state, school examinations and panchayat polls are being conducted etc. Remember those famous words of Congressmen during Emergency, that ‘‘trains are running on time and industries are working without a break’’?

During the JP movement, the then prime minister accused her opponents of being influenced by foreign powers that wanted to destabilise her government. How many times in the recent past have we heard its members say ‘‘certain external forces are trying to de-stabilise the BJP-led government at the Centre by promoting violence in Gujarat and later publicising it in international fora’’? Just as the parivar is taking strong objection now to the world reaction to Gujarat, Mrs Gandhi picked up laudatory references in the foreign media to the JP movement as proof of the malevolence of these ‘external forces’. There was hardly a rally where she did not refer to the ‘‘foreign hand’’ behind the movement.

Mrs Gandhi and her cohorts dubbed all the critics as ‘anti-national’. In this list were Vajpayee and Advani. It is now the turn of the victims of those days to prepare their own list of ‘anti-nationals’.

A prominent target of Mrs Gandhi’s attack was George Fernandes whose leadership of the railway strike played a role in precipitating the events that climaxed in emergency. George Fernandes is now finding conspiracy behind the media treatment accorded to him. The RSS was a victim of Indira Gandhi’s authoritarianism. That organisation is now taking recourse to her words. She accused newspapers of reporting against ‘‘the people’’; the RSS accuses the media of reporting against ‘‘the majority community’’.

A newspaper must always find the courage to stand alone, if need be, in defense of the truth and values of civilisation and fight the majority when it transforms itself into a mob. It is not the crawlers but the critics who overcome the world.