Underground during the 1975 Emergency
By Ravi Nair
It was a little over 3 months since the imposition of the Emergency on 25 June 1975 when I was arrested. I had escaped the initial dragnet in Delhi as I was in Bangalore with a colleague to rally local students for the Jayaprakash Narayan movement. I also had three close shaves from being arrested. Two, I have written about earlier.
In terms of the caprice and the workings of the Deep State, nothing seems to have changed. The repressive scaffolding is the same. When the police were looking for me, they raided my father’s home but I had left home a year before. The police then raided the Bara Hindu Rao office of the Delhi Socialist party where I had been staying.
Fair weather friends
Living in the underground was not romantic at all. All that I had read about popular support to the French resistance to the Nazi occupation was so much balderdash. Or maybe, the Indian bread, called the “chapatti” did not have the hard crust the French baguette bread had.
One lecturer in a South Delhi college turned me away from his flat with a handout of Rs 10. I threw the note at his face and walked away, hungry as I was. Years later, after the Emergency he tried to see me. I gave him a piece of my mind. He slunk away.
This was not an isolated accident. Another left of CPI (M), Marxist lecturer, opened the door to me and another comrade only to shoo us before I could even speak two sentences. He is still left of CPM! The little that is ideologically left of him!
The third, a Maoist lecturer allowed me and my friend to enter his drawing room in spite of his lecturer wife’s objections. He had been arrested on the night of the emergency. We had learnt that he had been released a few weeks later, hence our visit to his house. It was clear that he was a broken man. Later, I learnt that his family’s powerful Punjabi connections had got him released. He did not want to be part of any political work. Looking at him, we understood and left.
Another Maoist, desperately trying to recruit me to the cause before the emergency went so very underground that even if I had journeyed to the Centre of the Earth with Jules Verne I would have not found him!
The Good ones
One upper middle class couple, not political but just imbued with liberal values and most important of all good human beings, allowed me their spare bedroom whenever I was in South Delhi.
Three working class comrades from the Delhi Socialist Party and members of the then powerful Socialist led Delhi Auto Rickshaw Mens Union were not just comrades. Than Singh Josh, Teja Singh and Jajju, they were life savers. Their homes, their meager resources were all shared generously.
There were two Tamil Iyer brothers who had the contract to run the South Indian vegetarian eating place at the back of the United News of India (UNI) office. It was just a lean to shack but the food was scrumptious. It is still there, run by their relatives.
Both of them knew me as a stormy petrel as before the emergency, after every demonstration at Patel Chowk or Boat Club we would come there with our rolled up flags and banners for a delicious tuck in of hot iddlies and dosas. Ambi Saar as one of them was called, made sure I got a hot meal and always brushed away offers to pay, knowing fully well that I must be underground and short of money. And what is more I got idly podi in clarified butter,” naiee”as it was called in Tamil. Not every paying customer got it!
I would swing by there every 10 days or so when I came to see Mohan Ram, the resident correspondent of the Madras Mail who collected all the new snippets which the print media could not use because of the censorship. There was no electronic media those days. Only All Indira Radio (AIR). Could have given Goebbels a run for his money! I used it in the underground media, or what passed of as such!
My mother sent me some money every month after squirrelling away something each month from the household expenses and away from my father’s scrutiny. Bless her soul. I will write more when I do my autobiography. My father was a bureaucrat, need I say more?
A year after my release, semi underground again, that and the story of my arrest will have to wait for another day.
(Ravi Nair is with the South Asia Human Rights Documentation Centre)
https://theleaflet.in/close-shave-in-august-1975/