Indi(r)a taught me about free speech

As I noted earlier, 25 years ago, I was getting ready to leave for the US.

August 15th will mark the anniversary of my own "tryst with destiny"

In 1987, the Singapore Airlines flight that I was on took off from Madras (as Chennai was known then) a little before the midnight that made made the transition from the 14th to the 15th--similar to India's birth at midnight.  Quite dramatic, eh!

As the US immigration stamp from that old passport shows, I landed in Los Angeles on August 15th, 1987 and since then have only been a tourist in the old country where I had my wonderful formative years.

To borrow from Salman Rushdie, I, too, am one of "midnight's children."

Living here, and having grown up in an independent India, I have not experienced anything other free speech--but for a brief two-year period from the summer of 1975, when the then Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi, decided that she had had enough with the opposition to her views. Well, with the exception of my awful colleagues who prefer that I shut up!

In particular, Gandhi disagreed with the court’s ruling that voided her election victory.  To add salt to her political wounds, the court further declared her ineligible for elections for an additional six years.

Instead of resigning from office, a la Richard "I'm not a crook" Nixon, Indira Gandhi blazed her own ignominious trail.  In June 1975, Gandhi cited national security concerns and essentially suspended the constitution itself.

One of the chilling effects it had was on free speech.

Prior to this declaration of Emergency, for instance, the open grounds—the  “maidan”—close to our home was the site of political meetings almost every other day.  The loudspeakers provided us with a fantastic political theatre of sorts—after all, this was before television reached all far corners of India. 

However, under Emergency, there was an eerie silence everywhere.  It was almost as if people’s tongues had been cut off.  Newspapers and magazines, especially those that were critical of Gandhi even prior to Emergency, often had blank columns because the government’s censors had axed out paragraphs that were considered a threat to internal stability.  Many dissenting journalists were imprisoned as well.  If five or more people wanted to meet and talk, special permission had to be obtained from the government beforehand—otherwise, they faced jail time for unlawful assembly! 

Even as a kid I was a political junkie, and this was the worst kind of withdrawal I could have then imagined! 

Fortunately, this Emergency did not last long.  It was lifted in March 1977, and soon after, Indira Gandhi and her party were voted out of office by overwhelming margins.  It was convincing proof that Indians—the educated and the illiterate alike—could not be silenced forever. 

Of course, this brief interlude is nothing compared to the story of India’s sibling-neighbor, Pakistan.  Democracy has always been fragile there, with military coups and other anti-democratic events occurring at regular intervals. 

One of the many victims of such political machinations was the poet-intellectual Faiz Ahmed Faiz.  Faiz was born a hundred years ago, in 1911, in the undivided India, and lived in the newly created Pakistan after the horrible partition in 1947.  However, his “speech” and political activities, like those of many Latin American literary-intellectuals, quickly landed him in trouble.

In 1951, Faiz was sentenced to four years in prison for his participation in a failed conspiracy to oust the government. Decades later, he was yet again on the wrong political side, after democracy yielded to military law in 1977.  Faiz was forced into exile.  He did return to Pakistan in 1982, and died two years later.

One of Faiz’s poems was about the importance of speaking out, which my immediate neighborhood knows all too well.  Here is the final verse from his poem, titled “Speak”:

Speak, this brief hour is long enough
Before the death of body and tongue:
Speak, 'cause the truth is not dead yet,
Speak, speak, whatever you must speak.

Faiz provides me one more reason to speak via this blog--my own maidan.