Indi(r)a’s Emergency

Writer-director-producer Vikramaditya Motwane is in a phase of his life when he seems to be looking back a lot — partly to mine past events and understand why things went wrong, but also to make sense of the present. 

After making the 10-episode series, Jubilee, he has now made a documentary, Indi(r)a’s Emergency. Jubilee was set in Bombay’s film industry before and after Independence. At its centre was Himanshu Rai and Devika Rani Chaudhury, the first couple of Hindi cinema, who together set up Bombay Talkies. Through them, Motwane told the story of men and women driven by love, ego, fame and greed, and of how a director devoted to making films  fought political forces trying to use films to control people’s hearts and minds.   

In the stories they tell, the industry and era they are set in, Jubilee and Indi(r)a’s Emergency are completely different. But in spirit, they are companion pieces. 

Motwane’s 113-minute-long documentary, which premiered at the Mumbai Academy of Moving Image (MAMI) film festival on Saturday night, played at a packed theatre, and was followed by a Q&A session with the director, Sameer Nair of Applause Entertainment, which hasproduced the film, and Anurag Kashyap, Motwane’s friend and collaborator.

The documentary, which is split into chapters, each covering a phase of Indira Gandhi’s political life, opens with Jawaharlal Nehru, his eminent Cabinet, and B.R. Ambedkar—all stalwarts of the freedom movement—creating a Constitution that gave Indian citizens rights under Articles 14, 19 and 21. Adopted two years after Independence, it guaranteed Indians freedom of speech and expression, freedom to practice religion, protection of life and personal liberty, as well as equality before the law. The blindfold was not just on Lady Justice, it was also on the state and all its agencies.  

This preface frames and gives context to the documentary before it begins chronicling Indira Gandhi’s rise after Nehru’s death.

As the documentary moves through all the major political events—from 1966, when Indira Gandhi first took oath as the Prime Minister, to her assassination in 1984—we witness political scheming and manoeuvring of the “Congress Syndicate” led by K. Kamraj, the difficult decisions Indira took, but also the canny politician and authoritarian leader she became. 

We watch the rise of Indira as a leader who is “tireless, relaxed, and confident”, whose rallies and road shows don’t just attract voters but fawning fans, and who slowly emerges as a one-woman power centre, instilling fear in her own Cabinet members and party leaders, compromising the Parliament and bureaucracy, muzzling the press, institutionalizing corruption, and grooming a successor who only promised much worse.

Running parallel to the story of Indira, once called “gungi gudiya”, is the story of India—how drastically it changed with the decisions taken, but with the subtext of how things haven’t changed at all.

The 21-month-long Emergency is at the heart of Motwane’s film and the lead-up to it is quite simple and alarming — rising prices, corruption, stagnant salaries, general disillusionment and unrest, rail workers’ and students’ protests, the Opposition, led by Jayaprakash Narain, asking questions and talking of “Sampoorn Kranti”. Alongside all this, we see the rise of a reckless Youth Congress under Sanjay Gandhi, who enjoyed a free rein and embarrassing sycophancy.

The film has a sharp focus on how blatant and absolute usurping of rights and press censorship was during the Emergency. 

It shows us how, in one night over 600 people—Opposition leaders, suspected Naxals, student leaders — were arrested under flimsy or false pretexts, and booked under MISA. We watch peaceful protests being crushed with harsh police action, a compromised President, and hear stories of men and women who were tortured and killed in custody. While bulldozers are sent to flatten houses at Turkman Gate, and nasbandi (sterilisation) targets are met by force, quotes of even Nehru, Gandhi and Tagore were not allowed in newspapers and magazines because these men spoke of freedom, rights and truth. 

The documentary also shows, though carefully culled and cleverly edited archival footage, the all-is-well story that the government was running during the Emergency. 

While the Constitution was amended to give the Prime Minister absolute power, we watch Indira addressing large rallies, Sanjay Gandhi’s padyatras and Film Division reels where men and women talk about the glories of the Emergency, how necessary it was, and that its critics are people who don’t want the country to progress. Each photo-op is designed to frame Indira Gandhi not just as a decisive leader loved by the people, but as the only leader who could lead and fix India by providing a strong and stable government.

The segment after the Emergency is lifted, when Opposition parties of all hues come together to fight the might of Indira’s Congress, feels like it is foretelling the future. The Janata government led by Morarji Desai, which included Atal Behari Vajpayee, George Fernandes, Jagjivan Ram and Charan Singh among others, did not last long, and has, over the years, been turned into a comical, brief interruption in Indira Gandhi’s reign. Its story has been reduced to infighting amongst power-hungry men. 

But Motwane’s documentary illuminates one significant legacy of Janata Party’s short-lived government: How it righted the wrongs of the 42nd Amendment by restoring, and strengthening, the Constitution with the 43rd and 44th amendments which state that the Prime Minister’s election can be called into question, the cover of “anti-national activities” cannot be used to restrict legal review or suspend civil liberties, and any future declaration of Emergency needs the threat of “armed rebellion” as well as the written consent of Cabinet members.

Indi(r)a’s Emergency is a history lesson made entertaining, enlightening and relevant by stunning animated segments, a very cool background score and a delicious voiceover by lyricist, singer and actor Swanand Kirkire. 

The voice-over script, written by Abhay Korane and Sunil Kandola, is witty, sarcastic, funny and doesn’t pull any punches. It is sprinkled with words and incidents that have resonance today — we hear of “whatsapp university” and see how Indira Gandhi always managed to find “apda mein avsar” (opportunity in adversity). While telling us a story of the past, these contemporaneous bits disrupt our viewing by pulling us to the present. 

They give Motwane’s film political heft, and leave us with the depressing thought that India’s destiny seems to be stuck in a loop. Indi(r)a’s Emergency ends how it began, with the Constitution. Two quotes appear at the end, including one by B.R. Ambedkar, that drew a loud applause from the audience: “Bhakti in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul. But in politics, Bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.”

There are many ways to watch Motwane’s Indi(r)a’s Emergency. And different audiences will process it differently. One way to watch it is to see it as the story of how India — under the rise, might and marzi of a megalomaniacal leader — changed forever. But to remember throughout what Sameer Nair said during the Q&A session: “All subtext is purely coincidental”.