The most profound words from Orwell’s 1984 : Who controls the past controls the future.

Today is June 25, or what I like to call “Dynasty Day.” The day on which Indira Gandhi bared her fangs and tried to swallow our nascent democracy.

Yes, the danger has passed. I can say with reasonable confidence that the Dynasty will not dare to make such an attempt again. Democracy has been baked into our genes. But it is always worth remembering the Emergency, in order to remember what the Nehru-Gandhis wanted to do to our country.

What else is there to remember about the Emergency? In my view, the most important thing along with remembering who resisted the Emergency is remembering who did NOT resist the Emergency: India’s elite.

Caught up with Communist rhetoric and assured that Indira’s hand would always feed them fell, India’s elite were quite happy to let our democracy go to the dogs. Some liked to travel abroad, snobbishly telling the world that the Emergency was actually for the upliftment of the poor, for speedy poverty reduction by a “strong” government. “Their bread is more important than my freedom,” as they would say… It is quite another matter that these elite were not particularly interested in freedom at all, because they had been assured a lifelong supply of bread from Indira Gandhi.

By telling Indians and the world that the emergency was about poverty reduction, the elite planned to steal our freedom.

Credit goes to the teeming hundreds of millions of Indians who saw right through the trick. Remember that this was 1975…the scale and depth of poverty in India would quite simply be unimaginable. As such, the elite thought that the poor would fall for anything that carried with it the promise of two meals a day.

But the elite were wrong. As poor and hungry as the people were, they realized that something very precious was being stolen from them. This is a level of political maturity that had no parallel in the world at the time and likely never will. From the 50s to the 70s, dozens of third world countries fell into the hands of dictators and never saw the light of democracy again for decades. It is this kind of global success that led Indira Gandhi to try in India what Stalin and Mao had done in their countries.

She underestimated the people of this nation. The rest is history.

I must note here with some amusement the inversion of circumstances between 1975-77 and 2014-2018. Back in the time of the Emergency, the ordinary Indian was crying out for justice while the elite made merry. I remember an article of Karan Thapar fondly recalling how they would eat brunch at the PM’s table in 1976 and casually go for a movie at Rashtrapati Bhavan.

During Modi rule, this paradigm has been inverted. While the average Indian is leading his life calmly, it is the elite … the class to which Karan Thapar belongs … that is crying hoarse about “undeclared Emergency.” I leave it up to you to decide whether this class is crying over a loss of freedom or crying over a loss of bread.

Now on to the second part of the title of this post. About how it matters which parts of history we remember.

We all know that the Emergency will just be a footnote in today’s media, if it is mentioned at all. In fact, you might even see some articles actually praising Indira Gandhi for having the “grace” to hold an election in 1977. They forget that every dictator … from Hitler to Musharraf … has held a referendum of this kind. And the tragedy of history is that the dictator inevitably wins. That is why India stands out as a shining star … Indira Gandhi lost.

For an event of such extreme gravity, it is stunning how little we talk about the Emergency today. Compare to other great democracies, such as America. The Americans bring up their children to know as much about the Civil War as possible. But because our school curriculum and media discourse is mostly controlled by those who live on crumbs from the Dynasty’s table, we hear so little about the Emergency.

In fact, in 2015, Scroll interviewed “Professor” D L Seth, a so called academic, on the subject of the Emergency. In this, the “professor” argued that RSS/BJP had nothing to complain about during the Emergency. The reason? They were only thrown in jail, not tortured.

These are the same publications that cannot stop talking about the obstacles to free speech created by Twitter trolls.

Because secular intellectuals could not work out a way of justifying the Emergency, they did the next best thing. They wiped it out of public memory.

Examples of this nature abound. I recall having a FB debate back in 2013 (I no longer do those) in my heavily left wing college alumni group. Those were the days when Modi was beginning to hit the deck… and the temperature on FB was very very high. Soon enough, somebody pulled out the old smear of “But RSS supported Hitler.”

I decided to strike back, reminding people of how Communists were military allies of Hitler for the first two years of World War 2. To my absolute astonishment, a massive percentage of grown adults, educated at one of India’s finest institutions, had never heard of it!

Bizarrely, I was accused of lying about Hitler ever being a military ally of the Soviet Union. When I started putting out the Wikipedia links to the Soviet invasion of Poland in coordination with the Nazis, the photos of joint victory parades of Nazis and Soviets, Nazi generals making merry with Communist comrades, links to the Katyn massacre, it caused quite a flutter. One person apologized to me. Others went into an angry silence.

I dare anyone to try this experiment. Try asking otherwise well informed people you know if they are aware that Communists and Nazis were allies in WW2. Why is this so little known? Because the left wingers who control academia did an amazing job of scrubbing inconvenient facts out of history.

Here’s another. Ask people if they know that Mussolini paid the Catholic Church a cool $39 million in return for the Pope endorsing his Fascist Party…

Chances are they know about the one time Golwalkar said something about Nazis… but not this.