The Conscience Network

Title: The Conscience Network – A Chronicle of Resistance to a Dictatorship
Author: Sugata Srinivasaraju
Publisher: Vintage, 2025 (First)
ISBN: 9780670096787
Pages: 554

If you are in the habit of judging a book by its cover, this one would look like another run-of-the-mill product on Emergency for which there is no dearth. It describes the organisation and the methods through which Indians in the US – staying there for study or employment – resisted the Emergency declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in India in Jun 1975 to Mar 1977. The organisation followed a path independent of Cold War leanings and was guided by nonviolent Gandhian action. It recounts a nearly forgotten story of resistance to the Emergency, its manner of construction, its philosophy and pursuance which is fascinating and a compelling read. This story is put together by a string of individuals in the USA. The role of Gandhians and Socialists and the networks they ingeniously made possible in the US to fight the Emergency have been underplayed and unrecorded and this book claims to endeavour a correction on this aspect. Sugata Srinivasaraju is an independent journalist, author and columnist who has written for nearly three decades at the intersection of politics, culture and contemporary history. In the past, he has edited newspapers and run television channels and digital news platforms. He has four other books to his credit.

The business of the 1970s Emergency is still an unfinished business in India because the Congress party, which declared the Emergency and suspended democracy in this country for 21 months, have still not owned up the culpability nor regretted it. In other words, Congress still has not accepted the mistake of Emergency. In Jan 1978, Indira Gandhi herself took the entire responsibility for all the mistakes and excesses committed, but she caveated it by saying she did what she did to save the nation. In Mar 2021, Rahul Gandhi admitted that the Emergency was a mistake, but again qualified it by saying that the Congress at no point had attempted to capture India’s institutional framework. This was a plain lie because the Emergency saw the worst corruption and capture of India’s institutions. Raju observes that it was the dynastic succession of the Congress party that prevents it from fully owning up and regretting the Emergency which should have elicited an unqualified apology in any other civilized context. In fact, the political dynasty itself was a product of the Emergency. This book does not cover the excesses committed during that dreadful period in India where tens of thousands of innocent people were imprisoned for no reason and without trial. The repressive measures adopted by the Indira regime against overseas Indians who were part of the resistance movement such as revocation of their scholarships or impounding of passports are described in good detail. The book also indicates that Nehru had also exploited this provision in the Constitution for his political expediency. Nehru imposed the Emergency in 1962 during the China invasion and did not lift it for many months even after the ceasefire. It was also misused to repress citizens for innocuous and unconnected acts after labelling them as anti-nationals (p.150).

Even though the book is fairly huge at 554 pages, it is eminently readable and a pleasant experience. The resistance movement in the US was powered by a few individuals – S R Hiremath, his wife Mavis Sigwalt, Ravi Chopra, Anand Kumar, P K Mehta and Shrikumar Poddar. The first two chapters describe their backgrounds and how they ended up in America. It also discusses the political situation in India and the US in the 1970s. Jayaprakash Narayan (hereafter JP) started a movement called Citizens for Democracy (CFD) to fight the rot in economic and social spheres in India under Indira Gandhi. The expatriates created another organisation to mirror it and named it Indians for Democracy (IFD) which consolidated support and spearheaded the resistance program in the US. Despite the contradictions in the ideologies of the IFD constituents, the organisation firmly decided to adopt the Gandhian model and were not caught up in petty streams of power games back home. Amidst all the currents and undercurrents of ideology circulating around IFD, it remained steadfast to Gandhian ideals and methods. It could build support among pacifists, Quakers and the enlightened civil society of America only because Gandhi and his non-violent methods had cast a total spell in those circles. Noted Quaker leaders like Horace Alexander who had enjoyed a warm friendship with Gandhi and Nehru, intervened on behalf of the protestors and sent fact-finding teams to India. Indira allowed herself to be interviewed by them but nothing much came out of these meetings. The western press saw JP as another Gandhi-like figure and his was another freedom movement to rid India from corruption and dictatorship. There was a Cold War angle too, as JP was fighting Indira, who was a bosom friend of Moscow.

Emergency was a heinous assault on our democracy and there is absolutely no doubt that it should have been avoided. Still, the role of the Opposition in fomenting violent protests which were encouraged to be verging on open rebellion is traditionally not examined seriously. This book also follows this paradigm. Probably if Indira Gandhi had restricted the arrests to some leaders and refrained from muzzling the media, she might’ve had a presentable case. This book describes some activities of the Opposition leaders which would make us think that they were exceeding the limits of democratic decency. JP’s exhortation of Sampoorna Kranti (total revolution) was an indirect call to arms, even though he later wriggled out of such interpretations. He has been making revolutionary utterances on a continuous basis for a year before the Emergency. In June 1974, he demanded closure of all schools and colleges in Bihar for a year. He encouraged a no-tax campaign to paralyse the government. In July 1974, he exhorted the police personnel in Bihar to be guided by their conscience rather than illegal orders from their superiors. In Oct 1974, he directed student volunteers to set up parallel, ‘revolutionary’ peoples’ governments. In the same month, he threatened to hold parallel elections in Bihar if the elected assembly was not dissolved. On June 25, 1975, he repeated the threats he had been using in Bihar in Delhi and the police scooped him out to jail on the same night. George Fernandes was a firebrand trade union leader who led a 20-day railway strike in May 1974. He asked the railway workers to realise their collective power. A 7-day strike by them would close down every thermal power plant in the country. 10-days’ strike would shut down every steel plant which would then take up to a year and considerable expenses to restart. Moreover, L N Mishra, who was the Union railway minister and a crony of Indira Gandhi, died in a bomb blast at the Samastipur railway platform in Bihar. The perpetrators were not found. In view of all these, the ethics of the Opposition protests should be re-examined by a neutral party now – at a distance of fifty years chronologically from those fateful incidents.

The book provides a good coverage of the activities of the Indians for Democracy (IFD) organisation in the US. Several times they marched to the Indian embassy or local consulates holding placards and raising slogans. Official propaganda meetings were intercepted and tough questions asked to the local or visiting dignitaries. They also organised a 200-mile walking procession to rouse awareness of India’s fall along a slippery slope to authoritarianism. With press censorship in full throttle in India, the only arena left for the counterargument to exist was the international stage, especially the US and the UK. However, the monotony and low-key of the protests turned even the ardent volunteers off. About seven months after they had begun, the program slowed down because they were only repeating the speeches and was far away from home. All of them had other regular and full-time academic and professional duties to attend to. The regime retaliated with brutal swiftness. Scholarships of several students who participated in the protests were revoked and several passports were impounded. Anand Kumar of Chicago had a tough time managing a year without financial support. When the Janata government came to power after the Emergency, his scholarship was restored with retrospective effect. The year 1976 was not like the previous year for the protestors in America. The Western press took a graver turn when the general elections scheduled for that year was indefinitely postponed. It was a kind of confirmation of dictatorship. Some Indian leaders escaped from India through adventurous means to reach the US. Their work on foreign soil are also catalogued in the book. Subramanian Swamy set up the Friends of India Society International (FISI) which had RSS links. IFD had an uneasy relationship with it due to its socialist bias, but they got on well in view of the common enemy who was browbeating both. Ram Jethmalani also escaped to the US and obtained political asylum there in 1976, becoming the first Indian to get asylum from the Indira regime.

We also read about some eminent individuals who either came in support of the Emergency or were not vocal enough in opposing it. Non-political scientists and other professionals were understandably reluctant to take the plunge which was sure to divert them away from their academic pursuits. However, the leaders of the IFD were also professionals or scientists, so there was no hard and fast rule on who could qualify for volunteering for democracy. Noted physicist S. Chandrashekhar, later a Nobel laureate, and A K Ramanujan, eminent linguist and litterateur (not to be confused with the famous mathematician) were in the University of Chicago at that time engaged in research, but they were not interested in supporting the protests. There is a chapter on T N Kaul, who was India’s ambassador to the US during the Emergency, and was personally so close to the prime minister as to address her ‘Indu’, stoutly defended the Emergency at every step as directed by Indira. But after a few years since stepping down, he changed tone and admitted that Indira was surrounded by self-seeking sycophants and democracy was indeed in danger at that time. Powerful Christian groups in the US wholeheartedly supported the Emergency and came out in vocal agreement with it when the US Congress constituted a committee under Donald Fraser. James K Matthews, Bishop of the Washington area of the United Methodist Church and Charles Reynolds, secretary of the Ludhiana Christian Medical College, took the trouble to testify before the Congressional committee to extol the Emergency, but the prudent committee did not take them seriously.

Raju has followed a non-partisan approach throughout the narrative with a distinct negative bias. He includes the arguments against a particular organisation or individual without bothering to look deep into it or attempting to verify it. However, he leaves no party untainted and in that sense, keeps a fair and neutral stand. His characterizations are stellar and deeply convincing. He claims that the police ran the country during the Emergency and each police station was an independent republic with its own set of arbitrary rules, applied differently to different people. His observations on the extreme left faction, who were called Naxals, are noteworthy. Organisations like the IPANA were Naxal-minded. They were not angry with Indira Gandhi alone for having proclaimed the Emergency; they were angry with everything connected to the freedom struggle and since India’s independence. The book sports excellent diction. Rarely do we come across books of this genre. It was a pleasure to read Raju’s turns of phrase and assimilate the fine nuances. The book was written based on personal interviews conducted during the early-2020s, but the passage of half a century has not dimmed the colour nor dulled the pungency of the narrative of the protests which was a labour of conscience.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star