“Just shut up; there is an Emergency on!” hissed my fellow reporter Pranab Basu as I strode into my newspaper office on the morning of June 25, half a century ago. I was eager to see the front-page display of my first major political story as a 22-year-old city reporter on the famous Jai Prakash Narain rally at Ram Lila Maidan the evening before.

“Big deal, there has been an Emergency on for the past several years,” I shot back, referring to the external Emergency in place since the 1971 Bangladesh War.

“No, this is an internal Emergency, quite different. Many opposition leaders and political activists have been or are being arrested, blanket censorship has been imposed and power connections have been snapped from last night in newspapers and presses, including our own,” whispered Basu with a grim face.

Inside the Link House on Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg (Delhi’s Fleet Street), which housed my Patriot newspaper, in the darkened office without electricity, there was a sense of gloom and doom. As my colleagues and I sat devastated in the gloom, only the chief editor, Edadata Naryanan, a fierce pro-Soviet left-winger who despised Jai Prakash Narayanan, seemed happy, much to our annoyance, cackling about how the right-wing had got its comeuppance.

Later we went to Indira Gandhi’s residence, where vast rented crowds, including a large band of eunuchs, shouted slogans supporting her. It is amazing to recall in these days of VVIP security that even the day after the government had put the entire........

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