Keeping Up the Good Fight

Description

Does Every Generation Have to Face an Emergency?

September 25, 1975. It was not the usual campus morning at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). A strike called by the Students Federation of India (SFI) to protest the expulsion of Ashoklata Jain - an elected councillor of the students union - was in its second day and the campus was tense.

It was also three months since Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had declared a state of Emergency.

I was on the lawns of the School of Languages that morning, with a few friends from the SFI, when a black Ambassador stopped near us and a burly man got out. He came up to me and asked if I was D.P. Tripathi then president of the students union. I replied that I was not, but my questioner was a cop, DIG-Range P.S. Bhinder, and he didn't believe me. He and his men, all in plainclothes, swiftly proceeded to kidnap me in broad daylight. I would end up in jail, kept there for a year under the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA).

Fast forward by five decades. The government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Prime Minister Narendra Modi have been in power since 2014. They won a second term in 2019. The India we knew, that we thought of as home, was being changed by the day, in myriad ways.

February 9, 2021. Morning again. I was at home. I had just finished breakfast and was reading the newspapers when the doorbell rang. It was a group of men, one of them with an official-looking paper in hand. They were from the Enforcement Directorate, he announced. The ED was here to conduct a raid. Their target was NewsClick, the digital web platform I had set up............