A million tyrannies now: Maseeh Rahman remembers censorship during the the Emergency
NB - an entire issue of Infochange, named The Limits of Freedom was devoted to censorship, and may be read here:
For journalists in India, the only experience of nationwide state-enforced press censorship came with the internal Emergency promulgated by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on June 25, 1975. I had just taken over as editor of the magazine Onlookerin Mumbai, and my first issue was ready to go to press. It was my maiden job as editor. Having cut my teeth as a newspaper reporter, I immediately got down to transforming Onlooker into a hardnosed news and features magazine.
The cover story for my first issue was to be on Jayaprakash Narayan’s ‘Total Revolution’ campaign seeking to overthrow the government through street mobilisation. The issue was to carry other critical features, such as a lengthy interview with Atal Bihari Vajpayee, then a leading figure in JP’s movement, and an insider’s expose of the Indian Foreign Service.
The timing couldn’t have been worse. When I reached my office on the morning of June 26, I was told that the Maharashtra government had called a meeting of editors. Seated in a bland committee room, we were informed by a dour bureaucrat that we were no longer free to publish what we liked. A new office of chief censor was to be set up, and this worthy would henceforth decide what the people should read.
The whole idea seemed so strange that as we shuffled out of the room some of us sidled up to Sham Lal, the formidable editor of The Times of India, seeking a pointer for the morrow. A senior editor mustered up the courage to ask him what he planned to write in his next editorial. “I’ll be writing on potato cultivation in Lahaul,” Sham Lal, arguably the most influential editor in the country, replied tersely.
The bad news sank in -- the world had suddenly changed.
Throughout the 21-month Emergency, the TOI never once fell out of line. The only note of dissent came from a single, much-celebrated item anonymously placed in the paper’s ‘Deaths’ column by an outside journalist, Ashok Mahadevan:
O’Cracy, D E M, beloved husband of T Ruth, loving father of L I Bertie, brother of Faith, Hope and Justicia, died on June 25.
The TOI submitted to a police inquiry, and Mahadevan shaved his beard to escape detection...
