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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2023
On 4 July 1975, 20 detenus were huddled in an armed police van and were in the process of being transferred from Delhi's Tihar Jail to an undisclosed destination. Inside the van were some well-known people: late union minister and attorney Arun Jaitley, then the president of Delhi University Students Union, Vijay Kumar Malhotra, the ex-mayor of Delhi, several seasoned representatives of the Jamaat-e-Islami and Muslim Majlis, two members from the Socialist Party, a few from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), two members from the CPI(ML), and author Primila Lewis. Everyone was busy exchanging notes. Then, when one of the unidentified and unshaven young men of the CPI(ML) spoke, everyone fell silent:
‘You all believe in this parliamentary system—we don’t’, he said. ‘But what were all of you doing, you who talk so loudly about democracy, when we Naxalites were being killed and tortured a few years ago, and even now, when thousands are rotting in jail without trial for years on end? I was arrested in Delhi in 1971 and tortured, then taken to Patna and tortured again, then to Calcutta—we were given electric shocks, heated iron bars were stuffed up our backsides, young men have been maimed and driven mad—all these things are well known. But nobody, not one of you in your precious parliament raised a voice of protest or even a question.’ (Lewis 1978: 17)
The young man had a point. Few had questioned or raised a voice about what happened to the Naxalites in police lock-ups in the early seventies. Addressing the dark horrors of the Emergency which ‘shocked the world about the realities about the world's “largest” democracy’, historian Ranajit Guha observed. ‘There was nothing in this that West Bengal did not know in the past eight years’ (Ranajit Guha 2009: 610). Perhaps, but the young man's observation needs to be historicized as there has been an unusual preponderance in scholarship in favour of Naxalbari as against the relatively sparse research on the unprecedented state power exhibited during the Emergency. Fortunately, with the publications of Gyan Prakash's Emergency Chronicles (2019), Christophe Jaffrelot and Pranitav Anil's India's First Dictatorship (2020) and Arvind Narrain's India's Undeclared Emergency (2022), this skewed scholarship has been somewhat restored.
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