The Darkest Hour

Qurban Ali is a senior journalist and son of former freedom fighter and Socialist leader Captain Abbas Ali, who was jailed for 19 months by the Indira Gandhi government during the Emergency.

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In the backdrop of the recent controversy regarding the release of the Bollywood film Emergency, featuring Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP Kangana Ranaut in the lead role, and the BJP's push for 'Samvidhan Hatya Diwas' to commemorate 50 years of the Emergency, Ali spoke to Outlook about the "dark days" and the political legacy of the Emergency. He has keenly followed India's freedom struggle and is now documenting the history of the Socialist movement in the country.

MY father was very fond of going to jail. Before Independence, he was arrested by the British government in India, court martialled, and sentenced to death for marching with Subhash Chandra Bose's Azad Hind Fauj (INA). Saved by Independence, he spent the next decades of his newfound freedom in and out of prison. As part of the Socialist movement, he was jailed about 50 times between 1948 and 1974 for demonstrating different forms of civil disobedience. His toughest incarceration, nevertheless, was the last one during the Emergency, imposed by Indira Gandhi on June 25, 1975. I was about 12 years old at the time. Yet, memories of those days come back to me in a whirl of pamphlets, slogans, protests and resistance, like it was just yesterday.

We were at my nana's (maternal grandfather) house in a remote village in Aligarh when we heard about the Emergency and the mass arrest of political workers and Opposition leaders. It was the peak of the JP (Jayaprakash Narayan) movement and my father, a popular Socialist leader in Uttar Pradesh (UP) at the time, had been participating in demonstrations being held across the country since the June 12, 1975 Allahabad High Court judgement, of which my father had been a witness. We knew he was likely to be arrested, and he was. But his arrest was not made public. For nearly two months, we searched high and low for him but without a clue. We did not know which jail he was in, under what charges he was arrested, or whether he was even alive.