I have been reading Coomi Kapoor's book on emergency published in 2015 and it has proved to be more revealing than I had bargained for, but not in the manner I had expected. That period remains strongly etched in my memories, and I always have considered that act of Indira Gandhi as completely unconstitutional and constituted an unnecessary subversion of the entire system. Nevertheless, Coomi Kapoor's book has forced me to rethink the entire issue through an historical perspective. In the aftermath of the declaration of the emergency and the excesses carried out under its name, the true causality had become and remains obscure until this day.
What no one talks and that book, between the lines, reveals is that crescendo of opposition agitation prior to the emergency and its organization was under the complete control of RSS. Coomi Kapoor herself had been associated with RSS in many manners. The book has a foreword written by Arun Jaitely, who only sometimes back wrote one of the most shallow accounts of that era.
More importantly, most of the leading lights of opposition were guided by RSS. Indira Gandhi might have had a purpose in declaring that emergency but its operations were taken over by thuggish Sanjay Gandhi and his coterie of Punjabi mafia. And the outcome was a horrible period in the Indian history. Curiously, many of the leading persons from that mafia later became part of BJP.
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