Socialist leader Jayaprakash Narayan wrote in his diary as a political prisoner during the Emergency imposed in the country fifty ago, “Every nail in the coffin of Indian democracy is like a nail in my heart.”
In 1975, on 25 June, around midnight, the then President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed announced an emergency citing ‘internal disturbance’.
On the same day, Jayaprakash Narayan, popularly known as JP and a staunch critic of the then Indira Gandhi government, addressed a huge gathering at Ramlila Maidan in Delhi.
There he raised a famous slogan of ‘Empty the throne’, quoting a line of ‘Birth of Janata’ by Ramdhari Singh Dinkar. At that time 72 -year -old Narayan, Morarji Desai, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, LK Advani and other opposition leaders were soon arrested under the Internal Security Maintenance Act (MISA).
A few days later, JP was taken to PGI-Chandigarh and kept there as a political prisoner with police security for a few months from July 1.
The first edition of Narayan’s ‘Jail Diary’ was published during the Emergency, which begins with a poignant details written on 21 July 1975 during his detention. He wrote, “My world is scattered around me. I am afraid that I will not be able to see it joining it again during my lifetime. “
It is written in JP’s ‘Meri Jail Diary’, “I did not feel like writing for the last two days. Every nail, which was stuck in the coffin of Indian democracy, is like a nail in my heart. I have searched my heart and I can really say that even if I have to die now, I will not mind it. ”
SK Jindal has also written about the detention of this ‘VIP guest’ kept in PGI-Chandigarh in his 2015 book ‘Medical Encounters: True Stories of Pacions-Memouries of a Physicians’. He wrote in a chapter, “I was honored to take care of JP’s political detention and then as a medical officer during the days of hospitalization in our institute in Chandigarh.”
According to the official archival documents of that era, the student rebellion against the Chimanbhai Patel government in Gujarat inspired Narayan’s ‘Bihar Movement’ in the 70s, which eventually came into force.
Among the youth of Gujarat, JP saw the spark and energy of revolution in the eastern state, which eventually took the entire country.
