2.6
Shadows of 1975
When India whispered in fearhe return of voice
June 1975: When the air changed
In June 1975, while we were wrestling with Pathology and Pharmacology—trying to understand how disease invades the human body—the country fell ill in another way. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared an Emergency.
Until then, Delhi felt far away from us medical students, like a radio play in a language we did not fully speak. But the Emergency did not stay on the front page. It entered the air. A hush settled over the country, as if someone had lowered the volume of India.
On the morning of June 26, the radio announced it in a calm voice.
“The President has proclaimed Emergency. There is nothing to panic about.”
For a day or two, we floated in confusion. We did not know what it meant, or where it would lead. The meaning arrived not through a speech, but through the morning newspapers.
When Tarun Bharat and The Indian Express reached the hostel, we stared at them as if someone had tampered with the print. The pages were scarred with black ink. Where headlines should have been, there were gaping voids—blank columns printed as protest. A silent scream.
Only later did we learn what had happened in the night: power supplies cut, presses raided, editors threatened. Words were being arrested before people were.
Silence, rumours, and the hostel mess
We were medical students. We were insulated from the worst of it. But you did not need to be an activist to feel fear. It seeped into ordinary life—into pauses, into lowered voices, into the way people stopped speaking mid-sentence.
The press was gagged. Leaders who had fought for freedom were jailed. Even Wardha, usually content to mind its own business, felt the tremors. We watched with quiet dread as Suman and Thakurdas Bang—the Gandhian parents of Abhay Bang, my senior from the 1968 batch—were imprisoned. Authoritarianism had acquired a local address.
We heard whispers of forced sterilisations and demolition drives. The “midnight knock” stopped being a phrase and became a possibility.
In the hostel mess, where debates usually began with watery dal and ended with Sunil Gavaskar, voices dropped.
“Did you hear who was picked up in Bombay?”
“Is it true about forced sterilisations?”
We traded rumours like contraband, and looked over our shoulders as we did it.
I was not an activist. I did not march or distribute pamphlets. My rebellion was quieter. I read.
We hunted for what the state wanted hidden—pieces by Kuldip Nayar, C.R. Irani, A.D. Gorwala, and Arun Shourie; the fearless columns of Kamleshwar in Sarika; the editorials of M.G. Vaidya in Tarun Bharat. We read the way thirsty people drink water—quickly, greedily, and with a faint guilt, as if reading itself could be overheard.
The censorship was suffocating. Newspapers were forced to submit copy for clearance. Editors were threatened. Dissent invited trouble. Yet a few publications found quiet ways to protest—leaving blank spaces where editorials should have been, printing careful lines that still carried a sting, refusing to pretend that everything was normal. In those days, even a small truth printed in black and white felt like an act of courage.
Hostel rooms turned into debating societies. Late into the night, I would sit with friends, speaking in hushed tones, dissecting the difference between order and tyranny, between discipline and fear. One of us had a family member jailed. That brought the Emergency out of the newspaper and into the room.
March 1977: The transistor vigil
The suffocation lasted twenty-one months. Then, in early 1977, as we slogged through Final MBBS, came the surprise announcement: elections.
The fear did not vanish, but it stepped back. In its place came a nervous, electric expectancy—the feeling that something might finally move.
On the evening of March 20, 1977, Hostel No. 4 was not a place of study. Textbooks lay abandoned. Stethoscopes hung like tired ornaments. We had no television. No live visuals. No flashing tickers. Only transistor radios—Bush, Murphy, Philips—small crackling boxes that carried the fate of the country in a thin voice.
We huddled around them as if warmth would improve reception. We adjusted antennae with the seriousness of surgeons. The corridors were dim. Cigarettes glowed. Somewhere a ceiling fan complained.
Then the results began to come in.
Indira Gandhi was trailing.
Sanjay Gandhi was losing.
The Congress, which had felt invincible for as long as we could remember, was slipping.
When it was confirmed that the Prime Minister herself had lost her seat, the hostel erupted. Doors flew open. Boys poured into corridors. There was shouting, laughter, dancing, hugging—people embracing classmates they had never even greeted properly.
It was not merely politics. It felt personal. As if a heavy hand had lifted from our shoulders.
Three buckets of freedom
In the middle of this joy, my friends Nandkishor Chandak and Omprakash Bohra decided that cheering was not enough. A moment like this needed food. A feast. A ritual.
The mess was closed. But young men, when determined, can cook democracy out of anything.
They found three large plastic buckets—usually meant for bathing—scrubbed them clean, and made an enormous batch of kaccha chiwra: puffed rice, roasted peanuts, raw onions, green chillies, coriander, salt, and oil. Simple, sharp, honest food. Like the mood of the night.
They carried the buckets up to the terrace of Hostel 2 like priests carrying offerings. Everyone was invited—seniors, juniors, toppers, backbenchers, saints, sinners.
We stood under a star-filled sky, eating with our hands, mouths burning from chillies, hearts strangely light. We talked late into the night, not as future doctors, but as young citizens tasting something we had missed without fully knowing it.
Freedom.
After the cheer, the books returned
By morning, the radios fell silent. The buckets were washed. The terrace emptied. And the academic calendar returned, stern and unmoved.
Final MBBS still waited.
The next day, we went back to Pathology, Pharmacology, and thick textbooks that did not care who won elections. But something had shifted inside us. We had seen a nation hold its breath—and then exhale.
Years later, I would forget many details of those months. But I would never forget the blackened newspaper columns, the whispered hostel conversations, and that night when a crackling transistor told us that fear had limits.
And on a hostel terrace, three plastic buckets tasted like democracy.