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Jul

Bihar at the Centre of another Kranti

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By Amitabh Srivastava

Bihar at the Centre of another Kranti

Memories never fade but they do change colours.

At age 25, I was attending Jai Prakash Narain's rally at Ramlila Ground Delhi exactly today on June 25 (in 1975).

The crowd was thin.JP was a frail man, not a great orator but had been catapulted as the face of the Sampoorna Kranti movement which originated in Bihar as a student movement.

Lalu Prasad Yadav, Nitish Kumar, George Fernandes, Ram Vilas Paswan, Sharad Yadav name any young leader they were there to bring about total revolution in India's political system and Bihar was the epicentre of this Kranti which had been going on since two years.

12th June 1975 became a turning point in the history of the country as Justice Jagmohanlal Sinha of Allahabad High Court declared then PM Indira Gandhi's election 'null and void' for malpractices. The result had been challenged by her opponent the Maverick Raj Narain.

That brought all opposition parties in the fray and agitations demanding her resignation started snow-balling all over the country.

Ever ready to fish in troubled waters the Jan Sangh top leaders Atal Behari Vajpayee, LK Advani, Arun Jaitley, Narendra Modi, Nanaji Deshmukh etc joined the movement to demand ouster of Indira Gandhi.

But to give a respectable face to their ambitious plans they put forward the name of Jai Prakash Narain as the head of the movement. However a down to earth leader, JP knew his limits.

He told audiences everywhere that he could not talk like Atal Behari Vajpayee who had 'Saraswati' on his tongue.

Cut to June 25, 1975 meeting at Ramlila Ground,

I was not a journalist officially but had a penchant for mass meeting and so there I was.

The crowd was sparse.Obviously, the Jan Sangh reserves its best efforts only for its own leaders.

But JP was crisp and prophetic.

He told the audience,"I have been told by people that I could be arrested soon. But that does not scare me, I want my voice to reach Parliament from here. I would again tell my brothers in the Police and the Army not to follow illegal orders of the Masters.".

I am sure someone must have read out the Sedition Act to the Government as his speech was spreading 'disaffection' among the people though there was no call for violence. But Gandhi had gone to jail for six years in 1922 for this same crime for writing articles in Young India and Bal Gangadhar Tilak had faced the same punishment before that.

So by midnight the whole lot of opposition leaders including J P, Morarji Desai, Atal Bahari Vajpayee, Advani, Nanaji Deshmukh, Raj Narain, Lalu, Sharad Yadav etc  were arrested wherever they were in a swift midnight operation.

Many books have been written since then about what happened during the emergency and why it happened and who was the villain etc.

But that happened nearly 50 years back.

What needs to be discussed today is that almost around the same date the same Lalu whose daughter MISA donated her kidney to him and Nitish are on stage with a member of the Gandhi dynasty.

The Gandhi family must have done some things right during this period, hopefully to become the fulcrum of this movement.

Today 15 opposition parties of the country are sharing stage in Patna to put a united fight against the Bharatiya Janata Party (then Jan Sangh) which has been steamrolling the opposition under threats of ED,CBI and IT raids ever since it came to power in 2014.

They tied to use the Narcotics Bureau to that use but somehow it boomeranged on them.

Today there is no Emergency.

But two ministers of the Aam Aadmi Party Government in Delhi are in jail. Incidentally AAP controls both the Assembly and the MCD currently having won overwhelming majority through elections.

It also rules a troubled Punjab and has been making inroads in many others states.

But why is a party with a popularly elected government for almost eight years forced to join a platform of Opposition parties whom it has been fighting single handedly so far?

What I more worried about is why are top lawyers and activists of the country so scared of speaking out their minds not only on issues like Sedition (Section 124 A) but even on POCSO that concerns protection of children? This came out so clearly when none of them took a stand when a minor wrestler was forced to wiggle out of her statement alleging harassment by the WFI President Brij Bhushan Singh, an honoured MP of an Honourable Party?

All this while the Prime Minister sharing cheers with Joe Biden tells the media in the US,"Democracy is in the DNA of India."

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