Introduction
The State of Emergency, imposed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in June 1975, is one of the most infamous episodes in the history of independent India. During the 21 months it was in force, the government postponed elections, censored the press, and imprisoned more than 100,000 people without charge or trial. The period also led to an escalation of the authoritarian social programmes of slum clearances and mass coercive sterilizations. In spite of being a crucial and consequential moment in Indian political history, there remains a paucity of scholarship on the period.Footnote 1 This is particularly pronounced in regard to the Indian diaspora, who played a specific role during the Emergency that has hitherto been largely ignored. This article seeks to address this lacuna, considering the ways in which the Emergency was a significant moment in the relationship between Indians overseas and the politics of the homeland.
The recent fortieth anniversary commemorations, accompanied by numerous newspaper and magazine articles, underlined the extent to which the Emergency occupies an important role in the political imagination. Many accounts of the period are partisan eulogies by figures in the Hindu nationalist movement, whose organizations were banned and members incarcerated. L. K. Advani, veteran Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People's Party, BJP) leader, wrote in his autobiography: ‘If the Emergency was the darkest period in India's post-Independence history, the righteous struggle for the restoration of democracy was undoubtedly its brightest.’Footnote 2 The Emergency continues to be evoked by politicians today: it both serves as a means to criticize the Congress Party (who were in power during the Emergency) and extol the ostensibly heroic role of its Hindu nationalist opponents. This retelling has been particularly resonant as several leading figures in the BJP in recent years—including current Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and A. B. Vajpayee, prime minister in 1996 and 1998–2004—were themselves young opposition activists and upcoming party leaders during the Emergency.Footnote 3
A few scholars have recognized that one of the most significant long-term effects of the Emergency was the transformation of the political fortunes of the Hindu nationalist movement.Footnote 4 It can be seen as a turning point in the electoral prospects of Hindu nationalism, allowing the Bharatiya Jana Sangh (Indian People's Organisation)—the principal Hindu nationalist political party at the time and the forerunner to the present-day BJP—to enter mainstream politics through its participation in the anti-Emergency coalition and the subsequent Janata government. Although the cadres of the Sangh Parivar—the family of Hindutva organizations emanating from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteer Organisation, RSS)—often invoke their ‘valiant’ role during the Emergency, this has received relatively little scholarly attention. Indeed, this lack of critical analysis has enabled the Sangh to present itself as a central figure in all opposition to the Emergency in a ‘second freedom struggle’.Footnote 5
Historians have almost entirely neglected the role of the diaspora in the political opposition to the Emergency. Existing accounts of the anti-Emergency activities of Indians overseas have been produced primarily by members of the Sangh Parivar and need to be treated with caution.Footnote 6 The scholarly literature on the Hindu nationalist movement's engagement with the diaspora concentrates overwhelmingly on the period after the late 1980s and seldom recognizes the significance of this earlier phase.Footnote 7 Similarly, recent work on the Indian state's policies towards its diaspora asserts that India had ‘a negative policy attitude’ that disregarded the diaspora until the 1990s.Footnote 8
This article will demonstrate that the Emergency is a key event in the history of state-diaspora relations in India, which needs to be viewed through several lenses. First, it is a significant episode in the history of the global Hindu nationalist movement. The Sangh Parivar had been gradually building its cadres overseas since the 1940s. In response to the Emergency, its leaders mobilized and developed this network (as part of a wider campaign by a variety of political groups). Existing Hindutva organizations, and others established specifically to oppose the Emergency, organized protests, lobbied public figures, and encouraged media coverage overseas in an attempt to influence foreign governments to put pressure on Indira Gandhi to end the Emergency. Members and branches of the Sangh overseas also interacted with the homeland in order to transmit information, funds, and moral support from abroad. This experience—and the Sangh's eulogizing of it in the years since—has had a lasting effect on the Hindu nationalist movement. The Sangh used the Emergency to strengthen its overseas networks by engaging its members in new forms of activism to oppose the Indian government. This taught members new skills, imbued them with confidence, and encouraged the development of a younger generation of leaders. The diaspora's impact in effecting the end of the Emergency and the subsequent political shifts in India, however, is harder to precisely determine and disaggregate. Indira Gandhi's government expressed anxiety and anger at the negative international press coverage that the diaspora was able to realize, but although the Emergency caused concern among politicians in Britain and the United States, it did not, ultimately, lead to any tangible ruptures in bilateral relations.
This article shows that this crucial episode in the history of Indian democracy cannot be confined to national boundaries. It had a transnational impact and was influenced by an increasingly significant diaspora population. In this sense, we can recognize the Emergency, in certain ways, as a global event. Although superficially a domestic political episode, it had repercussions for, and was affected by, certain actors within the diaspora in at least three continents beyond Asia. The government and its various opponents competed for the political support of the diaspora. Through a primary focus on the Emergency's impact in Britain, we propose a re-evaluation of the ‘transnational citizenship’ of India's diaspora—used here to denote cross-border engagements in the political processes of the homeland (often irrespective of legal citizenship status in regard to nationality and formal, voting-based democratic participation).
Lastly, the Emergency can be seen as a turning point in the relationship between the Indian state and its diaspora. It was a ‘critical event’ that created new avenues for overseas Indians to involve themselves in the politics of the homeland.Footnote 9 But it also transformed the way in which the government and political organizations in India perceived the political significance of the diaspora and how they attempted to engage it in various new ways. Studying the Emergency sheds new light on the shifting nature of transnational citizenship, diasporic networks, and long-distance nationalism.
The article traces these processes using a range of sources. Some of these have been produced by the Sangh or its members, including contemporary underground literature, memoirs published in the years since the Emergency, and the accounts of the period by Subramanian Swamy given in two interviews with one of the authors.Footnote 10 Naturally, these internal accounts served a propaganda purpose, both at the time of the Emergency and in its subsequent memorialization, and so have been read critically. These narratives have been analysed alongside contemporary sources generated by those opposing, observing, or allied to the Sangh. This includes newsletters and the private papers of left-wing anti-Emergency activists, whose dynamic role is often obfuscated by Sangh accounts and has been celebrated less actively in the years since the Emergency. The article also draws on a wide range of official sources, including Indian and American diplomatic correspondence, files from the Ministry of External Affairs, and United Kingdom parliamentary records.
The Emergency and the Sangh Parivar in India
On 4 July 1975, less than ten days after the declaration of Emergency, the Congress government proscribed the RSS, along with 25 other organizations, under the Defence and Internal Security of India Rules (DISIR) and the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA). Many of the RSS's leaders and ordinary members were imprisoned under Emergency legislation, as were members of its sister political party, the Jana Sangh. It is unclear exactly how many members of the Sangh were incarcerated during the Emergency, though the RSS certainly claims that the vast majority of all those imprisoned were swayamsevaks (‘volunteers’—the name given to members of the RSS).Footnote 11
Both at the time and subsequently, Sangh leaders have underlined the significance of the episode for the Hindu nationalist movement. Upon the arrest in Nagpur of M. D. Deoras, RSS sarsanghchalak (supreme leader), he reportedly said, ‘what could not have been achieved in twenty years will be possible in two years’.Footnote 12 RSS member Sanjeev Kelkar even stated that the ‘Emergency was one of the few good events in the 60-year-old life of independent India . . . [It] galvanised the nation.’Footnote 13 L. K. Advani expresses a similar, vainglorious position in his autobiography:
If the Emergency was the darkest period in India's post-Independence history, the righteous struggle for the restoration of democracy was undoubtedly its brightest. It so happened that I, along with tens of thousands of my countrymen, was both a victim of Emergency and a soldier in the Army of Democracy that won the battle against it.Footnote 14
India's current prime minister, Narendra Modi (whose role is discussed below), wrote that the Emergency provided him with ‘a wonderful opportunity’.Footnote 15 In any revolutionary movement, the incarceration of members and leaders frequently serves as a badge of honour. For the RSS, which glorifies self-sacrifice, this was particularly potent. Moreover, framing the Emergency as a ‘second freedom struggle’ helped the RSS expiate its less-than-heroic role during the Independence movement.Footnote 16 Morarji Desai, in the foreword to Advani's Prisoner's Scrapbook, wrote: ‘We had a new generation of satyagrahis.’Footnote 17
The Sangh's hubristic invocations of the Emergency are not limited to the domestic front. The Hindutva ideologue M. G. Chitkara emphasized the importance of the Indian diaspora, as well as international recognition of the Sangh's gallant role:
The Swayamsevaks who were living abroad in 80 and odd countries all over the free world spontaneously responded to the call of Mother Bharat and stirred up the conscience of the world . . . The world-wide protest, especially of the Indians living abroad, proved to be one of the decisive factors in upsetting the calculations of the dictatorial regime here . . . Through this, the RSS crossed the national frontiers and became a household word in the entire free world as the creator of a new tradition in the history of national revolutions.Footnote 18
In accounts like Chitkara's, the diaspora is framed almost as righteous guerrillas in exile: beyond the reach of Indira Gandhi's regime, yet sufficiently attached to India to participate vigorously in anti-Emergency activism. The RSS largely generated this version of events themselves and thus it must be treated with caution.
The extent and impact of the Hindu nationalist movement in opposing the Emergency within India are not entirely clear. The RSS claims that it overtly protested against the Emergency and courted arrest in large numbers, describing this as ‘satyagraha’.Footnote 19 Without independent evidence of the true extent of its role, historians of the movement have been forced to repeat the RSS's own figures on swayamsevaks arrested, while noting that they may be subjective.Footnote 20
Arvind Rajagopal, in a short but astute assessment of the Sangh's role in the Emergency, doubts its account.Footnote 21 He questions the true extent of the RSS's dynamism within India during this period, noting ‘a striking paucity of signs of a movement in conventional terms—large gatherings, collective action, clashes with police, specific advances made, etc.’.Footnote 22 Evidence from some contemporary observers supports this, such as a diplomatic cable from the United States embassy in New Delhi to Washington, DC, reporting only ‘a very small number of lightly attended meetings at which the government has been criticized’.Footnote 23 But although comparisons with Gandhian satyagraha—in both scale and character—might be exaggerated, the significance of this period for the organization cannot be ignored.Footnote 24 This article will bring to light new evidence about the Hindu nationalist movement's activities in the diaspora. While the role of the RSS in the anti-Emergency movement is still not well understood, its legacy generates considerable controversy.
The Emergency and Hindu nationalist activism overseas
Scholars have barely touched upon the role of the Indian diaspora during the Emergency.Footnote 25 The diaspora's engagement with Hindu nationalist politics in the homeland is usually assumed to have begun with the Ramjanmabhoomi mobilizations from the late 1980s. More widely, awareness of Hindutva ‘long-distance nationalism’ only really spread after the controversies surrounding the 2001 Gujarat earthquake fundraising and the 2002 violence that took place there.
Overseas networks of Hindu nationalism—which were first established in East Africa from the 1940s, and then in Britain and elsewhere from the 1960s—were mobilized to considerable effect, and thus were substantially developed, during the Emergency. Many members of the Indian diaspora maintained an active interest in Indian politics, and Indira Gandhi's attack on her opponents elicited a particularly animated response. The ban on the RSS in India, and the imprisonment of many of its members and leaders, spurred the group to engage its overseas supporters in the anti-Emergency struggle. This article argues that the diaspora was mobilized in two key ways. One was through an advocacy role, in which protests, various forms of dialogue, and media coverage overseas were designed to stimulate foreign governments to put pressure on Indira Gandhi to end the Emergency. The other was by interacting with the homeland in order to transmit information, funds, and moral support from abroad.
Immediately after the declaration of the Emergency on 25 June 1975, and even before the RSS ban on 4 July, the Sangh's global networks were set in motion. On 29 June, a meeting of 75 anti-Emergency representatives demonstrated outside the Indian Embassy in Washington, DC. The RSS-published The People Versus Emergency: A Saga of Struggle—by far the most extensive, although inherently partisan, account of the RSS's role in the Emergency—claims that ‘the plan to bring them all together was made by RSS workers’.Footnote 26 The same document records the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (the RSS wing in Britain) kicking into action just two days after the Sangh's ban in India. By 12 July, activists had founded a new organization—‘The Indian Freedom Front’—to coordinate anti-Emergency mobilization.Footnote 27 On 3 August, it organized a demonstration and march to the Indian High Commission in London, which was covered in British newspapers, and thus ‘greatly boosted the enthusiasm of the people’.Footnote 28
Although Sangh sources frequently claim a leading role in, or even sole credit for, opposition to the Emergency, the Sangh did not monopolize anti-Emergency activism within India or among the diaspora. A number of other groups launched campaigns, including left-wing organizations (such as the Indian Workers’ Association and Socialist International), supporters of Jayaprakash Narayan (‘JP’), members of the Indian diaspora who had no party affiliation, and various concerned ‘third parties’ (such as human rights campaigners and Quakers). These campaigns also interacted and occasionally collaborated with groups or individuals linked with the RSS and the Jana Sangh. The heterogeneity of transnational anti-Emergency activism is key but is elided in Sangh literature. For a number of reasons, the memorialization of the role of other groups has been less effective than that of the RSS, with the result that the contribution of the former has been downplayed or ignored altogether. In fact, the non-Sangh elements of transnational anti-Congress activism may have been more dynamic, broad-based, and influential than that of the Hindu nationalists. This diversity, which is discussed briefly towards the end of this article, is also the subject of ongoing research by the authors. However, the focus of this article is on the nature and effects of Sangh-related activism and activities claimed by the Sangh, including the consequences of the Sangh's celebration of its own role.
Diasporic efforts to protest against the Emergency and support dissent in India were, to a great degree, coordinated from India. Although the claim that RSS members in more than 80 countries participated in anti-Emergency activism is probably hyperbolic, mobilizations were clearly transnational.Footnote 29 Before his incarceration in December 1975, Nanaji Deshmukh, RSS swayamsevak, a leader of the Jana Sangh, and general secretary of the Lok Sangharsh Samiti (People's Struggle Committee), wrote a rallying letter to Indians overseas. In it he provided an ‘eight-point programme for Indians abroad’, with instructions on forming committees, raising funds, engaging local media, and maintaining contact with people in India.Footnote 30
Most RSS-inspired activism occurred in a porous, intersecting, quintilateral nexus, including India, East Africa, Britain, Canada, and the United States. Many of the diaspora's efforts were facilitated by Sangh networks already in place through the development of the Bharatiya Swayamsevak Sangh (the Sangh's divisions in Africa) and the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (the Sangh in Britain and elsewhere outside India). But one individual—Chamanlal Grover, who had pioneered the development of the Sangh overseas from the 1950s—played a particularly prominent role. According to Sahasrabuddhe and Vajpayee (authors of the major RSS volume on the Emergency), ‘the success of the agitation abroad was largely due to the silent work that a full-time RSS worker—Chamanlal—had been doing for years’.Footnote 31 Subramanian Swamy also stressed his pivotal role in an interview.Footnote 32 Coomi Kapoor, Swamy's sister-in-law, refers to Grover as ‘[a] coordinator, a clearing house of information’ and ‘an unassuming man who kept track of countless details and liaised with many who were underground’.Footnote 33 Another account suggests that Grover's ‘successor’, Laxmanrao Bhide—the first RSS pracharak (full-time worker) officially deputed to oversee the diasporic growth of the Sangh—was also responsible for delegating work abroad.Footnote 34
Of all the foreign centres of Sangh activism, Britain was arguably the most important. Jagadish Sood, karyavaha (secretary) of the Kenyan Sangh, moved to London in December 1975 at the order of the RSS general secretary to help develop the Friends of India Society International (FISI). An RSS source claims that: ‘His one-room residence became the centre of Sangh activities.’Footnote 35 In addition to this ‘intra-diaspora’ movement, a number of important figures left India to escape arrest and coordinate efforts outside the country. RSS leaders sent Bhide ‘specially . . . to UK and USA to organise a pro-democracy struggle’, shortly after the declaration of Emergency, where he ‘had a big role to play’ in the formation of FISI.Footnote 36
Two key personalities deputed to work on the anti-Emergency struggle overseas were the Jana Sangh politicians Makarand Desai and Subramanian Swamy. Swamy and Desai went on to become leading figures in FISI, which is discussed further below. Desai, a member of the Gujarat Legislative Assembly, arrived in London on 17 April 1976, after the Indian government in New Delhi imposed President's Rule on Gujarat and suspended the Janata Morcha government in which he had been a minister.Footnote 37 He was ‘sent to London . . . to strengthen [and coordinate] the agitation abroad’ and became ‘head of all activities conducted abroad’.Footnote 38 One of Desai's key roles was to launch and edit Satyavani (Voice of Truth), a monthly journal based in London which served as the FISI bulletin. This published news was ‘smuggled’ out of India then ‘back’ to the homeland, and was also circulated around the world, including in the USA. Sahasrabuddhe and Vajpayee claim that ‘the London residence of Ramanbhai of Navsari was a centre for these reports. Major papers of London kept in touch with Ramanbhai for news from India.’Footnote 39 While we must be hesitant about taking these claims at face value, this does highlight how significant these overseas activists were seen to be.
Despite Desai's importance during this time, and his larger reputation at the start of the Emergency, today the most well-known individual to ‘escape’ India during the Emergency is the charismatic and contrary Jana Sangh (now BJP) politician Subramanian Swamy. Smuggled out of India on the instructions of a number of senior Sangh leaders, he first arrived in Britain in December 1975.Footnote 40 In a contemporary account, given in an open letter from Swamy ‘to the people of India’, he emphasized his importance to the Indian diaspora:
Our 25 million Indian brothers and sisters overseas were horrified at the slander by the present regime against the opposition, and they pleaded with the opposition that a representative should come abroad to tell them the complete facts about India. I was chosen thus to go.Footnote 41
Once abroad, Chamanlal put Swamy in touch with networks of activists, including the HSS in Britain and Indians for Democracy in America. The Sangh also helped to coordinate the movements of Swamy's wife Roxna. An account by her sister Coomi Kapoor states that ‘Nanaji Deshmukh now asked Roxna to go abroad on an exploratory visit to get in touch with RSS sympathizers in the UK and the USA.’Footnote 42 Another account refers to Roxna's ‘deputation’ to Britain and America, ‘with a blueprint for a fool-proof communications system between Indian Underground Movement and Indian resisters abroad’.Footnote 43
Swamy is an indefatigable character who was, and still is, always on the move, talking at various functions, meeting prominent figures, and speaking to the media. After arriving in Britain he immediately began raising support for the anti-Emergency cause. One of the most dramatic tales, mythologized in no small part through Swamy's own repeated narration of the incident, involved his audacious re-entry into India after his initial tour abroad. Despite a warrant for his arrest, Swamy flew back to India and, according to the tale, with the aid of a false beard and turban, walked into his home past a policeman. On 10 August 1976, Swamy entered the Rajya Sabha. As the speaker read a list of obituaries, he theatrically declared: ‘Democracy has also died, kindly include that also in the list.’Footnote 44 His subsequent ‘escape’, which he likens to that of the Scarlet Pimpernel, was aided by the RSS, who arranged his second flight via Nepal.Footnote 45 While self-serving and possibly exaggerated, this story is part of the folklore of the period, which increased morale and excitement during the Emergency and has helped secure the Sangh's reputation ever since. Furthermore, Swamy's vignette underlined, both to those at home and abroad, the possibilities of long-distance activism and the global networks that could make this sort of audacious resistance possible.
Swamy's centrality in the heroic narrative notwithstanding, the first steps to form FISI took place at a meeting in Birmingham on 25 October 1976, two months before he came to Britain.Footnote 46 One of its first prominent public meetings, which coincided with Swamy's arrival, took place in a Wembley school on 17 January 1976. This was followed by meetings later that same month in Chalk Farm, Ilford, and Croydon. A flyer for these meetings shows Swamy's picture at the top, with a long biography of his credentials as ‘a renowned economist’, and the title of his talk: ‘Current Situation in India’.Footnote 47 The most prominent and widely discussed FISI event was a conference held at Alexandra Palace in London on 24–25 April 1976. According to a Sangh report, 700 participants attended from 13 countries, and the public session at the conference drew a crowd of 2,000.Footnote 48
The event was intended to be both informative and strategic. It relayed ‘real news’ to journalists and the Indian diaspora, and publicized the Sangh's pre-eminent role in fighting for the restoration of democracy. FISI policies and principles were also decided at the conference. Swamy and Desai were elected president and secretary, respectively, and London was declared its headquarters. Various operational outcomes emerged during discussions: ‘The world was divided into seven divisions for propaganda purposes’ and ‘it was announced in the conference that 52 chapters of the organisation had been set up all over the world’.Footnote 49 News of the conference quickly reached New Delhi, which was concerned with reports that ‘the conference had doubtless boosted the morale of those conducting these activities, and the RSS was behind all of them’.Footnote 50
But the Alexandra Palace conference also had a more ideological, Hindutva element; the novelist and journalist Shiva Naipaul, younger brother of the more famous V. S. Naipaul, attended the conference and published his report on it in The Times of London. Summarizing the speeches from the rostrum, Naipaul writes: ‘Ageless India. Holy India. Vedic India. What, one was forced to wonder, did any of this have to do with the State of Emergency. . .?’Footnote 51
FISI continued to operate, although in a limited capacity, after the end of the Emergency (for instance, hosting a press conference during the first UK visit by a sarsanghchalak of the RSS, in 1995).Footnote 52 While we must be wary of attributing to it the influence, or even recognition, that its activists claim, in certain ways it undeniably served as a precursor to more successful forms of Hindu nationalist lobbying nearer the turn of the twenty-first century.
Swamy, Desai, and their co-agitators saw their chief role as liaising with the foreign press, encouraging newspapers and magazines to publish articles on India's political predicament. The intention was to raise awareness among both the general public and foreign governments which, in turn, would lead to pressure on Indira Gandhi to end the Emergency. Swamy and Desai's educational background added to their (perceived) ability to interact with the media—Desai, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Swamy, a PhD holder and former professor at Harvard University.Footnote 53
When interviewed, Swamy said his educational background and ‘Harvard stamp’ gave him ‘instant access’ to the press, think tanks, and even politicians. A diplomatic cable from February 1977 shows that he was even in dialogue with the US government.Footnote 54 Swamy's personality was deemed key to the movement; a Sangh source writes: ‘with his intellectual calibre matched by a high sense of drama, his dauntless nature harnessed to a keen political awareness . . . During this triumphant tour [of the United States] he addressed 162 public meetings and gave 38 TV and radio interviews.’Footnote 55 Swamy himself claimed that he appeared in The Times, The Guardian, the Economist, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Denver Post, the Toronto Star, and the diaspora publication India Abroad, as well as in TV interviews on the BBC, PBS, and Canadian television.Footnote 56 When considering the influence of all of these activities, we must, of course, bear in mind Swamy's outspoken, self-assured, and highly ambitious personality, and, more generally, the glamorized chronicling of this period by those who opposed the Emergency.Footnote 57
Another form of anti-Emergency activism involved publishing advertisements in national newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic. An advertisement in The Times on 15 August 1975 (Indian Indepen-dence Day) called for JP's release and pleaded, ‘Don't let the light go out on India's democracy’. Portraits of JP and Mahatma Gandhi figured prominently. More than 200 people signed the petition, including 65 MPs and other public figures, among them the economist E. F. Schumacher, the historian A. J. P. Taylor, and the socialist Fenner Brockway. A similar advertisement, although with fewer signatories, was published in the New York Times on the same day. These and other public notices alluded to a vibrant anti-Emergency movement that extended beyond the narrow circles of the Sangh and FISI.Footnote 58
An important goal, which FISI regularly achieved, was to garner column inches on the excesses of the Emergency in the mainstream press in both Britain and North America.Footnote 59 Although these pieces provided succour (and sometimes new information) to the campaigners who read the publications, quantifying their impact on the Indian government is difficult. The characteristic Sangh line was that this influence on international opinion was a key factor in Indira Gandhi's decision to announce the March elections in January 1977. Although this is probably overstating the case, it is backed up to a degree by the extent to which the foreign press was monitored from India. Moreover, Swamy's influence in the foreign press clearly riled New Delhi, as evidenced by the recommendations of a Rajya Sabha committee especially convened in September 1976 to investigate Swamy.Footnote 60
It is difficult to measure the effects of negative coverage in the British and American press on the US and UK governments’ policy towards India. As Rudra Chaudhuri's ongoing work suggests, neither government drastically changed its policy as a result of the human rights abuses that followed the declaration of Emergency rule.Footnote 61 Neither the USA nor the UK made a formal statement criticizing the Emergency, and when the American president Gerald Ford made an offhand comment to journalists that ‘I think that it is really very sad that 600 million people have lost what they have had since the mid-1940s’, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger admonished the White House.Footnote 62 Ford's comment was angrily reported in the Indian press.Footnote 63 Britain sought to emphasize that the Emergency was an internal matter and that ‘business as usual’ would prevail in its bilateral relations. It sought to avoid controversies of the kind engendered by Ford's comments. An internal Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) document from 1976 acknowledged that India's politics ‘still exercise public opinion in this country’, but asserted that the British government must ‘guard against giving offence’, adding: ‘We must not lose from sight the potential that is India.’Footnote 64
Both the US and UK governments prioritized geopolitical and economic interests over the promotion of democracy.Footnote 65 Four months after the Emergency was declared, Kissinger said to William Saxbe, US ambassador to India: ‘We would just as soon have democracies, but I don't see this as an object [of] US foreign policy.’Footnote 66 Certain individuals in the British government went significantly further than the formal government position by expressing active support for the Emergency, notably Michael Foot who defended Indira Gandhi and went on to visit India in October 1976.Footnote 67 One month before Foot, Margaret Thatcher, then leader of the opposition, also went to India, though she stopped short of an overt defence of the Emergency itself.
While most American and British diplomats were eager not to aggravate the Indian government, the press made sure that the Emergency was not altogether brushed under the carpet. The US Congress held hearings about civil liberties in India during which negative coverage in the American press was read into the Congressional record, alongside statements by members of the diaspora. Some American newspaper articles cited in Congress had been explicitly sourced from diasporic groups like Indians for Democracy or from reports on their activities.Footnote 68 We know from Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) files and reports from Indian diplomatic missions in the USA that this was a matter of concern for the Indian government.Footnote 69 In Britain, questions were asked in the House of Commons about human rights abuses in India and junior minister David Ennals told parliament that the British High Commission in Delhi ‘has protested about the manner’ of the expulsion of British journalists.Footnote 70 Moreover, even the British government's ‘business as usual’ policy was—at least in Whitehall's eyes—carefully distinguished from anything like approbation for events in India. On the advice of the government, Prince Charles called off a planned visit in 1976 in order to avoid a potential ‘political controversy’ in what could be construed as the Crown condoning the Emergency regime.Footnote 71
What is clear, however, is the Indian government's concern about negative foreign press coverage. Indira Gandhi publicly denounced the Western media repeatedly during the Emergency for unfavourable reporting, while her envoys to London and Washington registered their protest with the British and American governments in strident terms. She angrily stated that the ‘slanderous and malicious news stories’ amounted to ‘foreign interference’.Footnote 72 Lacking the evidence to reveal the reasons that triggered Indira Gandhi's decision to call elections, we cannot definitively ascertain the influence of diasporic activists, mounting criticism in the foreign press,Footnote 73 and international pressure. However, there is no doubt that it was a significant cause of concern for her government.
Although the Emergency may not have caused a substantial rupture in India's relations with the UK and USA, its tangible international impact means that it should be understood as a global event. The effect of the diaspora's efforts in terms of advocacy, and the impact of the press coverage it helped to generate, are particularly hard to measure. But it is clear that Indians overseas (and their allies) who lobbied against the Emergency were seen as a threat by the Indian government. And, crucially, sections of the diaspora saw their role as significant, both at the time and in its subsequent narration. In this sense, we can view the ‘global event’ of the Emergency as contributing towards the generation of a ‘diaspora consciousness’—an ‘awareness of multilocality’—among Indians overseas.Footnote 74
Censorship of the press and the transnational ‘smugglers of truth’
Another central role played by the diaspora was in the transnational production and dissemination of literature. In India, severe restrictions were imposed upon the press, with draconian government ‘guidelines’ distributed on the first day of the Emergency.Footnote 75 A White Paper on the Misuse of Mass Media During the Internal Emergency, published shortly after the Congress government was ousted, lists a range of ‘harassment’ techniques, including leverage of the newspapers’ dependence on revenue provided by government advertisements.Footnote 76 There was also, arguably, a degree of complicit self-censorship; Advani famously said to journalists: ‘When you were merely asked to bend, you chose to crawl.’Footnote 77 A US diplomatic cable from the New Delhi embassy to Washington, DC in 1975 corroborates this: ‘In recent weeks pre-censorship of the press has been largely replaced by self-censorship.’Footnote 78
While many mainstream newspapers were subject to substantial intimidation and censorship, a number of smaller periodicals, including the Jana Sangh's The Motherland, and publications associated with other opposition groups were forced to shut down entirely. Many foreign journalists were gagged or expelled. Some illicit newspapers were produced and circulated in India, such as Apatkaleen Sangharsh Bulletin (Emergency Struggle Bulletin) and Satya Samachar (True News).Footnote 79 However, the production of pamphlets and newsletters overseas was significant, partly as a way of spreading information and partly as an important form of networking and identity-formation for the diaspora.
A range of publications were circulated among and from the diaspora during this period. In Britain, pre-existing vernacular newspapers, particularly Amar Deep (Hindi) and Gujarat Samachar (Gujarati), began to include various articles criticizing Indira Gandhi. However, after pressure from the Indian High Commission (which also exerted influence through its position as a client for advertising), the papers stopped their criticism and began to praise the Indian government.Footnote 80 But the Emergency also precipitated the launch of new publications: the British wing of the RSS—the HSS—launched its periodical Sangh Sandesh (Sangh Message) in 1977. It continues to be published today (albeit now in PDF format). According to the founding editor and prominent Sangh leader, Dhiraj Shah:
Because of the Emergency in India, many swayamsevaks all over the world had come into touch with each other . . . Everybody felt that they needed to keep in touch with each other, and the idea of a monthly newsletter, which gives news about Sangh and swayamsevak activities around the world, was mooted . . . So in August 1977, one small eight-page Sangh Sandesh was created . . . It has today become particularly a point of contact and news item for swayamsevaks all over the world. Footnote 81
Perhaps the best-known publication, launched especially to combat the Emergency, was Satyavani (Voice of Truth). This ‘newspaper’ was first published by FISI as a result of the April 1976 conference in London, with the first issue coming out on 12 June 1976.Footnote 82 It included original content, but primarily reproduced reports on the Emergency from the press outside India.Footnote 83 Narendra Modi (whose role is discussed in more depth below) was responsible for helping to circulate the publication in India. He describes a resourceful routine for gathering the content:
The children of the Indians living in London were given the work of visiting each and every library in town. They were allotted responsibilities in an orderly fashion. They were supposed to look at the newspapers available in the libraries. Wherever they found references to India, immediately they would get the page photocopied.Footnote 84
Satyavani was distributed around the world, but with a particular focus on taking it ‘to different corners of India’.Footnote 85 After the Emergency, Makarand Desai published a collection of Satyavani articles in a volume titled Smugglers of Truth, referred to by Emma Tarlo as ‘part of the collective exercise of asserting a dominant interpretation of the recent past’.Footnote 86 In describing themselves as ‘smugglers of truth’, these Hindutva activists were attempting to subvert the government's case for the Emergency. The figure of the smuggler—long vilified by the Indian developmental state and in popular culture—was central in justifications of the Emergency.Footnote 87 One poster that could be seen on the roads of India showed smugglers behind prison bars with the caption: ‘There is only one place for these people.’Footnote 88 The smuggler was popularly identified, along with the foreign agent, as anti-national elements who penetrated India's borders. Indeed, when the lawyer Ram Jethmalani—later a BJP cabinet minister—testified before the US Congress about human rights abuses in India during the Emergency, the Indian Embassy in Washington, DC sent a cable to Delhi requesting any information about ‘his involvement with blackmarketing and smuggling activities’ that could be used to discredit him.Footnote 89 FISI sought to neutralize this critique by redeploying the term for themselves: in Desai's words, the Emergency itself forced the ‘purveyors of truth . . . to learn the smuggling game’.Footnote 90
Sangh literature frequently suggests that these publications provided a major source of information for underground, anti-Emergency networks in India, emphasizing Indira Gandhi's iron grip on information. We should, of course, remain wary of this obviously biased interpretation. However, the point here is not so much to assess how influential these publications were; rather it is to assess their role in connecting members of the diaspora through a tangible medium around which like-minded activists could coalesce and organize. Swamy, in an interview, revealed this more prosaic aspect: ‘Satyavani was basically for giving work to our underground. They had to have something to do.’Footnote 91 In addition to providing information, the publications had a ‘tremendous’ impact, partly because ‘they got us recruits for the underground’. The act of circulating these publications was crucial; ‘the cadre had work to do . . . the morale grew after a period of deep gloom’, Swamy added.Footnote 92 Furthermore, the publications encouraged donations to the cause. The activists outside India helped to encourage support and recruits to the anti-Emergency struggle within India, and provided the movement with confidence.
But missing from Swamy's narrative is a crucial layer of analysis concerning how this activity fashioned ‘diaspora’. The circulation of literature allowed Indians abroad to participate in India's political process; for this reason, many accounts emphasize that only Indian citizens living abroad (not British citizens of Indian origin) were activists. Sahasrabuddhe and Vajpayee claimed that ‘outside India they had decided . . . not to use a single paisa of non-India funds . . . It was further decided that only Indian passport-holder[s] would participate in the movement, not British passport-holders.’Footnote 93 While this seems highly unlikely (by the mid-1970s, the majority of Britain's Indian-origin population were already British passport-holders), these claims were ‘disclaimers’ to mitigate criticisms of ‘foreign’ intervention in Indian politics. The circulation of literature and foreign funding also provided an important medium for the diaspora to enter into the homeland political imaginary. In this sense, we can see it as an example not only of the print capitalism with which the nation is imagined, but of the tools by which global Hindutva samaj (society) was made real.
Hindu nationalist politics: Narendra Modi and other protagonists
The RSS's engagement with, and estimation of, the diaspora was greatly enhanced during this period. This experience had an enduring effect on the Hindu nationalist movement and, more broadly, India's relationship with its diaspora, which is still felt today. Perhaps the most significant figure in this category was an ambitious young RSS pracharak in Gujarat. In 1975 Narendra Modi was a 24-year-old ‘in-charge’ for the Gujarat region of the Sangh student wing, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP). With the declaration of Emergency, he took on a dynamic new role.
The Emergency period enhanced Modi's growing reputation as an enthusiastic, intractable young pracharak, quite out of keeping with the Sangh's ethos of conformity and composure.Footnote 94 He also became increasingly known for his aptitude for efficient and passionate organization. Modi, with the characteristic hubris of many Sangh leaders, later framed himself as ‘at the core of the anti-Emergency movement’, noting on his website that he later became the general secretary of the Gujarat Lok Sangharsh Samiti.Footnote 95 His work between 1975 and 1977, during which he interacted with ‘a wide spectrum of leaders and organisations’, was rewarded by a promotion to RSS sambhaag pracharak (regional organizer) after the Emergency ended.Footnote 96 It is in this light that Modi referred to the Emergency as providing him with ‘a wonderful opportunity’.Footnote 97
But Modi's influence and interactions during the Emergency were by no means limited to India. One of his key roles was to maintain contact with networks of Sangh activists abroad and arrange for the transmission of information ‘back’ to India. We know of this from Modi's little-known book on the Emergency, originally published in Gujarati as Sangharsh ma Gujarat (Gujarat's Struggle) immediately following the Emergency.Footnote 98 Of particular interest are the letters to Modi from Makarand Desai, at this point based in Britain. This communication illuminates the kinship networks and methods of mobilization that the Sangh was engaged in during this period, which predates most existing understandings of global Hindu nationalism.
Modi and Desai's letters indicate a two-way conversation—a ‘prachaar sanghatan’ (alliance for the purpose of propagation) in Desai's words. In this course of this relationship, Modi provided Desai with information on the situation in India, which Desai then disseminated through newsletters, including Satyavani. A dual focus on the Indian diaspora and wider global publics is clear. In one letter, Desai writes, ‘We are working on world consensus being consolidated in our favour’, and a few lines later, ‘the Patel Patidar community's support will do us good, for this you should write to the CM [Chief Minister] of Gujarat, Honourable Babubhai Jasbhai Patel to write to these people urgently [to encourage their backing]’.Footnote 99 Another letter, dated 16 July 1976, relays that information provided by Modi was disseminated in Britain and was subsequently broadcast by the BBC.Footnote 100 The same letter also refers to the publication of updates on the Emergency and opposition to it in Satyavani; ‘people await this [news] with tremendous excitement’. But the transfer of information was not just made by post; Desai wrote that ‘visitors who came here [from India], also give us information about the state of affairs’.Footnote 101
Much of Modi's role during this period was to facilitate the covert publication and distribution of Sangh literature across India.Footnote 102 This was predicated on building networks of contacts. In one letter, Desai asks Modi: ‘From your end try to send us the maximum addresses to which Satyavani newspaper can be posted.’Footnote 103 Such was Desai's enthusiasm to ‘recirculate’ information in India that in one letter he moots the idea of ‘broadcasting ideas through the medium of radio’.Footnote 104 Modi was in touch not only with Desai, but others in Britain, the United States, and East Africa.Footnote 105
The Emergency was a moment which saw the Gujarati diaspora, who form a very significant proportion of Indians overseas, particularly actively engaged with the political and social affairs of the homeland. Modi's account of the period paints a picture of a tight-knit transnational network of communication, capital flows, and the movement of people. It is a truism that Modi's perspective was Gujarati-centric, but many other sources also note the heavy concentration of activists from the region. Indeed, the Prime Minister's Office in New Delhi observed their substantial role, believing that the Alexandra Palace FISI conference ‘was largely funded by the Gujarati community’ and expressing a desire ‘to win over the Gujaratis [in the UK] to the PM's side’. To achieve this, Indira Gandhi sent the former chief minister of Gujarat to Britain on a propaganda mission in 1976, as will be discussed further below.Footnote 106
In particular, we can see the disproportionate involvement of East African Asians (a very high proportion of whom were Gujarati émigrés) in anti-Emergency activism. Swamy, in an interview, suggested that people already expelled from one country had ‘nothing to lose’ and therefore less to fear.Footnote 107 While this mythologized account must be treated with caution, many factors did predispose East African ‘twice-migrants’ to maintain strong connections with the homeland.Footnote 108 This meant they already had a range of communications and kinship networks in place, in addition to a strong sense of involvement in their homeland communities and, to an extent, Indian political affairs. But, quite contrary to Swamy's belief that they had ‘nothing to lose’, some members of the Gujarati diaspora were beginning to accumulate considerable resources in Britain and elsewhere, some of which they donated to the cause.
Others, while sympathetic, were less keen to engage actively, perhaps put off by fear for their own security and well-being. Situating this political engagement with the homeland in the lived experiences of migrants in Britain during this period is critical. Desai wrote to Modi that ‘in fact the people of Indian origin are not openly endorsing this only so that the government here does not take any actions against them, but intrinsically they want to help us’.Footnote 109 An account by Coomi Kapoor, Swamy's sister-in-law, reports that ‘Roxna [Swamy's wife] felt the RSS people she was asked to meet seemed a trifle timid and fearful of upsetting the British authorities’.Footnote 110 These anxieties reflected their vulnerable status as migrants and minorities, and, for many, a recent history of expulsion from East Africa. In the 1970s, the National Front was in ascendance in England—partly as a consequence of the influx of East African refugees—and Enoch Powell's infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech was a recent memory.Footnote 111 Exclusion and disenfranchisement were compounded by a lack of political representation: not until 1987 did a black or Asian MP sit in the House of Commons.Footnote 112 Engagement with homeland politics was perhaps a more attractive, credible, and germane alternative for the Indian diaspora.
But we must also engage critically with sources which paint all Indians in Britain as ineludibly involved and invested in the Emergency. The diaspora's experience of the episode needs to be located in a broader context, taking into account other struggles and exigencies of the time. The 1970s were a turbulent period for South Asians in Britain: the ascendance of violent racist groups (tragically underscored in 1976 with the murder of Gurdip Singh Chaggar), the rise of radical Asian youth movements (from the mid-1970s), and the Grunwick Dispute (1976–78) all represented political concerns much closer to home.Footnote 113 These are all ignored by Hindu nationalist accounts that place the Emergency as the critical struggle of the time. In addition, the resettlement of Asians from East Africa (and particularly Uganda) was extremely fraught, and those who emigrated to Britain had to negotiate a distressing and discombobulating period. They were met by considerable resistance from various political factions and a large proportion of British society in general, with the government's often inadequate provisions for the refugees adding to their anxiety.Footnote 114 This sense of precariousness was exacerbated by the restrictions on immigration introduced through the Commonwealth Immigrants Act (1968) and the Immigration Act (1971), and the controversies surrounding the Race Relations Act (1976). In short, Britain's Indian population—which by the end of the 1970s had swelled to over three quarters of a millionFootnote 115—had many concerns closer to home. But while for many in the diaspora, the Emergency did not represent a critical struggle, for those involved in the activism it constituted a pivotal political moment.
The anti-Emergency mobilization had a significant legacy for the Sangh Parivar abroad and, later, for the diasporic sections of the BJP. Figures who were active in opposition to the Emergency overseas have taken a leading role in diasporic Hindutva organizations in recent years. Ved Prakash Nanda had attended an RSS shakha (regular branch meeting) in Delhi as a young man before travelling to America to study law in Chicago and at Yale University.Footnote 116 As a lawyer at the University of Denver, Nanda was one of the most prominent figures criticizing the Emergency in America, testifying before a Congressional subcommittee about human rights abuses in India in June 1976, and publishing academic articles as well as journalism attacking Mrs Gandhi's actions.Footnote 117 He was a central figure in the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS) in America for many years, and in 2002 became the organization's sanghchalak (president).Footnote 118
Moreover, for some of these leading figures, the experience of the Emergency itself was their route into Hindutva organizations. One activist Mukund Mody had been living in the USA for eight years, working as a doctor, when ‘the imposition of emergency by Mrs Indira Gandhi in 1975 gave a u-turn to [his] life’ and he joined with ‘like-minded Indians’, most of whom ‘belonged to Vishwa Hindu Parishad and RSS’, to oppose the government's actions.Footnote 119 Mody did not just participate in anti-Emergency activism but supported it financially. Narendra Modi writes in his Emergency memoir that Mukund Mody, in making a major financial contribution to the cause, ‘decided to play the role of Bhamashah in this movement’—a reference to a sixteenth-century general and Rajasthani folk hero who donated his wealth to Maharana Pratap in order to raise an army against the Mughals.Footnote 120
Mody's mobilization was not short-lived; instead, he went on to forge relationships with leading Hindutva politicians in India and to play a significant role in diasporic Hindutva organizations in America. In an interview Mody described how he first came into ‘close contact’ with A. B. Vajpayee in March 1977, when they ‘organised an international conference under the auspices of the “Friends of India Society International”’.Footnote 121 This personal relationship was renewed over the years each time Vajpayee visited the USA, when he would stay in Mody's Staten Island home.Footnote 122 In the 1980s, Mody continued to work as secretary-general of FISI and to organize Hindu youth camps in America for the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP).Footnote 123 In 1990, he travelled to India to meet ‘the hierarchy of the BJP’ who wanted to open cells of the party in foreign countries ahead of the 1991 general elections. Mody founded the Overseas Friends of the BJP in March 1991 and Advani visited New York City to launch it the following month.Footnote 124 The experiences of these individuals during the Emergency—and the roles they went on to play in the Sangh overseas—illustrate the extent to which this period was critical in the global Hindu nationalist movement.
The Indian state and ‘transnational citizenship’
The final section of this article will explore what these events tell us about the Indian state's attitudes to its diaspora. The Indian diaspora changed radically in the first few decades after India became a nation-state in 1947. At Independence, the majority of the four million overseas Indians were located in other developing countries, but in subsequent years the diaspora grew rapidly in size, changed in demographic composition, and emigrated increasingly to the global North. Furthermore, over the second half of the twentieth century, these migrants attained increasingly higher levels of social, economic, and political capital. However, Indian government policy towards this growing, dynamic community during this period has scarcely been studied and forms a major lacuna in the recent literature.Footnote 125 Some scholars have dismissed the issue altogether: Latha Varadarajan has written that in ‘the first four decades after Independence . . . diaspora issues were consciously sidelined’ and moreover that ‘the role of the Indian diaspora in shaping the foreign policy agenda of the Indian state was virtually non-existent’.Footnote 126 Mario Rutten and Pravin Patel write that East African Asian ‘twice-migrants’, feeling that they were ignored by the Indian government, ironically translated ‘NRI’ (Non-Resident Indian)—the widely used term for emigrants—as ‘Non-Required Indians’.Footnote 127
Where archival-based histories of overseas Indians exist, they have usually focused on the period before Independence, examining labour migration and transnational anti-colonial movements.Footnote 128 Recent studies of the economic importance of the diaspora have concentrated overwhelmingly on the last 20 years,Footnote 129 regarding the earlier period only as a ‘missed opportunity’ for the Indian government.Footnote 130 Although some scholars have posited the end of the 1970s as a turning point in India's diaspora policy, they refer only to attempts to encourage foreign direct investment from non-resident Indians, while neglecting the Emergency and the political significance of the diaspora.Footnote 131
The existing literature is particularly inadequate on the earlier history of what can be termed ‘transnational citizenship’. Here, we use the term in a broad sense for various forms of engagement in the politics of multiple nation-states, rather than the more formal, legalistic type proposed by Jonathan Fox and Geoffrey Stokes among others, or that which pertains to external or ‘non-citizen/denizen’ (voting) rights, as discussed in the work of Rainer Baubök.Footnote 132 After 1947, the Government of India refused formal citizenship to diasporic Indians and Nehru instructed members of the ‘older’ Indian diaspora to integrate themselves into their adopted homelands. Studies of Indian citizenship therefore typically ascribe the diaspora little relevance from the time of Independence until the 1990s; the intervening decades are more or less blank. In Niraja Gopal Jayal's history of Indian citizenship, for instance, she discusses Nehru's distancing of the diaspora and argues that ‘this attitude began to undergo a change [only] around 1998’ under Prime Minister A. B. Vajpayee.Footnote 133 Chakravorty, Kapur, and Singh's recent monograph on Indians in America reinforces this view that ‘the Indian government and its diaspora shared mutual apathy’ until their relations were ‘transformed’ from the 1990s onwards.Footnote 134 We argue that this fails to take account of important earlier developments. The diaspora was engaged in processes of transnational citizenship during the Emergency and, consequently, the Indian government tried to influence this.
This can be demonstrated by the fact that, during the Emergency, attempts to mobilize the diaspora by the RSS and other groups did not go unchallenged by the Congress Party and the Government of India. Overseas anti-Emergency activism was a matter of concern at the highest level and the diaspora became a proxy battleground for Indian politics. T. N. Kaul, the Indian ambassador to the United States, wrote to Indira Gandhi personally to keep her informed about the political activities of Indians in America, and to recommend a severe response. In particular, Kaul related to Mrs Gandhi the activities of Subramanian Swamy and passed on details of the people that he met. He informed her that Swamy ‘is going round various towns where there are Indians and Indian students, holding meetings and doing some vicious, false and malicious propaganda’. He forwarded the text of Swamy's interview with the diaspora newspaper India Abroad, and informed the prime minister that he had unofficially sent a ‘bumptious and aggressive’ Indian lawyer to challenge Swamy's statements. He also suggested that Indira Gandhi should request that the US State Department prevent Swamy's activities.Footnote 135
The intensity of surveillance is indicated in a letter from the New York City Indian Consulate to the MEA in New Delhi:
Dr Swamy has been calling on the editors of various American newspapers. He spent about an hour with the editorial staff of the New York Times last week and also addressed a dinner meeting organised by the Quaker groups . . . I enclose copy of a note also recorded by me on his address at the dinner meeting.Footnote 136
Other official correspondence refers to anti-Emergency meetings and articles in the foreign press, including details of individual activists and relevant press clippings. One report from the Information Service of India (ISI) provides a detailed report on a seminar held at a New York state college.Footnote 137 Another letter, from the World Bank to Ambassador Kaul, reveals that the Embassy attempted to prevent the Bank from recruiting two unnamed candidates on the grounds of their activism; the Bank replied that it ‘avoids political considerations’.Footnote 138
Later in 1976, the Rajya Sabha appointed a committee to investigate the conduct and activities of Subramanian Swamy. The report documented his public statements during his time abroad and concluded that it was ‘the first ever case of a Member of Parliament carrying on so blatantly his activities in collusion with anti-India elements abroad to malign our democratic institutions and to provide fuel to the fire of anti-India propaganda by the external enemies of our country’.Footnote 139 The Committee recommended his expulsion from the House—the first time this had ever happened—in order ‘to rid the House of persons who are unfit for membership’.Footnote 140
The radical change in the make-up of the diaspora at this time had a number of consequences. First, diasporic Indians were increasingly located in powerful Western countries. Secondly, Indians who had migrated to the West had different citizenship statuses to the ‘old’ Indian diaspora. Many of the ‘overseas Indians’ resident in Britain, and most of the thousands migrating to America at this time, were still officially citizens of independent India. The Indian government sought to exert some control over these people through their citizenship status by impounding the passports of several high-profile anti-Emergency activists.
These citizenship policies were improvised by officials in Delhi and in embassies abroad in response to pressure from activists in the diaspora. In August 1975, the Indian Embassy in Washington asked the MEA for legal guidance because ‘Indian citizens here’ were asking ‘whether any protest by them against developments in India would involve loss of passport rights’.Footnote 141 The Ministry replied that,
If the activities of an Indian citizen abroad are found prejudicial to the maintenance of internal security in India, he will become liable to be dealt with under the relevant Indian laws . . . All Indian citizens may be advised to conduct themselves as responsible citizens and not engage in any activity which is likely to harm the interests of the enforcement of emergency regulations in India.Footnote 142
The weapon available to the Ministry was to impound passports under the Passport Act, a broadly defined power that could be invoked ‘in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of India, friendly relations of India with any foreign country, or in the interests of the general public’.Footnote 143 A few months later, Indian embassies abroad were instructed to produce a ‘blacklist of undesirable Indians’—those ‘who indulge in anti-national and unpatriotic activities’—whose passports could be cancelled.Footnote 144
This was a strategy decided at the highest level to prevent anti-Emergency activism among the diaspora. T. N. Kaul wrote to Indira Gandhi that: ‘We are taking action against a few ring leaders of “Indians for Democracy” and impounding their passports or stopping their scholarships. We shall wait and watch the result of our action in two cases before we proceed further. I feel, however, that some action is called for; otherwise this thing may spread.’Footnote 145 One of those who lost his scholarship was the Chicago student Anand Kumar, later a JNU sociologist and a founding member of the Aam Aadmi Party.Footnote 146 The government used this tactic on people from a number of opposition groups, including members of FISI working in Britain such as Jagadish Mitra Sood, the secretary of the Kenyan Sangh, and Ratnakar Bharati, who made broadcasts on the BBC during the Emergency.Footnote 147 Another example was Surur Hoda, a Gandhian socialist who led the ‘Free JP Campaign’ from the UK. Hoda was an Indian citizen, born in Bihar, who had worked and lived in the UK with his wife and child since the early 1960s. His passport was impounded under the Passport Act ‘in the interest of the general public’.Footnote 148 An Indian minister Om Mehta wrote to a British MP at the time about Hoda: ‘no government can permit its citizens to deliberately tarnish the image of the country abroad’.Footnote 149 The government informed him that he had to return to India—where he would probably have been imprisoned—but Hoda chose to stay in Britain thereby losing his ability to visit his family in India. As he wrote at the time, ‘[t]he action of the government of India has virtually rendered me stateless’.Footnote 150
In addition to taking concrete actions against individuals abroad wherever it could, the Government of India also tried to seize as much of the underground literature as possible. It used the fact that these underground newsletters originated with activists in the diaspora to discredit them, declaring that they were proof of interference by the so-called ‘foreign hand’. For example, in January 1976, a printed bulletin entitled ‘Indians in USA demand lifting of emergency, support Lok Sangharsha—Letter from America’ was seized by the police from RSS workers in Madhya Pradesh. The censored Indian press wrote up the story under the heading ‘CIA documents seized’; it went on to inform the public that the RSS members had been carrying ‘confidential documents concerning anti-India propaganda by Americans and CIA agents’.Footnote 151
The government also produced its own propaganda, justifying the Emergency, aimed specifically at the diaspora. After the appearance of an advertisement in The New York Times on 15 August 1975, which denounced the Emergency and called for JP's release, the Government of India ‘mailed to 5000 addresses in America packets containing booklets and pamphlets carrying vile abuse of JP and the RSS’.Footnote 152 Personnel, including government ministers, arrived in Britain and the United States to challenge ‘anti-national’ sentiments, both in public forums and in conversation with their foreign counterparts. Indira Gandhi sent leading Congress politicians, including Hitendra Desai, the former Gujarat chief minister, and Jaisukhlal Hathi, to tour England (travelling to London, Birmingham, and Leicester—heartlands of Britain's Indian population), funded by the MEA. B. N. Tandon, secretary in the Prime Minister's Office, wrote on 9 June that the ‘PM is keen that the Indians in UK should sing her praises and Desai and Hathi are being used for this’.Footnote 153 The MEA's External Publicity Division also armed those Indians who were travelling abroad with government-produced pamphlets, several of which concentrated on the RSS, with titles such as Triumph of Good Over Evil.Footnote 154
The government responded to diaspora activism by revoking individuals’ rights and countering their messages, but this activism also prompted the government to think of how it could make use of its diaspora. Indira Gandhi herself, in a letter written in 1975, wrote that, ‘India should use these people in its publicity drive in the same manner as Israel uses the Jews in [the] USA and elsewhere on their behalf.’Footnote 155 She went on: ‘The Israelis had a tremendous advantage. The Jews are the richest and most tenacious of the communities in [the] US. But we should make an effort. Thought should be given to organising Indian[s] abroad.’Footnote 156
This response to anti-Emergency activism was therefore also a moment of transition in the Indian imagining of its diaspora. T. N. Kaul wrote to the prime minister to suggest that she call a convention in India—though not in Delhi with its ‘pseudo-intellectuals and doubting Thomases’—where diasporic Indians from the USA, UK, and Canada could ‘contribute towards the mainstream of Indian life’.Footnote 157 Kaul had in mind specifically Indians living in Britain and North America; the presence of Indians who had settled in ‘East Africa, Fiji or the Caribbean’ could cause ‘misinterpretations’. It is clear that he too was thinking about diasporas comparatively—even competitively—telling Mrs Gandhi that, ‘[t]he Israelis, the Irish, the Greeks, the Italians, and others already do this’.Footnote 158
After the end of the Emergency, the subsequent Janata government carried out some of these plans. New Minister of External Affairs A. B. Vajpayee created a ‘special cell’ for ‘persons of Indian origin living abroad’Footnote 159 and held conferences in Delhi to discuss the diaspora.Footnote 160 At one of these meetings, Vajpayee said: ‘Though our sons and daughters have gone abroad to work or to reside there, India will never disown them or fail to appreciate and respect their essential loyalty to the culture and heritage of the mother country.’Footnote 161 Now in government, Vajpayee—who had been one of the RSS's more high-profile pracharaks jailed during the Emergency—was able to act on the Sangh's well-established relationship with the diaspora. Vajpayee himself had a history of engagement with the diaspora that predates even the 1970s. He visited Kenya in 1965—in the first of at least five trips there—and was even present in London during ‘the first ever planned formal meeting of Sangh workers’ in Britain in August 1966.Footnote 162
While India did not extend political rights to the diaspora in the immediate aftermath of the Emergency, it was the groups formed to oppose the Emergency that kept the matter under discussion through their campaigns. FISI began demanding dual citizenship for overseas Indians from 1978 because, in the words of Mukund Mody, it would ‘psychologically influence NRIs and they shall feel part and parcel of India’.Footnote 163 FISI continued to push for voting rights at its meetings and conferences throughout the 1980s.Footnote 164 Nonetheless, the main avenues for the engagement of the diaspora by the state following the Emergency were economic: in 1979 the Malhotra Committee, which had been appointed by the Department of Economic Affairs, ‘made various recommendations to increase the level of NRI investment’, leading to the (re-) establishment of a special cell for NRI investment in 1983.Footnote 165
It was under Vajpayee's prime ministership, in 2000, that the High Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora was appointed by the MEA. Four years later the Ministry for Overseas Indian Affairs was established—a milestone in the transformation of India-diaspora relations. The long gestation of India's twenty-first century diaspora policies is acknowledged in the Committee's report itself, which begins by quoting Vajpayee's speech from the post-Emergency conference held in November 1977.Footnote 166 Scholars have noted that some schemes recommended by the Committee were modelled on the diaspora-engagement policies of other countries. These include the Know India Programme to encourage young people from the diaspora to visit India, which was modelled on the Birthright Israel programme that the Committee had studied.Footnote 167 It is clear that this kind of comparative thinking about India's diaspora must be traced back at least as far as the Emergency.
As we have seen, the Emergency was a critical moment in the relationship between Hindu nationalist politics and activists in the diaspora. Individuals who had been politicized through FISI would go on to become involved in the HSS or VHP, or found new groups such as the Overseas Friends of the BJP. The institutional legacy of the Sangh's anti-Emergency activism has resulted in its role being commemorated, while other groups’ contributions have been downplayed or forgotten. However, a range of other organizations and individuals also actively opposed the Emergency. The Sangh-affiliated Satyavani was just one of a plethora of underground newsletters produced in the diaspora and smuggled into India: Swaraj, New India Bulletin, and CRIPP News (Campaign for the Release of Indian Political Prisoners) were all equivalents produced by left-wing groups.
This diversity has been neglected partly because many other anti-Emergency groups proved to be short-lived. Campaigns around the release of particular politicians, such as the ‘Free JP Campaign’, had no reason to perpetuate themselves as institutions. For other groups, such as Socialist International which campaigned for George Fernandes, the Emergency represented just one issue in an ongoing, globally oriented series of concerns. Furthermore, fraternal relationships between socialist parties and trade unions within India and their counterparts in Europe and elsewhere diminished as these groups fragmented and declined in importance. Other groups such as the Alliance Against Fascist Dictatorship in India—a far-left group whose figurehead in Britain was Mary Tyler, a schoolteacher who had served five years in an Indian prison for her association with the Naxalites—had a particularly evanescent existence.Footnote 168 Moreover, other agendas became more prominent in the politics of Indian diaspora communities during and after the Emergency, especially among the younger generation, such as anti-racist campaigns and conflicts over Sikh separatism.Footnote 169 These complex and sometimes competing political movements are beyond the scope of this article. However, it does need to be stressed that the lack of institutional continuity on the part of non-Hindutva anti-Emergency groups, in contrast to FISI and the RSS, has allowed the Hindu nationalist narrative of this period to dominate. It was the Hindu nationalists who publicized their narrative in the aftermath of the Emergency and have continued to do so ever since, while leading figures from those groups continually revisit the Emergency years for contemporary political purposes. The omission of non-Hindutva opposition to the Emergency has been reinforced by the government's Emergency propaganda itself, which claimed that the opposition was coordinated by ‘well-organised fascist groups’.Footnote 170 This represents a substantial historiographical lacuna that is the focus of ongoing research by the authors.
The effect of the Emergency on the Congress Party's relations with the diaspora is less clear-cut, not least because of the elision during this period between the interests of the Congress and those of the state. In Britain, as early as 1969, a group of Indians living in Southall in West London met to form the Indian Overseas Congress and sought to form links with the Congress Party in India.Footnote 171 However, their status as the Congress's overseas wing was contested. During the 1970s and 1980s, a number of different groups within Britain's Punjabi community declared themselves to be the ‘Indian Overseas Congress’, reflecting splits between Congress supporters and the Left, and later between supporters and opponents of Sikh separatism.Footnote 172 The Congress sought to make use of these groups during the Emergency. The Times of India reported on Indira Gandhi's meeting with a supportive delegation from the Birmingham Indian Overseas Congress, who had organized demonstrations attacking the British media's ‘biased’ coverage of the Emergency.Footnote 173 The All India Congress Committee invited representatives of the Overseas Congress in Southall to attend its sessions as observers.Footnote 174
After the Emergency, Indira Gandhi again sought to use these groups to rebuild her reputation abroad.Footnote 175 A number of separate ‘Indian Overseas Congress’ groups contested the right to host her visit to London in November 1978.Footnote 176 In the end, she received cheques from the Southall-based group at a dinner in London, and from the Midlands-based group at a dinner in Birmingham.Footnote 177 However, the visit did not go as smoothly as Mrs Gandhi had intended. She had been invited to address a meeting at the Dominion cinema in Southall for an hour but the moment she appeared she was greeted by ‘a barrage of shouting, stamping and whistling’ from sections of the audience. She was only able to give a short speech in Hindi before being ‘ushered out from the back of the platform by police special branch officers’.Footnote 178 The protests that dogged her visit were organized by groups sympathetic to the Left and the Shiromani Akali Dal, a Sikh party, as well as Hindu nationalist groups. Characteristically, the Congress politician Pranab Mukherjee, who accompanied Indira Gandhi on this visit, simply attributes what he calls the ‘ugly and violent’ demonstrations in Southall to rabble-rousing letters circulated by FISI.Footnote 179 During the 1980s, groups styling themselves the Indian Overseas Congress engaged in fierce contests with pro-Khalistan groups and a number of people were assassinated, including one of Indira Gandhi's hosts in 1978, Tarsem Singh Toor.Footnote 180 In 2001, during a visit to the United States, in response to this confusion and at a time when the BJP's diasporic links were well organized, Sonia Gandhi renewed the Congress Party's overseas wings.Footnote 181 While this article has begun to shed light on these dynamics, the position of the diaspora vis-à-vis electoral politics in India is a topic on which further research is required.
Conclusion
The Emergency's legacy is both substantial and complex, and some of its lasting impacts on Indian political life are only now starting to be explored and understood. After Indira Gandhi's still-enigmatic decision to call elections in March 1977, Congress's post-Independence hegemony was broken by the victorious Janata Party. The Jana Sangh's participation in the Janata coalition constituted its first forays into government. Two decades later India had its first Hindu nationalist government in the form of Vajpayee's BJP-led National Democratic Alliance. While many view the Emergency as a watershed moment for Congress's domination of Indian politics, in other ways the episode's impact was less straightforward; although defeated in the 1977 elections, Indira Gandhi was reinstated as prime minister in 1980 and Congress recovered almost all the vote share that it had lost. But the Emergency's significance must be viewed beyond just electoral politics. It constituted a crucial moment for the disarticulation of nationalism from the Congress Party, and even from the state itself.Footnote 182 Developing Rajagopal's argument that the state failed to confine politics to designated spaces within India during this period—including in its attempt to exert ‘control over communications’—we can also consider a transnational dimension to the resistance to the state's ‘monopoly’ over politics.Footnote 183
While the entry into the mainstream of the Sangh's political wing neither began nor ended with the Emergency, Hindu nationalist politics underwent an important transformation during this episode.Footnote 184 Sangh networks in India were strengthened through their resistance to the government; by engaging in new forms of activism, its members acquired new skills and the movement developed new leaders. Politically, the movement also enjoyed reputational gains. Advani's reference to the shedding of ‘political untouchability’ was perhaps best encapsulated in Jayaprakash Narayan's pithy declaration to the Jana Sangh: ‘If you are a fascist, then I too am a fascist.’Footnote 185 In turn, Hindu nationalist retellings of the Emergency also reflected a new self-confidence and heightened morale, still resonant today.
This article has illustrated that some of the most substantive, yet currently overlooked, advances made by the Sangh during the Emergency—in terms of capacity, skills, and networks—relate to the global mobilization of the Hindu nationalist movement. In many ways, the RSS's estimation of the diaspora and its possibilities was hugely enhanced. This was illustrated by a resolution passed by the Akhil Bharatiya Karyakari Mandal (All-India Executive Committee), immediately following the Emergency in 1977:
Our brother Indians living abroad have also displayed boundless courage of conviction during this period. Their joining the struggle intensified the voice of liberty raised from our soil into a thundering roar reverberating all over the world. They succeeded in mobilizing world-wide sympathy for the struggle of the Indian people.Footnote 186
It is revealing that many of the Indian Hindu nationalist leaders who witnessed the efforts of the overseas wings of the Sangh during this period—such as H. V. Seshadri, Rajendra Singh, A. B. Vajpayee, Subramanian Swamy, and Narendra Modi—maintained a much closer relationship with the diaspora after the Emergency. We must be cautious of the Sangh's own accounts of its ‘crucial’ role during the episode, which often obfuscates the dynamic (perhaps even greater) part played by a broader range of groups, particularly various left-wing actors. However, the importance of the period in terms of the confidence and morale that it brought to the Hindu nationalist movement goes beyond its practical contribution to opposing the Emergency. While the Emergency was not the first point at which the Sangh had engaged with the diaspora, it represents a major milestone for Hindu nationalism abroad. It is therefore necessary to revise the common perception that global Hindutva first made an important impact during the Ayodhya mobilizations of the 1980s and early 1990s. Furthermore, it requires us to understand Hindutva ‘long-distance nationalism’ not as an organic expression of patriotic nostalgia emanating from the diaspora—as envisaged by Benedict Anderson—but as a political movement organized through dynamic and carefully coordinated, multidirectional networks.Footnote 187
This study has also revealed that the other critical aspect of the Emergency, vis-à-vis Indians overseas, was the nature and extent to which the Indian government engaged in a contest to politicize and mobilize the diaspora. This contrasts with the existing literature which argues that the government largely ignored ‘NRIs’ throughout this period. Understanding the Emergency, therefore, is vital to comprehending the origins of the diaspora engagement policies put in place by the Indian state at the very end of the twentieth century (and which are still being actively developed today). The Emergency both represented a newfound interest in the diaspora on the part of the government, and precipitated a shift in the understanding of the diaspora—both as potential threats and assets. In this sense, we argue, the Emergency represents a ‘global event’. Following a period after Independence during which the state largely disregarded Indians overseas—partly as a matter of policy, and partly due to a lack of vision and capacity—we see, from the 1970s, the transition to a situation more familiar today, in which the diaspora was courted for the political and economic roles it could play. The consequences of the Emergency for global Hindu nationalist networks and for India's evolving conceptions of transnational citizenship reverberate to this day.
