50 Years of Emergency: Underground Stories of Disguise & Defiance
Chronicling the Well-known and Unknown Unsung Heroes of the Emergency
KS Muralidharan
“In the dark night of tyranny, even a spark of courage becomes a blazing beacon.”
Not all golden jubilees are celebration-worthy though they are no less memorable. Fifty years after Smt. Indira Gandhi declared Emergency in India on the night of June 25, 1975, the memories are still fresh in the minds of those who were part of the resistance, directly or indirectly.
Consider: Civil liberties were suspended, political opponents jailed, the press muzzled, and fear became the currency of governance. While most of the country was paralyzed by shock and oppression, a quiet, fierce resistance began to take shape — led not from parliament or palaces, but from underground cells, temples, hidden ashrams, and anonymous back rooms, and believe it or not, brought together the right wing and the left wing, RSS sympathisers and the Communist supporters, and members of the Muslim League!
Hmm. The RSS working together with the leftists and Muslim League. To digress a little, it’s like Rahul Gandhi and Modi making common cause and also working together! This unimaginable and impossible political coming together of sworn rivals was evocatively captured in his inimitable poetic way by Vajpayee post-emergency in his historic speech at the Ramlila grounds thus:
“Baad muddat ke mile hain deewane,
Kehne sunne ko bahut hain afsaane,
Khuli hawa mein zara saans to lein,
Kab tak rahegi azaadi, kaun jaane.”
(“It has been ages since we — those they call mad — have met,
There are so many tales to tell and hear.
Let us breathe deeply of the open air for a moment,
For who knows how long our freedom will last?”)
Coming back to the emergency era, the Congress government under Indira Gandhi bulldozed all democratic norms to the ground and banished the entire opposition to jail — including Morarji Desai, a Gandhian, senior Congressman and fellow Cabinet Minister of Indira Gandhi in the late 1960s, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, L.K. Advani and scores of others from the Jan Sangh, Madhu Dandavate, Laloo Prasad Yadav, Mulayam Singh Yadav, H.D. Deve Gowda, Veerendra Patil, Ramakrishna Hegde, and many more.
The darkest chapter of Indian democracy in the past deserves to be remembered, so that it will not script another such sordid chapter in the future. In the current context, it defies all imagination to understand how a draconian dictatorial government was fought without the might of social media, mobile phones et al. But many heroes and heroines emerged to save democracy and fight for our freedoms. Not all of them were famous and not all of them rose to fame, some of them who gave their everything to save the country from becoming a dictatorial banana republic, are today not among our midst, and died unsung and unheard.
The stories of both the contrasting celebrated well-known, and unknown and unsung, deserve to be etched in the collective memory of the nation, and remembered with gratitude and pride.
Narendra Modi: The Disguised Courier of the Resistance
At 25 years of age, Narendra Modi was already a kind of a veteran, though low-key, as a quiet, hardworking RSS pracharak in Gujarat. After the RSS was banned during the emergency, Modi quickly became an integral part of the underground resistance. He acted as a courier shuttling between Gujarat and Delhi, carrying secret messages, organizing resources, and disseminating banned literature.
Few know that Modi was a master of disguises which enabled him to evade arrest, dressing up as a Sikh (Sardarji), a monk (Swamiji), and as a bookseller at different times. Thus did he dodge many a plainclothes policeman looking for activists during his journeys at every train station and bus stand, traveling by night under assumed names and staying overnight in temples and dharamshalas.
Modi once even shaved his head and wrapped himself in saffron robes, posing as a spiritual ascetic to escape a police dragnet! An invisible thread in the vast tapestry of resistance mounted primarily by the RSS and Ramnath Goenka of the Indian Express, no one wagered then that he would go on to become the Prime Minister of India in the future. In true James Bond style, codenames were used to protect operatives and Subramanian Swamy who was in the most wanted list even made a dramatic entry into Parliament in disguise to give a short fiery speech against the emergency!
Dramatic entry and exit by Swamy
Perhaps no story of the Emergency is more dramatic than that of Dr Subramanian Swamy, then a Rajya Sabha MP. Declared as a fugitive by the Indira government, on August 10, 1976, Swamy in a daring act of audacity, managed to give the slip to security disguised as a Sikh — with a turban, false beard, and sunglasses, and stunned everyone with his fiery speech condemning the Emergency, demanding restoration of democracy, and before the officials could react, made a dramatic exit through a secret route and vanished.
Echoing a spy thriller, Subramanian Swamy reportedly escaped India through Nepal to the United States and from there, mobilised global opinion against the suppression of democracy in India.
The Dynamite of an Enfant Terrible
The other enfant terrible was undoubtedly socialist leader, George Fernandes, the Dynamite of Baroda, who though not from RSS, stitched up close ideological and logistical ties with anti-Emergency forces, including the Jan Sangh. Fernandes was the mastermind of the Baroda Dynamite Conspiracy, a plan: to sabotage railways and communication lines to paralyze the Indira regime.
Operating from an underground cell out of Baroda (Vadodara) with his volunteer army of engineers, students, and activists, he reportedly assembled explosives, trained for covert operations, and distributed anti-Emergency literature, and disguised as a fisherman, sadhu, or an ordinary traveller crisscrossed the country to coordinate rebellion.
Eventually betrayed, George Fernandes who decades later went on to serve as India’s Defence Minister under PM Vajpayee, was arrested and paraded in handcuffs. But his defiant raised fist became an icon of resistance. Despite brutal torture, he refused to buckle, and his trial became a rallying point for opposition forces across India. Tragically, both his brothers, Michael Fernandes and Lawrence Fernandes became permanently handicapped due to custodial police torture.
Balasaheb Deoras’ Invisible Network
The then RSS Sarsanghchalak Balasaheb Deoras was arrested early but his band of Swayamsevaks coordinated and collaborated together in RSS shakhas disguised as yoga classes or bhajan sessions, in many cities like Nagpur, Delhi, Bangalore, Kolkata, and Indore. Communication was coded, letters written in invisible ink, travels hatched with dual identities, meetings held in rotating locations donations collected discreetly through gold loans and private sales, and banned books and newspapers like “Motherland” and “Organiser” smuggled.
Enter: James Bond of Media
The story of the Resistance movement against the emergency will be incomplete without the devil-may-care heroism displayed by the indefatigable and uncompromising Ramnath Goenka, the media baron and owner of Indian Express Group of Publications.
When on June 28, 1975, the then I&B Minister, Vidyacharan Shukla ordered for the Express presses to be raided and electricity cut to his offices, Goenka responded with a blank editorial — an inspiring and powerful protest against censorship. As he was to say, “I had two options: to listen to the dictates of my heart or my purse. I chose to listen to my heart.”
Ramnath Goenka and his family faced a barrage of coercive tactics such as legal prosecution in over 300 cases and threats under MISA (Maintenance of Internal Security Act), motivated investigations into the paper’s finances by the Company Affairs Ministry, tax demands amounting to Rs 4 crore, bank loan refusals, suspension of government and private ads, electricity cuts, pressure to sell or cozy up to the ruling Congress party with Government-nominated directors placed on the Express board; and worse. But Goenka famously — and almost single-handedly in the Indian media which crawled when asked to bend in the words of LK Advani — relentlessly fought back despite suffering a heart attack, and helped rally civil opinion against authoritarian excesses of the emergency, and by collaborating with the opposition, largely influenced the Indira government’s eventual electoral defeat in 1977.
While the above warriors against the emergency are well-known or went on to become famous subsequently, there are also many unsung and unheard of underground stories of ordinary people who were no less committed to the cause, and with the top opposition of leaders like Vajpayee and Advani cooling their heels in Bangalore Central Jail, Bangalore became the hub for such heroic tales of resistance.
The Silent Warriors of Bangalore: Leaflets and Loyalty
In Bangalore, a quiet but impactful resistance was brewing. Young RSS volunteers and Jan Sangh (later BJP) sympathizers ran underground cells in localities like Malleshwaram and Chamrajpet, focusing on printing and distributing pamphlets that exposed Emergency excesses — arbitrary arrests, media censorship, forced sterilizations, recalls T.S. Vivek, son of T.R. Sampathu, who worked behind the scenes to ferry lunchboxes to LK Advani and Dandavate. The late Sampathu along with his brother, T.R. Ramaswamy, have the distinction of starting Jan Sangh in Bangalore in the early 1960s.
Sampathu was in charge of organising the printing and distribution of anti-emergency leaflets printed by rudimentary printing machines hidden in homes and small shops which were distributed at night through letterboxes, college canteens, bus stops, and even temples. Volunteers memorized routes, worked in teams of two, and used codes to signal danger, recalled Vivek.
Many RSS workers had to endure police torture like Mohan Kumtakar who was picked up from his college and jailed for 3 months. The only solace for them for rebels like Kumtakar was that they were honoured later by the top brass of the BJP.
Their resistance lacked the glamour of an armed revolt, but what they did prove critical in breaking the regime’s control over information. These young men and women were often students, traders, and part-time workers. Many were jailed, beaten, or expelled from colleges. But they never gave up.
A Battle of Belief
What united these ordinary individuals was not political ambition or personal gain — it was a steadfast belief in India’s democratic values, not traced back to 1947, but to centuries old civilizational culture and ethos.
These men and women risked everything — their freedom, careers, families, and in some cases, their lives — because they could not bear to see India turn into a dictatorship.
They were not armed revolutionaries. They fought with leaflets, with disguised identities, with whispered slogans and secret meetings. They fought in the shadows but for the light of the nation.
And though history often remembers the Emergency for its infamy, it is these stories of silent, stubborn courage that remind us what democracy truly means. That in a free India, dissent is not a crime. It is a duty.
We should never forget how when the Congress party tried to silence a nation, little-known whispers became unheard voices which became a resounding chorus 19 months later, with India’s democracy, wounded but alive, bouncing back to life, with the historic defeat of Indira Gandhi and her government.
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