Samvdhan Hatya Diwas

The Government of India has decided to observe June 25 as ‘Samvidhan Hatya Diwas’ every year. This is in remembrance of what the present government at the centre has described as the “inhuman pain” suffered by those who were jailed during the emergency that was imposed on this date in 1975 by the then Congress regime headed by Indira Gandhi. Making this announcement, Union Home Minister Amit Shah has also recalled how Indira Gandhi throttled the very soul of Indian democracy, exhibiting her dictatorial mindset, and how lakhs of people were dumped in jail without any reason. Through the Emergency, the then-Congress government also curbed the independence of the media by imposing pre-censorship on newspapers so that no voice of protest could be expressed by anyone. A large number of people across the country still have it fresh in their memory—the kind of repression that was carried out in order to silence anyone who tried to protest in order to protect democracy and the Constitution. In a brazen display of a dictatorial mindset, the Congress regime strangled the soul of democracy. As Amit Shah has pointed out, thousands of people were thrown behind bars for no fault of their own, and the voice of the media was silenced. Several had also disappeared while being confined to prison. Among them, the story of Rajan, a student of the Regional Engineering College, Calicut, who died as a result of torture in custody in Kerala, was the most spine-chilling. During the emergency, Indira Gandhi bestowed upon herself the power to rule by decree. She took every decision in consultation with some close party members, with her younger son Sanjay Gandhi emerging not just as her right hand but also as a self-styled dictator India had never seen before. Sanjay Gandhi also played an important role in the arrest of senior opposition leaders. According to the Union Home Minister, the decision to mark June 25 as ‘Samvidhan Hatya Diwas’ was taken by the government with the intention of honouring the spirit of millions of people who had struggled to revive democracy despite facing inexplicable persecution at the hands of an oppressive government. The observance of this Diwas, according to Shah, would help keep the eternal flame of individual freedom and the defence of democracy alive in every Indian, thus preventing dictatorial forces from repeating those horrors.