Indira Gandhi was guided to impose the Emergency, says Pranab Mukherjee in his book

New Delhi: President Pranab Mukherjee in his book, The Dramatic Decade: The Indira Gandhi Years, said that Indira Gandhi was guided to impose the Emergency.

He also lists what he calls the positive aspects of the Emergency: “Discipline in public life, a growing economy, controlled inflation, reversed trade deficit, enhanced spending on development and a crackdown on tax evasion and smuggling.”

But he adds that the events that unfolded during the time, which included “suspension of fundamental rights and political activity (including trade union activity), largescale arrests of political leaders and activists, press censorship and extending the life of legislatures by not conducting elections”, which adversely affected the interests of the people.

“The Congress and Indira Gandhi had to pay a heavy price for this misadventure,” Mr Mukherjee says.

Clearly documenting his loyalty to the late Prime Minister, Mr Mukherjee recounts how his father Kamada Kinkar Mukherjee, a Congress loyalist, had reminded him about standing by a person in his or her hour of crisis. It is then that “you reveal your own humanity,” his father had told him.

“I did not then or later waver from my loyalty to Indira Gandhi,” Mr Mukherjee writes.

Critical of the Opposition of that time, Mr Mukherjee termed the JP movement “directionless”.

“The fact that the Opposition parties accepted JP’s leadership and joined his total revolution movement had little to do with ideological conviction. With no one among them to measure up to Indira Gandhi’s political charisma, they needed a moral authority to provide them strength. And who better than JP at this time?” the President writes.

“To me it appeared to be directionless. It was contradictory in that it was a movement fighting against corruption yet composed of people and parties whose integrity was not above board,” he adds.

The first volume of his book, which will subsequently run into a trilogy, was launched exclusively on Amazon on Thursday.

The first edition, which has already become a bestseller, is filled with letters, photographs and extracts from official documents, including the Budgets of the times.

On the narrative part, the President has fairly relied upon his memory since much of his material was lost when his house got flooded. Mr Mukherjee’s 321-page book covers various chapters, including the liberation of Bangladesh, JP’s offensive, the defeat in the 1977 polls, the split in the Congress and the return to power in 1980.