Emergency intel, Sardar speech in new IB book

In the first ever declassification by the Intelligence Bureau of nearly 3,000 documents of minutes of meetings of top police brass and former Prime Ministers and home ministers since Independence, it is revealed that then home minister K. Brahmananda Reddy, speaking to the top police brass in 1976 (the year after the Emergency), claimed that through the promulgation of Emergency, the Indian government managed to “contain inflation”, “was able to further prosperity” and its “timely promulgation” resulted in a “big change” in the life of the entire community. As per the declassified documents, this was stated at the IGP conference chaired by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The documents have been presented in a 200-page coffee-table book brought out by the Intelligence Bureau, which offers a “clear outline of independent India’s national security history”.

The push to publish such a book came from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who felt that the intelligence and police community should “share” their history with the people of the country.

Excerpts of the book show that in March 1975, Gandhi termed as “baseless” the allegations of the Opposition saying that it is necessary for the police to know something. “The propaganda being carried out by most of the Opposition parties is that we are leading the country towards dictatorship and secondly, we are leading it towards communism... They have not been able to produce a single argument, a single example of a word said or an action taken which can give any indication that there is any such tendency here,” it says.

Later, then President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed proclaimed a state of national emergency from June 25, 1975.

In the excerpts, S.N. Mathur, then director of the Intelligence Bureau, is quoted as cautioning the police brass: “The persistent tactics of sabotage and violence by certain sections among the underground Opposition leaders like George Fernandez, the Socialist party leader, was causing all of us great concern.”

In March 1975, Gandhi also heaped praise on the police forces , especially the CRPF, in dealing with the rising “political violence” in the country even as she expressed concern over the “great amount of intimidation of the police and the judiciary”. She raised alarm over “the cult of violence” growing in the country. “If the Opposition parties or those involved in the agitations feel that things are not going their way, then immediately they start a whole campaign of propaganda,” she said. She referred to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi to shock at the media reports on the assassination of then railway minister Lalit Narayan Mishra.

“Assassination is not new, political leaders have been assassinated in different parts of the world. Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated here. But that immediately the blame for the assassination should be put on those who were friends and supporters of Mishra this the world has not seen before,” she said.

The book begins by documenting the address of the country’s first home minister, Sardar Patel, in 1950 where he advised the police brass not to “take a complacent view of things” and has foreword messages by national security adviser Ajit Doval and Union home minister Rajnath Singh.