Latest news with #post-Independence
Hindustan Times
a day ago
- Politics
- Hindustan Times
When India was turned into a vast prison house
On the 50th anniversary of its promulgation, falling on June 25, the horrors of the national Emergency (1975-1977) will be recalled by just about everyone as the darkest period in post-Independence India. The Emergency regime's abuse of power, its brutal suppression of democratic opposition and muzzling of free thought and expression will be excavated from the past, roundly and rightly rebuked. The ruling establishment will cite the Emergency's excesses, the Indian National Congress will not deny the venality of those excesses. Indeed, it cannot. But it will also respond by asking the government, 'What about yours?' In the slanging match that might ensue, the lessons that need to be learnt from its horrors may well get lost. Jayaprakash Narayan, as he was being taken to jail, is said to have remarked vinasha kaale viparita buddhi. (HT Archive) For me, the horror of all the horrors of the Emergency was that India had become a vast prison house. Fear gripped the political class, the intelligentsia, the business community, and the media. During the Emergency, it has been estimated that 34,988 people were arrested under the Maintenance of Internal Security Act and 75,818 people were arrested under the Defence of India Act and Rules. As a 30-year-old junior officer in the Tamil Nadu cadre of the IAS, I felt like I was suddenly imprisoned myself, unable to speak my mind without looking over my shoulders, for walls had overnight acquired ears, corridors eyes. Newspapers were under the strictest censorship, and the radio relayed only government-sponsored news. Word came through, nonetheless, of Jayaprakash Narayan, the country's tallest leader, having been woken up at three in the morning and taken to jail, and his saying, as he was being moved, vinasha kaale vipareeta buddhi (as perdition nears, the ruler loses his mind). National leaders like Morarji Desai, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, LK Advani, Charan Singh, Chandra Shekhar, were all taken in. As were student leaders including Prakash Karat and Sitaram Yechury of the CPM, and Arun Jaitley of the BJP. George Fernandes was captured after some months of being underground. His supporter Snehalatha Reddy was thrown into prison, tortured and died shortly after, while on parole. P Rajan, a student at the Regional Engineering College, Calicut, was arrested by the police in Kerala on March 1, 1976. He was tortured to death in custody. His body was never found. This sequence, transposed over what I had learnt of jailings during the British Raj, made the prison the ugliest symbol of the State for me. It also made the prison something I wanted to see and get to know in the course of my work as a civil servant. Had I become a district collector that chance would have come to me organically. But as it happened, that coveted position eluded me in my career in the IAS. I came to see the inside of a jail only years later when, working in West Bengal, I did what Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asked all governors to do. I visited correctional homes, as jails were by then called. In one, a bearded young man came up to me and said in Hindustani: 'Huzoor, I am a Pakistani. I wanted to visit Ajmer Sharif for a minnat (vow). I got a visa and came. But my mistake was I came alone. I was detained on the suspicion of being a terrorist. I want to make no request or complaint to you. I only want to thank you. By arresting me and putting me in this jail, India has done me a favour. I have found a copy of the Holy Quran in the library here and have read it for the first time from beginning to end…' I did not know what to say to him. Was he being ironic, sarcastic, genuinely appreciative? In any case, he was being totally intellectual. In another correctional home, as I was leaving, completely torn by the spectacle of elderly women sentenced for dowry killings, and by a section cruelly called pagal ward (ward of the mad), I was accosted by a young Bengali inmate. 'Saer,' he said breathlessly, in Bangla, 'Our library here… it needs a regular supply of good new books.' He could have been a final year student in any of our universities. In yet another, the inmates made a plain request: 'Can we have, just for the day, Sir, a TV installed to enable us to watch the Wimbledon Open?' This was done, to the great delight of the set there that might have included murderers, rapists, thieves. But all of them were for that day, tennis fans no different from other free followers of Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer. We who are 'out' do not know the story of those who are 'in'. India is under no Emergency today. But is the horror of Emergency horrors, the jail, call it by whatever name, not a grim reality? Are there no political detenus in India today? Is the threat of imprisonment not active in our political economy? The 50th anniversary of the promulgation of the Emergency should respect history, not serve politics. The Congress has a truly golden opportunity to offer an unequivocal and unstinting apology for each and every transgression committed in the course of that Emergency, across the gamut of human rights, political norms, legal nostrums. Would it be too much to expect the Congress president to call on arguably the seniormost living ex-prisoner of the Emergency era, Advaniji and offer him a personal apology? He should do this not as the president of the party that was in power during the Emergency, but the party that led India to freedom. And the government has a golden opportunity to do something beyond recalling the Emergency's horrors. What may that be? It can announce a chapter-turn in India's penological history by releasing all so-called political detenus, and by saying detaining persons for their political views, when not accompanied by incitement to violence, or hatred, will henceforth not happen. More, it can alter for all time, our prison profile, turning our jails into serious centres for state-of-the-art correctional services across physical and mental counselling, personality therapy, re-orientation, where there is no question of custodial torture, where prisoner-on-prisoner violence and perversions are erased, where in-jail crimes with outside collaboration, especially in drugs-abuse, are a thing of the past. Above all, it can put life into the amendment of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) which by, Section 436A (new Section 479 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita) allowing for the release of undertrial prisoners on bail after they have served half of the maximum sentence prescribed for their alleged offence, provided it is not a capital offence (punishable by death or life imprisonment). Seventy-five percent of the inmates of our scandalously overcrowded correctional homes are undertrials, most of whom are very likely innocent. The practice of releasing prisoners at anniversaries is an old and respected tradition across the world. The government of India will show by tangible deed its abhorrence of the imprisoning spree that marked the Emergency if it startles the nation by this radical reform. Gopalkrishna Gandhi is a student of modern Indian history and the author of The Undying Light: A Personal History of Independent India. The views expressed are personal.
Time of India
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Time of India
PAC band keeps beating strong with rhythm & legacy
Lucknow: The morning is thick with humidity. Clouds hang low, the air heavy and slow. But inside the 35th Battalion Band Headquarters in Lucknow's Mahanagar, the atmosphere crackles with energy — not from parade commands or marching boots, but from trumpets blaring, drums thundering, and saxophones singing in unison. This is no ordinary music hall. Here, khaki replaces concert black, and every beat is rooted in discipline. Awadhesh Yadav of Bareilly and Madhvendra Kumar of Ghaziabad aren't your typical musicians — they're constables with a call to serve both the nation and the note. "We're learning to command not just rifles, but rhythm," says Awadhesh, pausing between a precision-perfect snare sequence. They are among 10 PAC personnel undergoing intensive training in brass instruments — part of a broader revival drive to modernise PAC bands across battalions. At the heart of this effort is a proud legacy, one that marches back to the post-Independence years. The roots of the PAC band stretch back to Captain Ram Singh Thakuri — the legendary composer of the INA's rousing anthem Kadam Kadam Badhaye Ja. Post-Independence, in 1948, he joined the Provincial Armed Constabulary as a Deputy SP with one task: to raise a ceremonial police band. What he built was a living symbol of nationalism. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Thị trường có dấu hiệu suy thoái không? IC Markets Đăng ký Undo Declared the official State Police Band in 1965, it began performing at Raj Bhawan, Republic Day parades, state funerals, and cultural showcases. Even after retirement in 1974, Captain Ram Singh continued mentoring musicians. He was named Emeritus Musician by the UP govt and trained recruits till 2000. He died in 2002. Today, his legacy lives on in bandmaster Vishnu Pratap, who joined the PAC in 1987 and trained directly under the Captain. "We weren't just taught music — we were taught patriotism," says Vishnu, who has led the band at grand events including Prayagraj's Kumbh Mela and global expos in Noida. As part of chief minister Yogi Adityanath's directive, PAC bands are being overhauled — with upgraded instruments, improved training infrastructure, and dedicated performance spaces wherever they are deployed. "We've begun intensive 90-day training sessions for constables from different battalions," says Vishnu. "But mastery takes time — at least three years of consistent monitoring and hard work." A full-fledged brass band has 46 musicians, though compact units of 22 are also fielded. The ensemble features a powerful line-up: trumpets, cornets, clarinets, flugelhorns, saxophones, euphoniums, tubas, French horns, and more. "We have it all — from alto trumpet to baritone horn," Vishnu says. Among those training under him are constables like Sudhir Maurya from Gonda. "It's a privilege to be part of the tradition started by Captain Ram Singh," says Madhvendra. To honour this legacy, a dedicated PAC Band Museum has been set up on the 35th Battalion campus. Soon to be inaugurated, the museum showcases vintage instruments, historic uniforms, handwritten musical scores by Captain Ram Singh, and decades-spanning photographs of performances that stirred both hearts and parades. As Vishnu lifts his baton and the brass band comes alive once more, on Saturday they will perform at Raj Bhawan: "For our men in uniform, music is not just an art — it's a duty. And this duty does not fade," adds Vishnu.
The Hindu
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Marching to his own beat
The first time we met was at a gathering of luminaries at a retreat in Goa intent on saving 'Democracy in India'. We did such things in those distant days of the 70s. Goa was still an unexplored destination. There were dancers, poets, historians, political activists, the odd freedom fighter, one of each. Manohar Malgoankar the novelist lived in Goa and was our unofficial host to discovering the state, in between the long sessions at the conference table. Krishen Khanna, well known by then, was the artist. He was then as he still is now a handsome man; with a fresh pink complexion from his Lyallpur childhood in Pakistan, the thick swatch of hair falling over his forehead, a secret smile playing over his pursed lips. When he finally spoke, we listened. 'Let us not forget,' he said 'the leela of this ancient place, let us not forget to live!' In that one moment we forgot who we were as individuals. We danced. Khanna was the band-master of every world he entered. In much the same way that the red and gold brass buttoned Bandwallas in his paintings who emerged from his canvases in the 1980s played their trumpets through marriages, parades, political rallies and funerals. They marched to their own music. They could be said to reflect the trajectory of his life. In his autobiography, The Time of My Life: Memories, Anecdotes, Tall Talk, of a childhood in Lyallpur, now Faisalabad in Pakistan, and then in pre-partition Lahore, followed by a very privileged schooling on a Rudyard Kipling scholarship at the Imperial Service College of England in 1940, Khanna describes how his father would eat a piece of fruit at the table. 'He would almost attack the fruit and examine it while chomping to see where strategically he needed to bite next. While his teeth sank into the fruit, some kind of a process of suction would be set in motion, simultaneously, so that not a drop of juice went astray…' In 1947, the family as with many others, left their home driving across the divide in a car. They found a second home in Shimla. 'I remember my interview with the top brass at Grindlays Bank,' Khanna says with the same mischievous smile. 'It was a formal dinner with full tableware and cutlery that also included a marrow spoon. When they served a marrow bone, I used the marrow spoon as I had done in my schooling days in England.' He got into Grindlays in 1948. Khanna's Bombay chapter By then he had met Renu Chatterji and married her subsequently. She belonged to an equally distinguished family. Her brother P.C. Chatterji is considered a doyen of Indian Broadcasting and has written several books on the subject. When they moved to Bombay, the artist in Khanna began tugging at his tailored suits. His 1950 painting, News of Gandhiji's death, attracted the attention of Rudolf Von Leyden, the émigré art connoisseur from Europe. Von Leyden went to anoint the mixed cabal of artists that would put Bombay as it was known as the front runners of post-Independence Indian art. As Khanna described Von Leyden's influence in a recent biography: 'He belonged to a generation of immortals… He never said as much but he was a votary of beauty and was not given over to tightly held theories, there was much open mindedness which made discussions [more] lively.' Another immortal was Homi Bhabha, a great collector as well as being a scientist. As the head of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), he bought one of Khanna's paintings for ₹225 in the late 1940s. He created an extraordinarily prescient collection of art that decorated the walls of the TIFR. He had started a trend for corporate collectors to discover and create a renaissance of Indian art in all its varied manifestation. 'He never stopped being an artist' In the early 1950s the Khannas came to Chennai where their daughter Rasika was learning Bharatanatyam, and met S. Krishnan, a cultural advisor to the USIS (U.S. Consulate General). Khanna's first solo show was at the USIS in 1955. Subsequently, he was to paint a great mural on the maritime glory of the Cholas for the newly built ITC Chola Hotel. The same mural now gilds the walls of the ITC Grand Chola. Long before that Khanna's connection with the ITC Welcomgroup Hotels was fulfilled with the wonderful series of paintings that decorate the foyer of the Grand Maurya Hotel in New Delhi. Called The Great Procession, each panel tells the story in glowing colours of the daily lives of people in our world. It combines the tales from the Jataka of birds and animals as elegantly as those that appear in our miniature tradition, on street corners and albums. When I met the Khannas again many years later, it was at one of the ITC hotels' travelling 'Art Camps' organised by Monisha Mukundan, the editor of Namaste magazine at the time. She had the gift of creating a vivid collage of artists from different affiliations with other crafts people and writers. It was a moveable camp from New Delhi, to Agra, to Jaipur in stages. Khanna may have been the doyen of the group but he never stopped being an artist who sat at his scroll of paper with his pastels and Conte crayons drawing with all the vigour of a four-year-old. When Renu and I stopped to bargain for a necklet of beaten silver being sold outside at a market, Khanna laughed and said: 'How typical, you ladies want your freedom but are everywhere looking to be locked in chains!' We still bought the silver chain. The writer is a Chennai-based critic and cultural commentator.
Pink Villa
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Pink Villa
All the movies getting released by Dulquer Salmaan's production house Wayfarer Films in Kerala, full list
Dulquer Salmaan is not just a successful actor but also a leading businessman with his various endeavors. Among multiple ventures, the actor has a production house popularly known for distributing films in Kerala. Keeping this in mind, here's a list of movies that will be released in theaters in Kerala under Dulquer Salmaan's production house, Wayfarer Films. Dulquer Salmaan's distribution lineup 1. Kuberaa - June 20 Kuberaa, starring Dhanush and Nagarjuna Akkineni in lead roles, is slated to hit the big screens on June 20, 2025. The social thriller directed by Sekhar Kammula features the tale of a beggar and a chartered accountant whose lives are intertwined. With a scam of money swindling from business tycoons at play, the movie features actors like Rashmika Mandanna, Jim Sarbh, and more in key roles. 2. Kingdom - July 25 (Speculative) Kingdom is a spy action thriller featuring Vijay Deverakonda in the lead role. The film, directed by Jersey fame Gowtam Tinnanuri, is touted to be a duology featuring the tale of a man who rises to become the leader and protector of his people. 3. Kaantha - August 1 (Speculative) Kaantha is a period drama set in the 1950s of Madras (now Chennai), Tamil Nadu. The movie, touted to focus on the post-Independence transformation of India, is rumored to have DQ playing a prominent superstar from Tamil cinema during that era. However, details about the film haven't been confirmed yet. 4. Lokah Chapter - 1: Chandra - Onam 2025 Lokah Chapter - 1: Chandra is an ambitious project from Malayalam cinema, bankrolled by Dulquer Salmaan himself. The film, directed by Dominic Arun, is said to be the first iteration of a cinematic universe focusing on a series of superheroic events. While more details are yet to be confirmed, it is expected that the universe will expand with characters played by Dulquer Salmaan and Tovino Thomas. 5. Kalamkaval - TBA Kalamkaval starring Mammootty and Vinayakan in the lead roles, is said to be a crime thriller film based on serial killer Cyanide Mohan. With the Malayali superstar playing the main antagonist, Vinayakan is touted to play a police officer.
Indian Express
7 days ago
- Politics
- Indian Express
The nation, the state and the other: Hindutva's imprint on nationalism in India
Yogendra Yadav ('The nationalism we forgot', IE, May 27) stresses a familiar distinction between two nationalisms, one that emerged in the crucible of the Indian freedom struggle and another that he repeatedly calls 'European nationalism', specifically citing only Germany (presumably of the 1930s and '40s). He invokes a vivid label — 'belonging without othering' — to characterise the distinction. The nationalism pursued in the freedom struggle exemplified this label. The nationalism in Europe precisely did not, neither does the nationalism in currency in India today. Much of the essay elaborates how this current form of nationalism in India has resulted in undermining the rights of citizens to speak critically of the government. Being a nationalism defined by hostility towards the other — both outside our borders as well as inside — it extends this hostility to its internal critics as well, viewing all criticism as treasonously aligning itself with the outsider. By contrast, a nationalism that refuses 'othering' in its understanding of belonging views its internal critics as enriching the plurality that such a refusal permits (in contrast to the 'uniformity' demanded by the very act of 'othering'). This latter pluralist nationalism was the worthy legacy of the freedom movement and Yadav concludes his essay by laying the fault for the rise of the offending nationalism in India today at the doorstep of what he thinks of as a secularised, internationalist, modernist ethos that was cultivated in post-Independence India, which eschewed all nationalism, thereby creating a 'nationalism' vacuum that is now filled by the Hindutva conception of the nation. It would seem, then, that for Yadav, the betrayal of the legacy of the freedom movement began with the secularised modernity adopted after Independence and that betrayal gave rise to its opposite, the religious majoritarian Hindutva nationalism of our present time. Suhas Palshikar ('Who stole my nationalism?', IE, May 31) is right to accept the distinction between these two nationalisms and sensible too in expressing some scepticism about Yadav's diagnosis of its fault line. He holds more squarely responsible the contemporary perpetrators of Hindutva, but closes by tracing their nationalism to elements within the national movement more than a century earlier. I'd like to briefly give the related genealogies of these two nationalisms because that will bring out why it is not enough to see the 'nation' as their main topic. The topic is equally — and inseparably — the 'state'. Sometime in the mid-17th century in Europe, as a result of the rise of modern science, traditional justification of state power, as residing in the divine right of the monarch who personified the state, had lost its appeal. So, a new justification was sought, no longer in theology but in political psychology. At the same time, two developments occurred that shaped this revised justification. Since the Westphalian peace, a new entity had emerged (the nation) and power, whose locations had hitherto been relatively scattered, became increasingly centralised. In the centuries that followed, these twin developments conjoined and culminated in the fusion of the nation and the state, a fusion expressed by a hyphen: The nation-state. So, the political psychology that provided the new justification of state power took the form of generating a feeling for what was named by the left-hand side of the hyphenated conjunction (nation) and — because it was fused with what was named by the right-hand side of the hyphen — that feeling would legitimise the state. Much later this came to be called 'nationalism'. And the question was: How was this feeling to be generated? Everywhere in Europe it was generated by a standard ploy: Find an external enemy within the nation (the Jews, the Irish, the Protestants in Catholic countries, the Catholics in Protestant countries…), despise it and subjugate it, and declare the nation to be 'ours', not 'theirs'. When numerical and statistical methods came to be applied to the study of society, notions of majority and minority emerged and the ploy came to be called 'majoritarianism' — and since these categories were often defined by religion, it was, in those cases, called 'religious majoritarianism'. It is worth remarking that in tandem with this genealogy in Europe of one of these nationalisms is the genealogy of the doctrine of secularism. Nation-building exercises on the basis of such religious majoritarianism inevitably led to religious minoritarian backlash, and it was the civil strife created by this that gave rise to the doctrine of secularism, which blamed the influence of religion on the polity for such strife, and sought to repair the damage by articulating an outlook in which all religion (whether of the majority or the minorities) was ushered out from having any direct influence in the polity and the institutions of state. I mention this point about secularism because the genealogy of the other nationalism can be presented by explaining why Gandhi showed no interest in secularist doctrine. His argument was quite straightforward. The doctrine is there to prevent a certain damage created by European nationalism and since that damage had not occurred in India, it would be slavish mimicry to adopt it. Indian society has, for centuries, been characterised by an unselfconscious pluralism of religions and cultures living side-by-side and so Indian nationalism will re-play this pluralism in inclusive mass mobilisations against imperialism — and both he and Nehru conspicuously sought to do so, especially with Muslims, both in the Khilafat period and later with the Muslim Mass Contact campaign. Secularism is only relevant when this unselfconscious pluralism has been undermined and replaced by the civil strife that warranted it in Europe. Moreover, since the strife came via a nationalism that was at the heart of a legitimation of a certain form of centralised state power, that very idea of a state should be shunned in India — Gandhi's innovations in thinking of governance in highly decentralised terms were as much part of his alternative nationalism as its pluralism that Yadav asks us to cherish. It was those ideas of governance more than the pluralism that were dismissively repudiated by his own party in the years immediately after independence. A word, in conclusion, about Palshikar's tracing of Hindutva nationalism to much earlier elements in Indian nationalism. We need in these matters a distinction between the notion of 'roots' and 'antecedents'. There were indeed antecedents to contemporary Indian nationalism in Mahasabhite (and Savarkarite) ideas of an earlier time, but to call them the roots of the present would require tracing an organic causal path that connects the two. No one has done that. The roots of contemporary Hindutva nationalism lie no further back than a few decades, starting with the respectability that the Hindu right gained in opposing the Emergency (which the centre-left abjectly failed to do), and also in the ferociously concerted and highly effective effort that it then made to combat the effects of Mandal in exposing how divided Hinduism was by caste. Finding an external enemy (the Muslim) within the nation that all Hindus must oppose was that unifying move. No doubt there were antecedents to such attitudes during the freedom struggle but they were marginalised by the dominance of Gandhi and Nehru and though this certainly left unresolved questions, these do not amount to the roots of current Hindutva nationalism. The writer is Sidney Morgenbesser professor of Philosophy, Columbia University
