"When The Trains Ran On Time" : 5 Young Girls' Attempt To Highlight The Emergency Of 1975

Remember, remember not the Fifth of November but our own gunpowder, treason and plot. We see of no reason why this censored out season should ever be forgot.

[25th June marks the 40th Anniversary of Indira Gandhi's declaration of an Internal Emergency.What happened at Turkman Gate? How many countless lives were lost and destroyed by forced sterilisation? Who ultimately was the figurehead running India then? The deeply censored and scarcely talked about event has been clouded under a veil. Until now.]

" I spoke to my father, who was a freedom fighter and had been imprisoned, after the Emergency was declared. His plaintive cry was "Is this the freedom we have got?"

- Avijit Dutt, When The Trains Ran On Time.

A stipulated requirement to finish one's post-graduation project rarely provides any credible or ground-breaking work. Efforts are largely bestowed to secure the maximum marks and to impress the teachers, often toeing the line of an established status quo formula. But when Vandana, Guneet Kaur, Filza Hussain, Saba Naaz and Sugandha Nagar were stipulated to submit their final year project for M.A. in Mass Communications, they attempted to crack one of the most complex and least talked about events of Indian Democracy.

"When The Trains Ran On Time" is a 34-minute-long documentary made by these five young women from AJK MCRC under Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi, which provides different narratives about the Emergency from those who experienced it first hand. The accounts of actor Avijit Dutt, historian Uma Chakravorty, journalist John Dayal and CPI(ML) member Prabhat Kumar Chowdhary are in juxtaposition with the significant events of the Emergency. The documentary shuns any academic or factual narratives common to most post-Emergency narratives, something the film-makers told Homegrown was a conscious decision.

The group's initial quest had been to understand the post modern culture of the '60s and '70s. "We started rummaging through the phenomena that shaped various socio-cultural aspects of life in the '60s and the '70s, the Hippies, the Flower Children in the West and the kind of influence these had on music and art and fashion et al," says Sugandha Nagar.

While looking at the West, they also started researching on the events in India during the same time and decided on Hippie Culture in India being their topic. But extended discussions and research made them realise that they were missing out on something significant, which they could no longer ignore.

"We didn’t just want to focus on the documentary and project, we wanted to focus on such a topic that would grab the attention of our viewers. We felt that this would be the best topic as many people would be interested in it and would want to know more about this period" Saba Naaz explained.

[Watch the documentary below]

Of course, the choice of topic wasn't just about attracting eyeballs but rather, a personal quest to learn more. "As 20-something girls, we understood the Independence, or the ’93, and 2002 riots much more than the Emergency. And when we asked around, we found to our horror that much of our generation didn’t even know that such an event occurred," stressed Guneet Kaur. "The reason, we figured, was that the Emergency was hardly ever taught by our history text books in schools," added Guneet, laying bare the previous argument, which we had made in the absent conversation surrounding the Indian Emergency.

The film-makers shared their beliefs as Vandana rued how the Emergency was perhaps "conveniently sidelined" in our curriculum.

When we asked them for the reasons of such an amnesia, the film-makers speculated with various possible theories. "It wasn’t till 1999 that we had a proper, non-Congress government at the centre. And education has always been an important apparatus of ideological submission at the hands of the ruler. We were taught of the lores of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty’s greatness, but not the crimes committed during the Emergency," rued Guneet while Filza speculated a conscious/sub-conscious decision by the people of the period to forget the events.

"After emerging from the British rule which lasted for so long, I think the people could have hardly imagined that their freedom could be lost again, that too at the hands of their own govt. I think somewhere, it was realised that the period wasn’t something to be really proud of, no matter what the intention was, and hence was buried, omitting it from the schoolbooks, with only a filtered version available," said Filza while Vandana felt that the difference in experience for the people of the time lead to its dilution, "They didn’t understand what the meaning of the Emergency as that was first time Emergency was imposed. For a common layman, it wasn't possible to understand complexity of this unless they came one on one face to face. "

So then how did they go about collecting information? The paucity of information from school was compensated with the post-Emergency literature such as "In The Name Of Democracy" and "India After Gandhi" ,as well as Anand Patwardhan's "Prisoners Of Conscience" and movies like "Aandhi" and "Kissa Kursi Ka".

The filmmakers then took a conscious decision to interview and meet people who had experienced the Emergency first hand. "We decided to approach people from that period who might be able to give us more good information which we couldn’t read anywhere; their experience of the period would be something we would not get anywhere written," said Saba as she recounted how they met her uncle who was the Labour commissioner at time and vehemently supported the Emergency.

The 30-minute limit of the documentary saw them keeping many opinions and narratives out of the final cut after keeping aside the conundrum of what role the Emergency played in the history of the country. The varied reactions to the period--from boasts about the discipline to the laments about the curtailing of freedom left the film-makers perplexed.

"We were actually confused and we had no idea about why she did that. There were so many times when we were actually jumping here and there. We heard that it was a good thing and stuck to the good thing set of mind and then we heard that it was a bad thing and then we stuck to the bad thing set of mind," confessed Saba, as Vandana reflects that even till this day, many members of her family often argue that Emergency was a very good thing and did good to them.

But the facts which surfaced during their research made it hard for any positive associations to be made with the period. From the Turkman Gate incident to the account of a student who tore up his mark sheet in front of the Prime Minister, each of them had a personal resonance with the struggles of the time.

But the group's personal bafflement was perfectly captured in Saba's statement on listening to John Dayal describe how the papers weren't allowed to come out the day after the Emergency was declared.

"The meaning of press is that it can go anywhere. We opted for journalism and mass communications ourselves because we thought we would get a lot of freedom. But we never thought that someone would exercise control on our writing and on our expressions. That some dictator would come in and use her whim on our passion and our work and not let an entire paper come out. We had never thought about it and we were shocked when we heard this," narrated Saba, who presently works with India Today.

When The Trains Ran On Time went on to be screened twice at the International Film Festival In Goa in November 2012 under the Students Panorama Section and remains one of the most readily available source for Emergency narratives.

"At the end of the day there never was a question whether Indian civilisation or the State that we knew, would not survive the Emergency. We knew it would. But there were open doubts in 1977 as to what sort of an India would survive," concludes John Dayal in the documentary when asked about the legacy of the Emergency. When we posed the same question to the film-makers, they seemed to be on the same page.

"The Emergency changed the relationship between the Indian state’s policing machinery and its people forever. It normalised the use of force in the name of security to the extent that today, we willingly forfeit our independence to safeguard security. It is time that we identified that the Emergency didn’t end in 1977. In everyday censorship, surveillance, communalisation, covertly, it continues even today," concludes Gurneet, a realisation one finds sadly lacking in other Indian Millennials.

Want to read more riveting stories from the period? Click on any of the images below to be directed to more from our Emergency Series.