PRABIR PURKAYASTHA’S RATHER dramatic abduction in 1975 and his subsequent year-long detention under the draconian Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA) was his first experience of incarceration. During a students’ protest on the politically charged campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi in 1975, three months after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi seized absolute power to begin the Emergency, Purkayastha was picked up by the police in a case of mistaken identity.
“I was on the lawns of the School of Languages that morning, with a few friends from the SFI [Students’ Federation of India], when a black Ambassador stopped near us and a burly man got out, Purkayastha writes in Keeping up the Good Fight, his recent memoir. “He came up to me and asked if I was D.P. Tripathi – then president of the students’ union. I replied that I was not, but my questioner was a cop, DIG-Range P.S. Bhinder, and he didn’t believe me. He and his men, all in plainclothes, swiftly proceeded to kidnap me in broad daylight.” The real D P Tripathi was arrested a month later, and, together with Purkayastha, became a sort of Communist Party of India (Marxist) voice in jail.
In a brief recap of the 21-month Emergency, spanning June 1975 and March 1977, Purkayastha succinctly describes what he terms “a grim period in India’s post-independence history”. But the arrests and “preventive detention” of the political opposition, students and activists, and the censorship of the media amid a suspension of fundamental rights, are not a thing of the past. Authoritarianism, centralised control over all arms of the state and a well-oiled propaganda machine are, once again, ominously prevalent in India today, this time under the government of Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Forty-six years later, in February 2021, Purkayastha was once more subjected to heavy-handed action by the state. This time, it was the Enforcement Directorate raiding the Delhi offices of NewsClick, the digital news platform where Purkayastha was the founding editor. The raid continued for almost five days, and spread to also cover NewsClick staff members’ residences in over thirty locations in Delhi.