PMO-1 Prelude to the Emergency by B.N. Tandon

Nair also told Justice Mathur to convey to Justice Sinha that he could be appointed as the chief justice of Himachal Pradesh and subsequently elevated to the Supreme Court.Ĭhief Justice Mathur’s image has been unfairly tarnished because rumours circulated that it was he who made the offer to Justice Sinha. On 7 June 1975, an additional secretary dealing with legal matters, PP Nair, telephoned the chief justice of the Allahabad high court, DS Mathur, and told him that the verdict should be delayed until after July. But PN Haksar and finance minister Chidambaram Subramaniam and industries minister TA Pai asserted that Shanti Bhushan had been appointed by these government organizations on merit. Pressure was put on these organizations to drop him.

Shanti Bhushan was also the standing counsel of the State Bank of India and several other public sector enterprises. Her advisor on legal and constitutional issues, Siddhartha Shankar Ray, then the chief minister of West Bengal, and law minister HR Gokhale proposed that Shanti Bhushan could be enticed away from the litigation by offering him the position of a supreme court judge.īut PN Haksar, principal secretary in the Prime Minister’s Secretariat, thundered that this would be most improper. She had frequently stated in the preceding weeks that the nation needed a shock treatment.Īccording to Bishan Narayan Tandon, who was joint secretary in the Prime Minister’s Secretariat, she had been rattled by the thorough cross examination conducted on her by Shanti Bhushan, who was the lawyer of Raj Narain, and also treasurer of the Congress (O) party. It is possible that Indira Gandhi would have imposed the Emergency even if the Allahabad high court had not disqualified her election in its judgement of 12 June 1975. However, as argued by this author in his article “ Was Emergency Inevitable?“, Open, 19 June 2020, both her principal secretary, Professor Prithvi Nath Dhar, and her information advisor HY Sharada Prasad believed that the Emergency resulted from a string of political miscalculations during three simultaneous confrontations against Indira Gandhi: first, the Nav Nirman Andolan led by Morarji Desai in Gujarat from December 1973 onwards second, the railway strike led by George Fernandes in May 1974 and third, the Sampoorna Kranti Aandolan led by Jaya Prakash Narayan and Nanaji Deshmukh from March 1974 onwards. Most people believe that Indira Gandhi imposed the Emergency on 25-26 June 1975 to save her prime ministership after Justice Jag Mohan Lal Sinha of the Allahabad High Court set aside her 1971 Lok Sabha election on the grounds that she had availed herself of the services of a government official.

PMO-1 Prelude to the Emergency by B.N. Tandon