“Dark and depressing days”

I disagree with the conclusion of the reviewer of Coomi Kapoor’s book The Emergency: A Personal History ("Dark and depressing days,” Books, Parsiana, November 21, 2015) that "It is a tragedy that the period of the Emergency and all its excesses have been almost forgotten.” Certainly not!

The high-handedness of the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in her savage clampdown on all freedoms, helped by a committed judiciary and a large coterie of sycophants of the Congress Party which resulted in 18 months of incarceration of illustrious citizens in 1975 can never be forgotten. Innumerable families retain horrible memories of the vicious treatment meted out which perhaps a new generation of Indians are not aware of.
That the pen is mightier than the sword was proved by Ramnath Goenka, proprietor of The Indian Express (IE) along with leading criminal lawyer Ram Jethmalani who after Indira Gandhi’s assassination challenged her successor son "Mr Clean” Rajiv Gandhi regarding the Bofors scandal. Every day IE carried questions from Jethmalani to Rajiv, whose only reply was "I do not answer every dog that barks.” Unforgettable was Jethmalani’s riposte: "Why does a dog bark? Because there is a thief around!”
The Congress Party’s well deserved rout at the hands of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the last general election was the culmination of uncontrolled arrogance that permitted extensive scams with corruption being condoned to fleece and exploit the people.
Let the surviving embers of a dark period in history be rekindled into a flame as Kapoor has valiantly done on behalf of the millions of Indians who suffered Indira Gandhi’s tyrannical regime. Lest we forget!

RASHID G. KHOSRAVI