Snehalatha Reddy (1932 – 20 January 1977) was an Indian actress, producer, and social activist renowned for her contributions to Kannada cinema, Kannada theatre, Telugu cinema, and Telugu theatre. She was notably arrested for her involvement in the Baroda dynamite case and endured over 8 months of imprisonment during the Emergency in India. She co-founded the Madras Players in the 1960s, an amateur group known for staging significant productions such as Ibsen's Peer Gynt, directed by Douglas Alger, in addition to Twelfth Night and Tennessee William's Night of the Iguana, directed by Peter Coe. Her portfolio also includes acting in, directing, or producing plays like A View from the Bridge and The House of Bernarda Alba. In 2003, her husband Pattabhirama Reddy presented In the Hour of God, a play inspired by Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri, which he dedicated to her.

Born in 1932 to second-generation Christian converts in Andhra Pradesh, Snehalatha had a fervent aversion to Colonial Rule. Her early life was deeply embedded in the freedom struggle, and she displayed her disdain for the British by reverting to her Indian name and adopting exclusively Indian attire. Married to the poet and film director Pattabhi Rama Reddy, the couple shared a deep commitment to the principles of the celebrated freedom fighter and activist Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia.

Snehalatha gained national recognition through her role in the Kannada film Samskara, based on a work by UR Ananthamurthy and directed by her husband, which clinched the National Award in 1970. Her final film, Sone Kansari, was released posthumously in 1977. Her legacy extends through her children; her daughter Nandana Reddy is a human rights, social, and political activist and the founder of CWC (Concerned for Working Children), a Bangalore-based NGO that was nominated for the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize. Nandana has penned various memoirs detailing her mother's harsh experiences during her imprisonment in the Emergency. Her son Konarak Reddy is a celebrated musical artist.

Snehalatha Reddy and her husband were vocal opponents of the Indira Gandhi regime, specifically during the tumultuous period of the Emergency. Their resistance was in line with Lohia's principles, which they firmly supported. Snehalatha developed a close friendship with George Fernandes, a well-known trade unionist and politician. On 2 May 1976, she was arrested as part of the Baroda dynamite case. Although Fernandes and 24 others were formally accused, Snehalatha's name was not included in the final charge-sheet, implicating her by association alone. During her incarceration at Bangalore Central Jail, she endured relentless torture and was subjected to inhumane conditions despite suffering from chronic asthma, which led to two asthmatic comas. Her already frail health was further compromised by solitary confinement. On 15 January 1977, due to her deteriorating health, Snehalatha was released on parole, but tragically, she passed away from chronic asthma and a severe lung infection just five days later, on 20 January 1977. She is commemorated as one of the first martyrs of the Emergency.

While imprisoned, Snehalatha maintained a diary that was posthumously published in 1977 by the Karnataka Human Rights Committee in a compilation titled A Prison Diary. In 2019, her harrowing experiences and steadfast spirit were also captured in a documentary based on her diary.

The Emergency — A Personal History

The Emergency — A Personal History is a stark recollection of the draconian era imposed by Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay Gandhi. Described by the author Coomi Kapoor as a "chilling account," the book delves deep into the dark period when India was gripped by a palpable fear, with the fate of millions at the mercy of just two individuals. Kapoor, herself a victim, details the brutal reality of being susceptible to arrest and potential death merely for being in the wrong place at the wrong time during those years.

Arun Jaitley penned the introduction to The Emergency — A Personal History, where he describes his efforts to evade arrest as long as possible until his eventual capture, betrayed by those he once considered close friends, who are now well-known journalists and public figures. Coomi Kapoor opens the book with a reader-friendly timeline, offering a comprehensive overview of the events leading up to the Emergency. This timeline helps readers grasp the context of the turmoil that engulfed the country, despite Indira Gandhi's landslide victory in 1971.

The book details how institutions were dismantled and how political corruption and immorality were becoming institutionalized. The opposition’s current claims echo the realities of that era manyfold. Amidst this chaos, influential leaders like Jayaprakash Narayan and George Fernandes spearheaded nationwide protests against Indira Gandhi’s autocratic governance, yet they lacked a clear strategy or blueprint for political stability or governance.

During this period, Indira Gandhi frequently imposed President's rule across the country. One of the notable events was the assassination of Lalit Narayan Mishra, one of her top ministers, during a rally in Bihar. Suspicions arose that Indira Gandhi herself had orchestrated the assassination due to Mishra's growing political liability.

Siddharth Shankar Ray, the Chief Minister of Bengal at the time and a childhood friend of Indira Gandhi, had long advocated for the imposition of a state of emergency. He even prepared a blueprint and sent it to her, but she hesitated to take such a drastic measure. Ray was regarded as one of the most prominent "progressive liberals" of his time. The agitations and protests, as mentioned, had somewhat diminished by June 1975, or had been grudgingly accepted by Indira Gandhi as the reality of those times. Thus, the author suggests that these may not have been the direct causes of the Emergency. What likely pushed her to the edge was the judgment by Justice Jagmohanlal Sinha, which disqualified her due to election malpractices.

Indira Gandhi's overarching fear was the potential loss of power, considering the numerous scandals surrounding her family. Her younger son, Sanjay Gandhi, was particularly notorious, running multiple extortion operations under the guise of various schemes through both the bureaucracy and the police force. Despite receiving a partial stay from the Supreme Court, it was only a matter of time before she would be compelled to relinquish her position. Consequently, the Emergency was declared on 25 June 1975.

The book, The Emergency — A Personal History, primarily recounts the personal ordeals of the author, who is also Subramanian Swamy’s sister-in-law. This personal connection makes the narrative especially compelling, painting a vivid picture of the national chaos during the 21 months of the Emergency. It describes the widespread suffering of ordinary people, caught in the tumult of political and social upheaval.

The author's husband faced arrest, throwing their small family into turmoil over a mere argument with Ambika Soni, a prominent figure in the Indian Youth Congress known for her aggressive demeanor.

[Excerpt begins]

Ambika Soni, a rising star in the Indian Youth Congress with a reputation for being free with her hands. (Just before the Emergency, Soni had manhandled a group of Socialist youth who had marched to the Gol Methi Chowk outside the PM’s residence at 1 Safardarjung Road, demanding Mrs Gandhi’s resignation in the light of the judgment. The police had looked on passively.)

On that evening at the Red Fort function, Soni and a couple of her Youth Congress activists got hold of a boy who was barely out of his teens. She ordered the others present, including the police, to thrash the boy. Virendra being Virendra felt it necessary to intervene and chide Soni: ‘Why are you beating this boy? What has he done? If he has broken any law, the police will look after it. You are not the police.’ Soni stopped for a second, assuming he was a plain-clothes policeman. But when she saw him walking away from the scene, she was taken aback by his effrontery and asked who he was. He nonchalantly replied, ‘I am an ordinary citizen like you.’ ‘But don’t you think that instead of helping me arrest these boys, you were preventing me from getting hold of them?’ she shot back. Bajwa came running up to her and the two went into a huddle.

Within a split second Bajwa ordered the police to arrest Virendra as well.

[Excerpt ends]

Further…

[Excerpt begins]

Soni came up to Virendra and again asked, ‘Don’t you think instead of preventing me from nabbing those boys, you should have been helping me in doing that?’ A hot-headed Punjabi, Virendra, instead of showing any remorse, repeated defiantly: ‘I still maintain it was none of your business to catch those boys. If they were breaking any law, the police were there to handle it.’ A rattled Soni angrily said, ‘OK, then you go in.’

[Excerpt ends]

The author’s husband was incarcerated for almost 9 months without any clear reasons and was also kept in solitary confinement for more than a week, a practice not usually extended beyond five days even for the most dreaded criminals due to the devastating effects it can have on a person’s health.

What makes it scarier is that he was not specifically targeted; his arrest was the result of a random displeasure by someone close to the diabolical Sanjay Gandhi within the Congress party. This event was followed by a series of arbitrary detentions with no legal recourse, underscoring a period where the rights of the common man were effectively non-existent.

The author also discusses the pervasive ideological biases that have long been suspected by readers of alternative literature, as opposed to mainstream works endorsed by leftist intellectuals, authors, and historians. She highlights the discrimination against those who sympathized with the RSS—regardless of their qualifications and talents, such affiliations could lead to blacklisting in academic jobs even outside the period of the Emergency.

She writes about her sister, a PhD in mathematics, who was unable to secure a professorship in any college simply because of her perceived closeness to the RSS. Forced to abandon her academic aspirations, she had to choose an alternative career path that did not rely on the prevailing control of the university system by a certain influential group.

As soon as the emergency was declared, a wave of terror was unleashed upon the entire country. Politicians, bureaucrats, and police officers loyal to the Nehru family were given carte blanche. Opposition leaders were systematically arrested and imprisoned. These arrests were not ordinary political detentions; they were intended to break the spirit of the detainees, or worse, end their lives. Overnight, jails were transformed into veritable concentration camps.

The conditions in these prisons were appalling. There were no toilets, forcing detainees to defecate in the rooms where they were confined. There was no water available for washing hands. Flies and cockroaches contaminated the food. The harshness of treatment was indiscriminate, affecting everyone from political figures to members of the royal family who were out of favor with the Nehru family, and ordinary citizens like the author’s husband.

This is how they dealt with people close to George Fernandes:

[Excerpt begins]

In their frantic hunt for Fernandes and his accomplices, the police acted with incredible ruthlessness and cruelty. Two of the victims in this brutal operation were Snehlata Reddy and Fernandes’s brother Lawrence.

Snehlata was on a trip to Madras when the police picked up her teenaged son Konarak. They also raided her house in Bangalore in the middle of the night and interrogated her eighty-four-year-old father. A panicky Snehlata and Pattabhi rushed back to Bangalore. Worried sick by the disappearance of her son, Snehlata broke down under interrogation and promised she would disclose everything if the police would leave her family alone. Snehlata was taken into police custody on 2 May 1976. Despite police pressure she refused to betray the names of the people she had interacted with. Snehlata was then detained under MISA on 22 May and kept in the Bangalore jail.

A chronic asthmatic, Snehlata’s distress and despair is reflected in her diary, where she wrote about the ill treatment she was subjected to by the jail authorities and the lack of proper medical care. Since no doctor attended to her she even had to administer the injections she needed herself.

On 26 July she wrote in her diary, ‘Can’t I be released or paroled on health grounds? I almost died because of the conditions here. My asthma has never been so continuous and severe. . . . I am going to have a nervous breakdown soon. I am on my way to it.’ She pleaded with the jail authorities to permit her family to see her, but a sadistic jail superintendent had cancelled all interviews with relatives.

Four doctors who eventually examined her said she should be immediately hospitalized because the claustrophobic atmosphere and conditions in the jail aggravated her allergies. But the prison authorities paid no heed. Snehlata’s health steadily deteriorated. Her asthmatic attacks intensified and she was treated with heavy doses of cortisone. She was finally released on parole on 13 December 1976, and died shortly afterwards on 20 January 1977 of a massive heart attack.

The treatment meted out to Fernandes’s younger brother Lawrence was equally cruel. Lawrence was taken from his house in Bangalore at 8.45 p.m. on 1 May 1976, but his arrest was not entered in the police records. He was placed in the custody of the Karnataka Police’s Corps of Detectives in Bangalore, and they interrogated him relentlessly to find out the whereabouts of his brother.

When he gave no answers he was brutally assaulted with lathis by eight to ten policemen. The beating continued till 3 a.m. and during this period he was not given anything to eat or drink. When he begged for water an officer asked a constable to urinate in his mouth. The constable mercifully desisted.

His father, J.J. Fernandes, lodged a report with the police control room that his son had been picked up, but the police refused to disclose that they had him in their custody. He was listed as a missing person.

By 3 May, after two days of ceaseless torture, Lawrence’s condition rapidly deteriorated. Apprehensive that Lawrence might die on their hands, the police summoned a doctor named Rajgopal to examine him. The doctor was ordered not to ask the patient any questions. Dr Rajgopal could make out the injuries were due to external violence. His body was swollen all over and his left foot seemed fractured. He urged that the patient be transferred to a hospital immediately.

It was only on 7 May, when Lawrence complained of trouble in breathing at 2 a.m., that he was taken in a taxi from Malleswaram police station to the K.C. General Hospital. The doctor on duty recalls that the patient, who was wearing only a vest, was speaking in a faint voice and complaining about pain around his chest. The doctor instructed the nurse to give the patient some painkillers and went out of the room for a few seconds to wash his hands. When he returned, the police and the patient had vanished.

On 9 May Lawrence was taken to Davangere Extension police station and lodged in an ill-ventilated lock-up full of cockroaches and mosquitoes. The next day he was brought before a magistrate in the presence of the DSP. The magistrate asked him whether he had anything to say. After a brief silence and with tears in his eyes Lawrence just muttered, ‘What can I say?’

[Excerpt ends]

What strikes you in the book is the sheer unpredictability and precariousness that defined the lives of ordinary citizens in a country where the political and legal systems were yet to mature. It was akin to being in a small, unstable African or South American nation ruled by dictatorial figures like Idi Amin or Pol Pot. At the helm was a family seen as criminal, leaving little room for justice or fair play. Anyone could be jailed, tortured, and even killed without cause.

[Excerpt begins]

In another act of retribution, Sanjay Gandhi ordered the arrest under MISA of twelve textile customs officers who dared to take samples from packages belonging to M/s Indira International. They suspected a false declaration of the fabric used—whether the garments were made from mill-made or power-loom cloth. M/s Indira International was partly owned by Sanjay’s mother-in-law, Amteshwar Anand. The CBI was used to concoct false and fabricated charges against these officers. [Excerpt ends]

About Sanjay Gandhi’s extortion cartels…

[Excerpt begins] The saga of Maruti is filled with instances of extortion, manipulating regulations, and blackmail. Once the Emergency was declared, the blackmail became more overt, accompanied by explicit threats of arrest under the Conservation of Foreign Exchange and Prevention of Smuggling Activities Act (COFEPOSA) or MISA.

The NDMC (New Delhi Municipal Council) and the government of Haryana exerted pressure to force individuals to purchase Maruti shares. Jawaharlal Mehra, president of the Janpath Traders’ Association, revealed that the NDMC threatened shopkeepers on Janpath with demolition unless they each invested Rs 11,000 in Maruti shares.

Mohan Lakhani, managing director of Urban Improvement, needed approval for a new colony in Gurgaon district from the Haryana government. He was informed that his company must first acquire Maruti Ltd shares worth Rs. 1 lakh.

Onkar Nath Gotewala, a coal dealer, was directly summoned by Sanjay Gandhi and coerced into buying Maruti shares for Rs. 1 lakh under the threat of arrest under MISA.

The JK Group, owned by the Singhania family, was targeted as a potential major investor. This business conglomerate ended up investing about Rs. 30 lakh in Maruti shares. In January 1976, yarn dealers and paper merchants connected to the JK Group began to buy shares in Maruti and apply for dealerships. This sudden flurry of investment activity seemed directly linked to the arrest under MISA of Rameshwar Aggarwal, the export manager of J.K. Udyog Ltd, on 21 November 1975, whose detention was later extended under COFEPOSA.

A detention order under MISA was also issued against Bharat Hari Singhania, a relative of the firm’s owners. The JK Group lodged complaints with Minister of State for Finance Pranab Mukherjee and Mrs. Gandhi’s additional private secretary R.K. Dhawan about the arrest warrants. Notably, Aggarwal of J.K. Udyog was released from COFEPOSA detention the very day J.K. Synthetics began purchasing Maruti shares, and Bharat Hari Singhania was similarly absolved.

[Excerpt ends]

Imagine this scenario: you're just returning home with groceries for tonight's dinner, and suddenly, you find yourself being seized by the police and thrown into jail, without any justification needed. Your residence could be razed merely because you declined to bribe Sanjay Gandhi or one of his associates. A slight hesitation in agreeing to a directive from Indira or Sanjay Gandhi could end your career in politics or bureaucracy. Your business might face closure for not investing in Sanjay Gandhi's automobile venture.

Additionally, indiscriminate vasectomy operations were performed on individuals regardless of age, with some left with untreated wounds out of sheer negligence. The prisons were filled not only with political dissenters but also with individuals who had minor disputes with influential figures close to the political elite, akin to the author’s husband. Mistaken identity was another cause of wrongful imprisonment, with many never seeing release as their plight went disregarded.

The severity of these actions wasn’t just a reflection of political maneuvering but stemmed from a personal ruthlessness by Indira and Sanjay Gandhi, who were intolerant of dissent. Their approach was unforgiving: if you disagreed with them, you didn’t deserve to exist.

Fortunately, the international backlash from Western allies, who distanced themselves due to the authoritarian governance, prompted Indira Gandhi to reconsider the Emergency. Surrounded by yes-men, she was out of touch with the actual sentiments of her citizens. Convinced of her popularity and that a return to democratic processes would reaffirm her position, she lifted the Emergency and called for elections.

Contrary to her son Sanjay's belief that democracy was unnecessary, she was proven wrong. India responded at the ballot box, and she was democratically ousted from power.

But the haphazard coalition that took over was a complete disaster. Sadly, the group was predominantly composed of power-hungry individuals who, in principle, did not disagree with the methods Indira Gandhi used to push the country into a political and social abyss. Given the chance, they likely would have acted similarly.

This alignment with her tactics was precisely why the new government failed, allowing Indira Gandhi to return to power within just two years. In a twist of fate, the previous villain was welcomed back as a savior, or at least a familiar face of stability. If the nation was destined to be ruled by villains, the populace seemed to prefer the devil they knew.

Why was Indira Gandhi and her family able to reclaim power so quickly? I often think it's due to the vastness of our country and the sheer size of our population. Despite the large number of people affected by killings, torture, violations, and humiliation, there remains a significant portion of the population that is completely untouched. Thus, no matter the catastrophe, we seem impervious to being deeply shaken.

You may not appreciate this observation, but in our part of the world, there is a deep-seated respect for authority, embodied in the saying "jiski laathi uski bhains" (might makes right).

In the book Indian Summer — The Secret History of the End of an Empire, the author fondly recounts an incident where Jawahar Lal Nehru jumps out of his car, grabs a man by the throat, and slaps him for misbehaving. The man feels honored to have been struck and strangled by Nehru himself. This anecdote captures the essence of our societal attitudes.

The more intimidating, the better. Our people seem to accept being shouted at and bullied. Even physical assault is tolerated if the assailant is seen as powerful. This mentality not only empowers leaders like Mamata Banerjee and previously the communists in Bengal but also keeps the Congress party relevant despite its questionable actions.

This same mindset allows political figures like Laloo, Mulayam, and Mayawati to remain prominent. It even enabled Kejriwal to manipulate both the national scene and local sentiments in Delhi.

We have a deep-rooted fascination with power. In small ways, we all exhibit criminal behaviors, like when we drive on the wrong side of the road and glare at those who dare to question us. This pervasive attitude is what brought Indira Gandhi back into power.

References:

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Snehalata Reddy