Political writing is dangerous in proportion to the ignorance and fanaticism of hearers and readers, and it is more than likely that, if sedition continues to avowed [sic] with impunity by a few, it will become the leading idea of many.
It is very easy to attribute these words to any leading light of the present government. However, these words that betray so much anxiety with so much candour belong to a nineteenth century colonial official. Writing in 1875, M. Kempson, Director, Public Instruction was building a government consensus towards a greater clampdown on political literature in public circulation which was to eventually culminate in the Vernacular Press Act, 1878. In the case of draconian colonial laws, we often have the luxury of hindsight on our side. But contemporary governments and their pallbearers often speak in forked tongues and are seldom so candid about their intentions. It is then left to us to look for our sources elsewhere.
In the immediate aftermath of the lifting of the Internal Emergency in India (in 1977), the market was inundated with ‘quickies’. As the name suggests, quickies were hastily written and published memoirs of Emergency days (mostly by journalists), recounting the excesses committed in that extraordinary period of post-Independent India. These quickies played an important role in popularizing the quotidian experiences under the then Congress government as well as articulated a collective sense of the time. The clampdowns on civil liberties and a tight control on existing modes of communication/ transmission, provides a backdrop to why these books were able to create a certain consensus against the ruling dispensation. It is noteworthy that then, as now, a vague rhetoric of ‘acche din’ or order and peace was deployed to justify the growing restrictions on everyday freedoms in the country.