Era Sezhiyan’s vital salvage

Chennai: On the 40th anniversary of the declaration of the Emergency on Wednesday, as social scientists and scholars of contemporary history recall its ‘heroes’, one person who seems to have been unwittingly left out is the former veteran MP from Tamil Nadu, Era Sezhiyan. Mr Sezhiyan   the former DMK MP who later joined the Janata Dal -  is one of those who not only fought the Emergency in his own quiet way, but also helped to “resurrect” the virtually lost Shah Commission report on the ‘Emergency excesses’.

“The sheer detail and the ethnographic intensity of the Shah Commission report,” as eminent social scientist Shiv Visvanathan recalled in his column in DC on Wednesday (Oped page), has a profound ring of truth to it for as he himself adds, “a copy (of the report) today is a collector’s item”. This valuable document that narrated the saga of the abuse of power and all that went with it, would have in reality become just that if not for Mr Sezhiyan.

In 2010, Sezhiyan, notwithstanding his advanced age, as an ardent student of constitutional history himself, undertook the arduous task of compiling and editing the Shah Commission’s three-volume report on the Emergency, which had been submitted to the then Janata government sometime in 1978. In fact, on Dec. 19, 2010, at a function in Chennai presided by the senior BJP leader L. K. Advani, when the “resurrected” volumes of the Shah Commission report were released, Mr Sezhiyan recalled how it was a combination of chance and necessity that enabled the volumes to see the light of day again.

Recalling the circumstances at that function, Sezhiyan said that retired IAS officer, M. G. Devasahayam, who had taken care of Shri Jayaprakash Narayan when the officer was deputy commissioner in Chandigarh during the Emergency days, was running from pillar to post, trying “to get some documents related to proclamation of Emergency” for a detailed work, through RTI queries. But his efforts were in vain.

The Congress government at the Centre in the early 1980s had reportedly withdrawn all copies of the Shah Commission report and only two copies were said to be available in the public domain in the subsequent years – one each in a library in London and Australia. But when Sezhiyan found that his personal library had retained a copy of the Shah Commission report, his joy knew no bounds.

The former MP recalled on that occasion that it was the best time to re-publish it for a “whole new generation” to drive home the value of democracy. And Sezhiyan took time off to accomplish this task with his introduction as a constitutional expert. The Shah Commission report had incorporated the key documents, which Mr Devasahayam had also been looking for at different places including the National Archives. For researchers in contemporary history, here is a mine of information on those dramatic days of the Emergency, thanks to Era Sezhiyan.