When the Organiser-Motherland ‘predicted’ the proclamation of Emergency and the intelligent agencies grilled the editor and demanded that he should reveal source! Arun Jaitley writes

 

Journalist Coomi Kapoor’s book on Emergency published in 2015 contains handwritten document in the writing of Siddhartha Shankar Ray where he requests Mrs. Gandhi to have lists of persons proposed to be arrested and outlines various other steps which were required to be taken. The document is dated as 8th January, 1975.

 

Curiously, around the same time in January, 1975 “Motherland”, a daily newspaper edited by K.R. Malkani (the editor, Organiser), had published a front-page article based on the astrological prediction by Dr. Vasanth Kumar Pandit, a Jan Sangh MP and astrologer, predicting proclamation of Emergency, arrest of the entire opposition members, censorship on media and India becoming an autocratic State. When published, I found it difficult to believe this astrological prediction. During the Emergency, one of my co-detenues in prison was K.R. Malkani himself. Malkani told me that when arrested on the midnight of 26th June, while others were straightway taken to Rohtak Jail, he was, for three days, kept in a guest house in Haryana and taken to the jail after three days. During those three days, he was grilled by the intelligence agencies as to his source of information on the basis of which that article predicting the Emergency had been enforced. The agencies thought this was a major leak in the Government and were investigating the matter.

 

Malkani, however, consistently maintained that this was only an astrological prediction. Cumulatively, it was these facts that persuaded me to believe that the script for the Emergency was prepared sometime in January, 1975. The immediate trigger would have been the Allahabad High Court judgement and the insecurity caused by it to Mrs. Gandhi’s positon.

 

(Source: https://www.organiser.org/Encyc/2018/6/25/The-Emergency-Revisited-Part-II.html)