More revealing are the excerpts he includes from Jayaprakash Narayan’s letters and other books on the Emergency. While there was much curiosity when this book was published as to what Mukherjee-who was a junior minister in the Union cabinet in 1975-would reveal, this is as dry and safe an account as could be, where he for the large part provides a defence for Indira Gandhi in the only place he can-the question of the legality of the opposition’s call for her to step down after the Allahabad high court’s judgement. The first of the Indian president’s three-part memoir that came out late last year, this one covers the period between 19. This unauthorized biography, republished by HarperCollins in 2012, is a candid, easy-to read account that portrays Sanjay Gandhi as awkward, cold, unemotional, power-crazed, and at rallies and in life, “a pedestrian uninspired speaker gifted with no turn of phrase or sense of humour'. The book includes a foreword by Arun Jaitley, a second-year law student at that time who too got the midnight knock.įirst published by Jaico in 1978 when he was still the editor of Debonair, Mehta is, as he put it, the “only biographer' of Indira Gandhi’s enfant terrible. In these chapters, if one admires media baron Ramnath Goenka’s gumption, the extra-constitutional role that Sanjay Gandhi and his coterie played still has the ability to shock. She approaches the subject through the profiles and the actions of some of the people who played different, vital roles in these times, including George Fernandes, Subramanian Swamy and, of course, Indira Gandhi herself. The latest book to be published on the subject (launched in bookstores last week), journalist Coomi Kapoor tells an engrossing tale in the way she does best-as though this were a dinner table gossip session. A detailed account of these two years, it benefits from having been written when the memory of the Emergency was still very fresh. Her senior-most private secretary recalls the failed attempts to bribe, induce and threaten “the strange' justice Jagmohan Lal Sinha of the Allahabad high court, who “could not be tempted and (who) would not submit to pressure', to delay the judgement. It begins with an air heavily laden with suspense at the prime minister’s residence on the morning of 12 June 1975, the day the Allahabad high court was to pass judgement on the Raj Narain petition accusing Indira Gandhi of corrupt electoral practices. But he continued to do so, knowing full well that here was a book waiting to be written. “For a newsman nothing can be more frustrating than to gather news that he knows cannot be printed,' he writes in the preface to the book.

A journalist with The Indian Express when the Emergency was declared, Nayar himself was incarcerated for about seven weeks. One of the quickies that Vinod Mehta referred to, this was first published in 1977 as The Judgement, and then in 2013 under this current title.

Emergency retold by kuldip nayar