JUNE 25 marked the anniversary of Indira Gandhi's 21-month 1975-77 emergency. The 50-year-old event came up for censure in the Lok Sabha Speaker’s and president Draupadi Murmu's address to the joint sitting of the two Houses of Parliament last week. The fuss over the emergency looks clearly designed to frame the resurgent Congress and mask the BJP's role in far worse and truly horrific events like the ethnic cleansing in Manipur, Gujarat pogroms and the destruction of Kashmiri lives under the Modi government. Be that as it may, Khushwant Singh, J.R.D. Tata, Bal Thackeray and the Communist Party of India (CPI) supported Mrs Gandhi’s suspension of civil liberties. The usually phlegmatic Tata said that "things had gone too far. You can't imagine what we’ve been through here — strikes, boycotts, demonstrations. Why, there were days I couldn’t walk out of my office into the street". The emergency, of course, was fought when it needed to be fought. At JNU, at the dead of night, K.N. Ganesh would be on the prowl with cyclostyled sheets excoriating the dictatorship. The targets included alleged "collaborators' from faculty and management. Ganesh would slip in his subversive papers under the doors of hostel inmates. A few could tell from the dragging sound of his worn-out slippers with which he attended Romila Thapar’s ancient history classes that the zealous CPI-M supporter was on the move. The Gestetner machine, its ink, A4