Bengaluru, 22 June

“I boarded an aeroplane for the first time in November 1975,” BJP MLA S Suresh Kumar said with biting sarcasm, recalling the trauma of the Emergency imposed by then prime minister Indira Gandhi on 25 June, 1975.

Kumar, then a young political activist, was arrested and subjected to brutal treatment at Bengaluru’s High Grounds police station before being shifted to Bengaluru Central Jail, where he spent 15 months.

The “aeroplane” punishment, he explained, involved having one's hands tied behind the back and being hoisted upward—an ordeal causing unbearable pain.

The 21-month Emergency cast a long, dark shadow over democratic institutions nationwide, and the State was no exception. Press censorship, mass arrests under the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA), and a climate of fear reshaped political and social landscape.

Among the notable detenus was senior BJP leader and former deputy prime minister LK Advani, who was imprisoned in City during this period. His incarceration, along with that of other national leaders, became a defining chapter in the resistance against authoritarianism.

He recalled participating in a protest at Mysore Bank Circle on 26 June, 1975—perhaps the first significant anti-Emergency demonstration in State. Surprisingly, no arrests were made that day.

Soon after, on 4 July, the RSS, Jamaat-e-Islami, and 11 other political organisations were banned.

Kumar said the State’s Congress government, led by chief minister D Devaraj Urs, implemented directives with near-total obedience to Delhi. Urs, remembered for land reforms and championing backward classes, oversaw a regime that clamped down harshly on dissent.

RSS leader Suresh Naik Ankola, who was jailed alongside Kumar, said LK Advani’s imprisonment was one of the most symbolic. Then a rising Bharatiya Jana Sangh figure, Advani was arrested shortly after the Emergency began. Initially detained in Delhi, he was transferred to Bengaluru Central Jail, where he spent much of his jail term.

Advani later said his belief in constitutional democracy strengthened during the Emergency when he was jailed.

“The Bengaluru jail became an unlikely incubator of political thought, resilience, and inter-party bonding,” Kumar observed.

Despite heavy suppression, silent forms of protest thrived. Underground pamphlets, clandestine poetry, and hushed intellectual resistance echoed through cities like Bengaluru, Dharwad, Mysuru, and Mangaluru.

Kumar said he was arrested while trying to hand a pamphlet to a visiting foreign delegation to alert them about the state of affairs in India.

According to him, a miscalculation by Indira Gandhi’s loyalists led her to call for elections in 1977—a decision that proved fatal for the Congress in the north.

“While the Congress was routed elsewhere, it still found solid support in South India, including Karnataka,” Kumar noted.

He concluded by invoking Advani’s famous remark about institutional complicity during the Emergency: “When they were asked to bend, they began to crawl.”