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A Prisoner’s Scrap-Book
A Prisoner’s Scrap-Book
is a fascinating account of the unfolding of events of the Emergency
(1975-77) as seen from a prison house. Written in a simple and
straightforward style embellished with anecdotes, this is not just one
more prison diary. Nor does it attempt to theorize. In words that speak
from the heart, the author—then the president of a major Indian
political party and how the country’s. Home Minister—has recorded his
thoughts and the events that took place on a day-to-day basis during his
nineteen-month sojourn in the country’s jails. In his foreword to the
book, former Prime Minister Shri Morarji Desai writes, “...The diary
reveals a person of singular honesty and dedication, culture and
equanimity. It depicts the burning faith with which he withstood the
consequences of governmental trickery and his passion, as an editor for
the freedom of the Press and the mass-media....”
The
book also includes a collection of pro-democracy literature written by the
author under a pseudonym and circulated in the underground conduits.
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If the Emergency was the darkest episode in India’s
post-1947 history, the struggle against it, which ended with the
victorious restoration of democracy, is by far the brightest episode. Shri
Advani was one of the heroes of that struggle. Emergency may be a distant
memory now, never to be revisited. But every new generation needs to
revisit, in books and in works of art and culture, both the dark and
bright chapters of its nation’s history—for illumination and for
inspiration.
The book will help the new generation, as well as the
generation that experienced the Emergency rule, to know both the
‘prisoner’ and the undemocratic mindset and establishment that had
turned India, for nineteen fateful months, into a ‘prison’.
A book which deserves to be read by all who value such ideals. |
