cratic processes and civil liberties, had become convinced that a failure to act as it did would have exposed the society to destructive political forces. By the spring of 1975, it had become apparent to many observers, both in India and outside, that in large areas of society there was danger of a breakdown of law and order. In the universities, for example, student strikes, harassment of teachers, refusal to take examinations, flagrant neglect of teaching duties by teachers, were continually reported in the press. In industry, strikes were commonplace, with serious loss of production in fields of utmost importance to the national welfare. In the Government bureaucracy, inefficiency, corruption, and indiscipline were widely reported.

The Government's argument, and there would be very widespread agreement with this, was that this breakdown in vital areas of national life was due to the activities of political parties, which, having failed to gain power through the electoral process, were seeking to undermine the Government by destroying the basis of an orderly social life. A variety of parties were active in what the Government regarded as destructive activities. Some of them were characterized as rightwing, others as extreme leftwing, but in India as elsewhere the labels of right and left are neither precise nor informative. Somewhere in the center of these political extremes, were members of the old Congress Party, which had split from Mrs. Gandhi's group in 1969. In addition, and often blending with these political parties, were a variety of religious or sectarian groups: The Hindu Mahasabha, a militant Hindu group; the Jamiat-i-Islam, a Muslim group; and small but troublsome sects such as the Anand Marga. All that they had in common was a denunciation of Mrs. Gandhi's government as corrupt, and unable to provide the leadership desperately needed by a society sinking beneath the weight of poverty, unemployment, and a hopelessness born or age-old ills.

This dissatisfaction found a focus in the person of J. P. Narayan, an enigmatic and famous figure. Narayan has often been described both by his supporters in India and abroad as a saintly pacifist, a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi who left the seclusion of retirement to do battle with Mrs. Gandhi because of the intolerable evils afflicting the country. He had, in fact, never been a very wholehearted follower of Gandhi, and in 1942 had led a very important armed uprising against the British. Mrs. Gandhi must have remembered this when, in the spring of 1975, his movement gathered momentum and in a climactic moment, he called upon the police and the army not to obey the Government if they felt it was tyrannous. The Government's argument is that this movement, and the call to the forces of law and order to desert, provided an intolerable challenge to the nation, and that any government that failed to act decisively would have betrayed its responsibility. All of these issues were clouded by the fact that Mrs. Gandhi had been found guilty in a state court of having broken the election law. To be sure, what she had done would be a commonplace elsewhere-to use public officials and government transportation in her election. campaign-but her opponents used the issue with great effectiveness to attack her.

It was at this point that the emergency was declared on June 26, 1975, with arrests of legislators of many parties, including Mrs. Gandhi's own party, and leaders of the religious communal parties.

Rigorous censorship was imposed, no cause was given for arrest and confinement, and with astonishing rapidity, modern civil liberties, which had been central to the whole movement for Indian independence, disappeared.

If one asks was this drastic attack on civil liberties necessary, the answer must surely be no, if the argument from necessity suggests that no other course of action was possible. If one asks, given the situation, was it a sensible and defensible course of action, then it seems one must be more hesitant in denouncing the decision. Can freedom of expression have too high a price? Mrs. Gandhi's supporters would argue that there are even higher priorities in India: The need for food, for orderly government, for industrial production, for population control. If freedom of expression and the law courts are used to prevent the Government acting in the interests of the masses, then surely there is no simple moral answer. All observers agree that during the past year there has been a marked improvement in many areas of life; above all, prices of staple foodstuffs have fallen, and inflation that was threatening the economic life of the country has been halted, and a new sense of order and discipline are apparent.

If it were clear that this improvement in the material condition of the people is genuinely due to the stringent limitations on individual freedom, then many of us might reluctantly agree that the emergency achieved ends that were not obtainable under the structures of political democracy. But this in fact is far from clear: The Government has had great good luck in having a successful monsoon that has made food relatively cheap and plentiful, while world conditions have to some degree favored India's external trade pattern.

On balance, it is probably true, insofar as there is any information, that many people have benefited from the emergency, despite the consequent loss of liberty for some. Mrs. Gandhi argues that the numbers are insignificant in relation to the total population, but this will strike many of us as specious. In the end, just as we believe that it is better that the guilty should go free rather than an innocent man be punished, so most of us will have a sense that to deprive people of freedom, as has been the case with many hundreds in India, is a wrong which cannot be balanced against another's good. It is surely important, both for our own sakes and those of Indians who cherish civil liberty, that we state that the argument is morally repugnant. While we may have sympathetic understanding for the magnitude of India's problems in feeding and clothing her people, and in assuring them of a human standard of life, at the same time, we should be willing to exert any influence we have as a Nation and as individuals to prevent the present situation becoming more tyrannical and more cruel. The danger with all authoritarian regimes is that when they are threatened they will react with increasing violence and ruthlessness. The Government of India, up to the present, has remained civilized and has great regard for the opinion of the rest of mankind. That fact distinguishes it from the governments of other countries where civil liberties have been destroyed, and we should continue to express our views in a fashion that will make it responsive to the pressure of world opinion.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. FRASER. Thank you very much, Mr. Embree.

[Mr. Embree's prepared statement follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF PROF. AINSLIE T. EMBREE, ASSOCIATE DEAN, SCHOOL OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

My name is Ainslie T. Embree. I am Associate Dean of the School of International Affairs and Professor of History at Columbia University. My teaching and research for many years have been in the history and politics of the subcontinent. My involvement with India, then, is rooted in special interest, but I believe that events in India during the past year must be of concern to all people of good will who are concerned with human freedom and civil liberties. Since June 26, 1975, when the Government of India proclaimed a state of Emergency, there has been widespread and systematic arrest of political opponents of the ruling party. In addition, censorship of the press was imposed, and even though this prior censorship has now formally ceased, the "self-censorship" agreement imposed upon the press means that any expression of disagreement with government policy, or any comment on subjects that the Government considers sensitive, is effectively censored. Public meetings of any kind have been banned for more than twenty-five people; this has been an especially effective means of stifling opposition in a country where large public gatherings were a normal channel of communication.

In a recent press release, the Government of India argued that the condition of civil liberties in India is not the business of the rest of the world; that a Government has the right to make such laws as it deems necessary for the welfare of the state. The Government continually stresses that the restrictions on civil liberties were not unconstitutional; that the President was exercising powers accorded him in the constitution. It is also argued that Parliament has approved all the new laws and constitutional amendments, and that Parliament is supreme. These arguments will not seem very impressive to many who remember that all totalitarian regimes have made similar claims, but nonetheless they are of importance in judging the Indian situation.

The argument is also made that it is especially presumptuous of outsiders to criticize India, when clearly the present rules are in accordance with the will of the majority of its citizens. All of us with a concern for human freedom are pleased that your Committee takes a broader view of human responsibility, and that hearings such as these indicate that we do not believe a Government can do what it likes with its own people, without criticism from the outside world. That this argument now comes from India is especially disappointing, because, for example, no Government in the world has opposed apartheid in South Africa so long and so consistently as has the Government of India, South Africa has always used the argument that India now uses: that such matters are matters of internal politics, and the rest of the world has no right to interfere.

It must be stressed that the curtailments on civil liberties in India occurred in a country that once was one of the most open societies in the world. Nor were the civil liberties of which India was justly proud recent acquisitions. Long before India achieved her independence in 1947, India had a legal system characterized by an independent judiciary. The press, too, had remarkable freedom. The proof of both the reasonably fair working of the legal system, and of the freedom of the press, speech and assembly, was that the Indian National Congress, which played the major role in opposing British rule in India and winning freedom, operated openly for sixty years. It is true that political leaders like B. G. Tilak were arrested and imprisoned; but they received open trials. The same was true at a later period for such men as Mahatma Gandhi. I stress this point because there has been a tendency in the foreign press, and indeed in India itself, to suggest that civil liberties had existed for only a few years and so their loss does not greatly affect the society as a whole, since what was being taken away had no deep roots in Indian social and political institutions.

Having asserted our right and duty to be concerned with the condition of civil liberties in India, it is only fair to admit that the situation as it now exists in India is not comparable to that of Russia or Chile or Malawi. India is not at the present time a political democracy as it was before the imposition of the Emergency decrees, but it has not become a police state, with power exercised arbitrarily without reference to law or where torture is institutionalized as a normal method of social control. It is true that there have been some allegations of torture in India, but there does not appear to have been any officially sanctioned use of torture.

There are three assessments that are frequently made about the situation in India that prevent understanding of what is happening in a country of great importance to the United States and to the world. One assessment is to see the actions of the Government of India as a reign of terror that, having overthrown the constitutional liberties of the Indian people, maintains itself through organized repression and fear. Another assessment has already been alluded to: that the idea of civil liberties had little place in Indian culture, and that it was inevitable that the facade of political democracy should be replaced by a system more in character with the nature of Indian society. A third assessment argues, in effect, that nothing has happened; that India is still a functioning democracy, and that after a few salutary checks on the activities of anti-social elements in the society, that freedom of the press and of assembly, habeas corpus, and all the other customary freedoms will be restored. All of these assessments do a disservice both to India and to the United States by concealing the complexity of the issues. It would be especially regrettable if a failure to examine with care the forces at work in India at the present time led us to take actions which may lead to further curtailment of civil liberties. This might come about either through too ready support of the present government, leading it to suppose that we preferred authoritarian regimes to democratic ones or, at the other extreme, hostility on our part might isolate the people from contact with the free ocuntries of the world.

It is impossible to state the facts of the Indian situation in a way that would be acceptable to everyone, but an assessment of somewhat different character from those noted above suggests the possibility of looking at what has happened in the past year without either condemning it or approving it, but rather seeing it as a responsible act of a government, that, while having a genuine commitment to democratic processes and civil liberties, had become convinced that a failure to act as it did would have exposed the society to destructive political forces. By the spring of 1975, it had become apparent to many observers, both in India and outside, that in large areas of society there was danger of a breakdown of law and order. In the universities, for example, student strikes, harrassment of teachers, refusal to take examinations, flagrant neglect of teaching duties by teachers, were continually reported in the press. In industry, strikes were commonplace, with serious loss of production in fields of utmost importance to the national welfare. In the government bureaucracy, inefficiency, corruption, and indiscipline were widely reported. The Government's argument, and there would be very widespread agreement with this, was that this breakdown in vital areas of national life was due to the activities of political parties, which, having failed to gain power through the electoral process, were seeking to undermine the government by destroying the basis of an orderly social life. A variety of parties were active in what the Government regarded as destructive activities. Some of them were characterized as right-wing, others as extreme left-wing, but in India as elsewhere the labels of right and left are neither precise nor informative. Somewhere in the center of these political extremes, were members of the old Congress Party, which had split from Mrs. Gandhi's group in 1969. In addition, and often blending with these political parties, were a variety of religious or sectarian groups: the Hindu Mahasabha, a militant Hindu group; the Jamiat-i-Islam, a Muslim group; and small but troublesome sects such as the Anand Marg. All that they had in common was a denunciation of Mrs. Gandhi's government as corrupt, and unable to provide the leadership desperately needed by a society sinking beneath the weight of poverty, unemployment, and a hopelessness born of age-old ills.

This dissatisfaction found a focus in the person of J. P. Narayan, an enigmatic and famous figure. Narayan has often been described both by his supporters in India and abroad as a saintly pacifist, a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi who left the seclusion of retirement to do battle with Mrs. Gandhi because of the intolerable evils afflicting the country. He had, in fact, never been a very whole-hearted follower of Gandhi, and in 1942 had led a very important armed uprising against the British. Mrs. Gandhi must have remembered this when, in the spring of 1975, his movement gathered momentum and in a climactic moment, he called upon the police and the army not to obey the government if they felt it was tyrannous. The Government's argument is that this movement, and the call to the forces of law and order to desert, provided an intolerable challenge to the nation, and that any government that failed to act decisively would have betrayed its responsibility. All of these issues were clouded by the fact that Mrs. Gandhi had been found guilty in a state court of having broken the election law. To be sure, what she had done would be a commonplace elsewhere-to use public officials and government

transportation in her election campaign-but her opponents used the issue with great effectiveness to attack her.

It was at this point that the Emergency was declared on June 26, 1975, with and arrests of legislators of many parties, including Mrs. Gandhi's own party, leaders of the religious communal parties. Rigorous censorship was imposed, no cause was given for arrest and confinement, and, with astonishing rapidity, modern civil liberties, which had been central to the whole movement for Indian independence, disappeared.

If one asks was this drastic attack on civil liberties necessary, the answer must surely be no, if the argument from necessity suggests that no other course of action was possible. If one asks, given the situation, was it a sensible and defensible course of action, then it seems one must be more hesitant in denouncing the decision. Can freedom of expression have too high a price? Mrs. Gandhi's supporters would argue that there are even higher priorities in India: the need for food, for orderly government, for industrial production, for population control. If freedom of expression and the law courts are used to prevent the government acting in the interests of the masses, then surely there is no simple moral answer. All observers agree that during the past year there has been a marked improvement in many areas of life; above all, prices of staple foodstuffs have fallen, and inflation that was threatening the economic life of the country has been halted, and a new sense of order and discipline are apparent. If it were clear that this improvement in the material condition of the people is genuinely due to the stringent limitations on individual freedom, then many of us might reluctantly agree that the Emergency achieved ends that were not obtainable under the structures of political democracy. But this in fact is far from clear: the Government has had great good luck in having a successful monsoon that has made food relatively cheap and plentiful, while world conditions have to some degree favored India's external trade pattern.

On balance, it is probably true, insofar as there is any information, that many people have benefited from the Emergency, despite the consequent loss of liberty for some. Mrs. Gandhi argues that the numbers are insignificant in relation to the total population, but this will strike many of us as specious. In the end, just as we believe that it is better that the guilty should go free rather than an innocent man be punished, so most of us will have a sense that to deprive people of freedom, as has been the case with many hundreds in India, is a wrong which cannot be balanced against another's good. It is surely important, both for our own sakes and those of Indians who cherish civil liberty, that we state that the argument is morally repugnant. While we may have sympathetic understanding for the magnitude of India's problems in feeding and clothing her people, and in assuring them of a human standard of life, at the same time, we should be willing to exert any influence we have as a nation and as individuals to prevent the present situation becoming more tyrannical and more cruel. The danger with all authoritarian regimes is that when they are threatened they will react with increasing violence and ruthlessness. The Government of India, up to the present, has remained civilized and has great regard for the opinion of the rest of mankind. That fact distinguishes it from the governments of other countries where civil liberties have been destroyed, and we should continue to express our views in a fashion that will make it responsive to the pressure of world opinion.

Mr. FRASER. Dr. Jack, you submitted, I think, four-are they case studies of torture?

Mr. JACK. Documents in that direction.

Mr. FRASER. Since the subcommittee has not had a chance to read them, could you give us in a general way the nature of the allegations, the circumstances and so forth? I am particularly interested in that because whatever else may be said about India, it always seems to me it is always difficult to justify torture. I am curious to find out what kind of allegations are being made on that.

Mr. JACK. Amnesty International has, I guess, not sent an official mission to India since the emergency, but before the emergency, as you perhaps know, the so-called Naxilites, the extreme leftwing Communists, the so-called Marxists-Leninists, were put in jail in the early