What Was Operation Blue Star?

Kangana Ranaut’s Emergency, recently released on Netflix, centers around a controversial figure, the late PM of India, Indira Gandhi. She was the first female prime minister of the country, and there was no denying that she was a force to be reckoned with. Mrs. Gandhi’s life was as eventful as a suspense thriller where nobody knew what was going to happen next. Be it helping East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), taking a firm stand against Pakistan, or forcing the President of India to declare a national emergency, there were many things that Indira Gandhi’s tenure as the prime minister of India was remembered for. A film on such a personality had a lot of potential, but I felt that it didn’t add any value to what we already knew. Yes, there is no denying that Kangana Ranaut’s performance is exceptional, and there are moments in the film that give you goosebumps, but Emergency wasn’t able to leave the kind of impact I expected it to. I believe, in the attempt to cover all the major political and personal events of her life, Kangana Ranaut and her team somewhere missed out on the main plot of the titular Emergency. So let’s find out what happened in the film, what motivated Indira Gandhi to make her political comeback after losing the election, and what led to her assassination.

Spoiler Alert

Was Sanjay Gandhi the prime reason for Indira’s downfall? 

In 1966, Indira after tackling a series of hurdles on her way, finally took an oath to become the PM and remained in power for the next 12 years. In the film, we saw that she depended upon her son, Sanjay Gandhi, quite a lot, and because of the love she had for him, she ignored all his misdeeds and let him act according to his whims and fancies. Sanjay was seen as a rich and spoiled brat, but the boy had political ambitions, and he wanted to sit in the PM’s chair one day. Though he was reckless in his approach, it couldn’t be denied that he did have political acumen. Had he been a little obedient, a little more careful, a little more sensitive towards the plight of others, then I believe things would have turned out different for both him and his mother. There were times when Indira Gandhi needed the support of her cabinet ministers, but because of how Sanjay disrespected them, they secretly hoped for her downfall. Sanjay was rash in his approach, and there were times when he treated his seniors and others with utter disregard. We saw how he threw the entire plate of breakfast out when his eggs weren’t made the way he wanted them, and Indira Gandhi, instead of scolding him and telling him to be respectful, called the chef and asked him why he couldn’t make the eggs properly. It was hard to imagine that a woman who had dealt with a superpower like United States of America in such a tactical manner, who wasn’t scared to make the blood move, who could talk eye to eye with the world leaders, would just let her son throw tantrums and act in such a disgraceful manner. 

Now I don’t know if that specific incident happened in real life or not, but what the filmmaker wanted to tell us through it was that if Indira Gandhi had stepped in and asked Sanjay to act like a civilized person, then probably her relationship with him wouldn’t have become strained in the end. Well, I cannot say that it was only Sanjay’s actions that caused Indira Gandhi’s downfall, but he did contribute to it. Indira sought the love that she couldn’t have from her husband and her father in Sanjay. She depended upon him, and Sanjay thought that just because he was born into a particular family, it was his birthright to sit on that chair. I want to say here that no politician wants to give up their seat, everybody is greedy for power, but where Sanjay went wrong was that he thought that nobody could or would oppose him ever. I believe he considered the possibility that he could lose the election, which told us that social welfare and the wellbeing of the people of the nation was never his concern. In the historic judgment, given by Justice Jagmohan Lal Sinha from the Allahabad High Court, Indira Gandhi was found guilty of electoral malpractice, because of which her election result was considered to be null and void, and moreover, she was barred from holding any elected office for the next six years. Indira Gandhi went to meet the president of India and asked him to declare a state of emergency. It was one of the darkest phases of independent India, and after that, the people lost trust in Indira Gandhi. Later, after realising her mistakes, she decided to call off the Emergency, even though Sanjay was absolutely against it. Sanjay didn’t care about the ramifications of such a debacle as he wanted to keep his political career afloat and stay in power. He told his mother that it was a political suicide, but Indira was determined to rectify her mistakes. 

How did Indira Gandhi make her political comeback?

Indira Gandhi literally vanished from the scene after the people of India brought the newly formed Janata Party into power, headed by the activist Jayprakash Narayan. When the comeback seemed impossible, Indira did something, out of bona fide intention, that brought about a shift in people’s perspective. Indira was going somewhere in her vehicle when a lady came by and requested her to help them. Indira got to know that many Dalit farmers had been brutally murdered by upper-caste authoritarians in the remote area. Indira, probably for the first time, did not seek any political leverage by helping the Dalits. As per the film, she had gone to meet Jayprakash Narayan, whom she thought of as her political nemesis but still somebody whom she looked up to and respected a lot. Jayprakash Narayan told Indira to be selfless in her approach and just work for the welfare of the nation without expecting anything in return. Those words changed something inside Indira. She felt like a wounded warrior who was seeking shelter and looking for just that one ounce of hope to survive and keep moving forward. It was said that the photographs of Indira Gandhi on an elephant, while going to the interior of Belchi village, created a kind of furore that was too hard for the already stumbling ruling party to handle. The Dalits present there were shocked to see tears in the eyes of the Iron Lady, and they didn’t understand why she was helping them when they hadn’t even voted for her. The villagers vowed that they would make sure that the Congress party won the next general elections and Indira Gandhi once again became the PM. That was all the confidence Indira needed to fight back. 

Indira realized that Jayprakash Narayan was not wrong; she felt a kind of gratification that she’d never had before after genuinely thinking about the welfare of the people of this country. What happened next? Well, Indira Gandhi won the trust of the people, and after a landslide victory, she got ready for her second tenure as the prime minister of India. 

What Happened After Operation Blue Star? 

Indira Gandhi had a very aggressive approach as compared to her father. We saw in the beginning of the film how she went to Assam and saved it from becoming another POK. She knew that her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, didn’t want her to go to Assam, but still she went there because her intuition told her to do so. Similarly, after the entire Emergency episode ended, Indira Gandhi realized that Sanjay’s instincts had only caused problems for her and the nation. She loved her son; she felt very close to him, and probably her love prevented her from seeing the truth. Indira Gandhi distanced herself from Sanjay, and history is proof of the fact that he didn’t take it well. Sanjay unfortunately met his fateful end after he lost control of his airplane while trying to perform a whimsical stunt. The tragic news of her son’s death shook Indira Gandhi, but what made her feel even worse was that people celebrated Sanjay’s death as if he were some sort of a monster.

Indira was still trying to cope with the grief of losing her son when she was told that the most wanted militant, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who had killed many innocent people and tried to evoke fear among the masses in Punjab, was hiding inside the Golden Temple complex. Indira Gandhi was not somebody who succumbed to such pressure, and she decided to launch an operation to hunt down the militants. As soon as Blue Star began, the Indian forces killed a number of militant leaders including Bhindranwale. The rebellion was suppressed, but still there was some deep-rooted discontent among a faction of the locals, which became the reason behind Indira Gandhi’s murder. On 31st October 1984, Satwant Singh and Beant Singh, Indira Gandhi’s two Sikh bodyguards, killed her to take revenge for Operation Blue Star, which allowed the authorities to fire on their sacred site. It was a dark day in the history of a country that had just learned to stand on its feet after the multiple debacles that weakened its foundation. 

Related

_{Images are for reference only.Images and contents gathered automatic from google or 3rd party sources.All rights on the images and contents are with their legal original owners.}