The Emergency (India)

The Emergency (India) was a 21-month suspension of democratic governance imposed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi between 1975 and 1977, a period in which the normal rule of law was set aside and the state wielded extraordinary powers of detention and seizure. Within the world of the Mumbai underworld chronicled in this book, the Emergency was not a distant political event but a lived catastrophe that dismantled the careers of established gangsters and reshaped the fortunes of the women who moved through their orbit. It was the moment when the state's coercive machinery reached directly into the lives of figures like the bootlegger Jenabai Daaruwali and the gold smuggler Haji Mastan, demonstrating that even the most powerful criminals were ultimately subject to the sovereign power of the state to suspend its own laws.

Legal Framework and the Maintenance of Internal Security Act

The instrument through which the Emergency's power was exercised was the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA), a controversial law passed by the Indian Parliament in 1971 during the administration of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The Act's stated objective was to provide law enforcement agencies with powers of indefinite 'preventive' detention of individuals, as well as the power to search and seize property without warrants. This legal framework effectively created a state of exception in which the protections of ordinary criminal procedure were suspended, allowing the state to hold individuals without trial for as long as it deemed necessary. The Act was a direct precursor to later stringent laws like TADA and MCOCA, which the Maharashtra government promulgated in 1998 after the abrogation of TADA, and which were later adopted by the Gujarat and Delhi governments to control criminal gangs. The Emergency thus established a pattern of exceptional legislation that would continue to shape the legal landscape of Mumbai's underworld for decades.

Impact on Haji Mastan and the Decline of a Smuggler

For Haji Mastan, Mumbai's most notorious gold smuggler, the Emergency was the beginning of a long and irreversible decline. In 1974, a year before the Emergency was formally declared, he had already been detained under MISA for ninety days. Following this, the government arrested him under the Conservation of Foreign Exchange and Prevention of Smuggling Act. Then, during the Emergency in 1977, he was once again tried under MISA, this time alongside other gangsters like Karim Lala. Despite hiring the best criminal lawyers, including Ram Jethmalani, Mastan languished behind bars for the entire duration of the Emergency. The endless legal battles pushed him into debt, and he realised that he no longer wielded the influence he had once enjoyed in Mumbai as a smuggler. When the Emergency was lifted and the Janata Party came to power in 1979, Mastan pleaded with the Janata Party leader Jaiprakash Narayan to intervene with the then prime minister, Morarji Desai, to show compassion towards him. Mastan had filed affidavits and, under oath, sworn to the government that he would try to turn over a new leaf. His plea was accepted and he was finally released from detention, but the man who emerged was a shadow of his former self, contemplating risky ventures in real estate or the movies as a way out of his debts.

Jenabai Daaruwali and the Gendered Application of State Power

The Emergency also touched Jenabai Daaruwali, the formidable bootlegger who had built an empire in the lanes of Dongri. Jenabai was also jailed under MISA during this period, but the charges against her could not be proved, and she was released. This outcome stands in stark contrast to the fate of her male counterparts like Mastan and Karim Lala, who were held for the duration of the Emergency. The book's author notes that it is much easier to be a Dawood Ibrahim than a Jenabai Daaruwali, and the differential application of MISA to Jenabai suggests that the state's coercive power was exercised unevenly, shaped by gender and by the specific threat each individual posed. Jenabai's release, however, did not mean she was untouched by the period. Her memory of Mastan from before the Emergency, when she had been introduced to him by the Tamilian don Vardharajan Mudaliar and had been in awe of his bravery and larger-than-life persona, became a measure of how much both of them had been diminished by the state's crackdown.

The Legacy of the Emergency in the Lives of Women

The Emergency's legacy extended beyond the immediate detention of gangsters, shaping the lives of women in the underworld in ways that were both direct and indirect. For Monica Bedi, the actress who became involved with the gangster Abu Salem, the experience of imprisonment in Lisbon and later in India echoed the state's power to suspend normal life. Her letters to Salem continued even after her family insisted she forget him, and the isolation of her years in prison took a toll on her, leading her to find solace in the teachings of the Bible. When she was finally extradited to India and held at the Chanchalguda Jail in Hyderabad, she wrote a letter to the court from Central Jail stating that she was innocent, claiming she was 'very young and inexperienced and a plain and simple girl by nature' who was 'ignorant about many evils that were prevalent in Mumbai.' Her experience of being held without the ability to meet her lawyer or relatives for months mirrored the preventive detention logic of MISA, even though the legal framework had changed. The Emergency thus established a template for the state's treatment of those it deemed threats, a template that would be applied to women like Monica and to the sex workers of Kamathipura, whose very existence was criminalised and policed.

The Emergency as a Turning Point in the Underworld's History

The Emergency stands as a watershed in the history of the Mumbai underworld, a moment when the state demonstrated its capacity to dismantle the power structures that had allowed smugglers and bootleggers to flourish. For Haji Mastan, it was the end of an era, reducing a once-mighty don to a debtor seeking favours from politicians. For Jenabai Daaruwali, it was a test of her resilience, one she passed by surviving the charges against her. The period also foreshadowed the more brutal state violence that would come later, such as the encounter killing of Mehmood Khan at Santa Cruz airport, where the police claimed he had fired at them even though his wife Ashraf knew he could not have carried a gun past airport security. The Emergency's suspension of normal legal procedures normalised a mode of governance in which the state could act outside the law, a mode that would have devastating consequences for the women and men of the underworld in the decades that followed.