Not for a family, just one person.

On the 43rd anniversary of Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi in 1975, people still remember that as the darkest period in India's history after independence. "In the lust for power and the mad devotion to a family, the entire country had been turned into a jail. An atmosphere of fear prevailed then. We will rarely find another example of how the Constitution was misused as a tool for a family," said Prime Minister Narendra Modi. To that, Sitaram Yechury, General Secretary of the CPI(M) retorted, "History also records two servile letters of the RSS chief pledging support to Indira Gandhi's 20 point programme and pleading release." The Prime Minister has been a member of the RSS or Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh since he was a child. Modi is more Indira than like Jawaharlal Nehru, wrote S Gupta. While "he hasn't nationalised any sector", "He is simply getting one public sector company to acquire another, thereby using these as his off-balance sheet milch cows." He is forcing the Life Insurance Corporation of India, LIC to buy a stake in a failed bank IDBI for Rs 200 billion. IDBI has bad loans of $8 billion, which is 28% of its total loans, and this could rise to 36%, wrote A Mukherjee. To waste life insurance premiums of millions of people the government is forcing three regulators to break their rules: IRDAI, the insurance sector regulator, SEBI, the stock marker regulator and the Reserve Bank of India, which regulates banks. Not much different from Indira Gandhi who corrupted the Supreme Court. Foreign policy has been reduced to serial hugging of other leaders which is extremely embarrassing for the rest of us. "Our big-power ties are wobbly. Our neighbourhood is stressed again and we are left with just one friend: Bangladesh." The Prime Minister's party, the BJP, is suspicious of advances in science unlike its founders who advised using technology to grow economically and militarily strong, wrote Prof R Sagar. The British created a system to increase their power and to extort enormous amounts of money from our economy, wrote RS Kapoor. Our politicians have not changed the system, instead they have added welfare schemes on it. If the welfare schemes are not reaching their desired targets they started a biometric identity system, Aadhaar. Other nations take fingerprints and iris scans of foreigners but not their own citizens, wrote M Choudhary. "Any compromise of such a database is essentially irreversible for a whole human lifetime: no one can change their genetic data or fingerprints in response to a leak." Clearly, this has been done with wholesale surveillance in mind. And, we the taxpayer paid for it. Indira Gandhi never went so far.