New Delhi: Arun Jaitley, the convalescing minister without portfolio, has revisited the 1975 Emergency through a blog, likening Indira Gandhi to Adolf Hitler, cautioning against attempts to curb free speech and unwittingly drawing a parallel with contemporary India.

"If you curb free speech and allow only propaganda, you become the first victim of propaganda because you start believing that your own propaganda is the truth and the full truth," Jaitley wrote.

The senior minister was marking the 43rd anniversary of the Emergency but if anyone mistook it for a commentary on what is unfolding in the country here and now, he or she could be forgiven.

Consider two back-to-back events that took place last week.

• A BJP legislator, Chowdhary Lal Singh, warned journalists to "draw a line" while reporting on the Kathua rape and murder and indirectly reminded them of the fate of slain editor Shujaat Bukhari.

• Several prominent media outlets in the country took down a news report on the huge inflow of demonetised currency into a cooperative bank associated with BJP president Amit Shah as soon as the note recall was announced.

Both instances - along with a chain of lynchings linked to dietary habits and a penchant for branding critics of the government as anti-nationals - were cited as glaring examples of an "undeclared emergency" that seeks to crush free speech, for which the original Emergency was notorious.

But neither Jaitley nor the rest of the free-speech defenders in the BJP have yet condemned in public either the MLA's threat or the mysterious disappearance of the news report from several websites.

Seemingly oblivious to such ironies, Jaitley recalled how the media was "completely terrorised" during the Emergency.

If Jaitley desisted from comparing the gunpoint censorship then and the so-called self-censorship now, he did look for a parallel on another front.

"Both Hitler and Mrs Gandhi never abrogated the Constitution. They used a republican Constitution to transform democracy into dictatorship. Hitler arrested most of the opposition members of parliament and converted his minority government in Parliament into a 2/3rd majority government," Jaitley wrote.

Jaitley drew a distinction between Indira and Hitler, too. "The Representation of People Act was retrospectively amended to insert those provisions so that the invalid election of Mrs Gandhi could be validated by changes in law. Unlike Hitler, Mrs Gandhi went ahead to transform India into a 'dynastic democracy'," he wrote.