Beyond the Lines: An Autobiography

by Kuldip Nayar

  The US suggested India buy Goa from Portugal as the US had done with France in the case of Louisiana. Nehru was considering the proposal favourably when Portugal made it clear that it was unwilling to part with Goa at any price. The deadlock continued. Nehru’s attitude agitated members of parliament and exasperated the country. Even so, he refused to use force, following Gandhian principles.

  However, as I discovered, Nehru’s policy was in deference to the US wishes. Its ambassador, John Kenneth Galbraith, who had direct access to Nehru, pleaded with him not to blot his record. India’s moral voice, he argued, would cease to count if it moved the army into Goa. President J.F. Kennedy followed Galbraith’s advice with a message regarding his general concern over the use of force, particularly in Goa. Washington even suggested that India approach the UN and request it to settle the ‘dispute’. Nehru regretted his decision to go to the UN over Kashmir and could not afford to make a similar mistake. Still, he was willing to postpone the action. Strangely however, it was Defence Minister Krishna Menon who informed Nehru that the advance party of the Indian army had already moved in (17 December 1961) and that the governor general of Goa had surrendered without a fight. Menon had eyes fixed on his election from Maharashtra and did what Patel had done in the case of Hyderabad, informing Nehru after initiating the military operation.

  When told about the army’s entry into Goa, Kennedy was so upset that he remarked that ‘a priest [meaning Nehru] had been found in a prostitute’s house’. Kennedy was loud and persistent in his criticism because he feared other countries, particularly those in Africa, would follow India to roll out colonialism.

  Kennedy was talking like an imperialist. I think it would have been a welcome action if the African countries had followed India’s example. I could not understand the logic of the West. It did not want to give up imperialism peacefully on its own but expected the colonies not to revolt because the use of violence was ‘out of date’. What really hurt Nehru was the criticism within India. The opposition leaders said that Goa had been annexed because of the impending Lok Sabha election.

  Nath Pai, a socialist MP who lived opposite my house at Tughlak Road in New Delhi, told me that India would not have acted had scores of Indian volunteers not crossed into Goa despite the hails of bullets from the other side. Madhu Limaye, a top socialist leader who had crawled into Goa through barbed wires, had to be dragged back because the Portuguese soldiers were on the point of shooting him. Had it not been for the socialists, I still believe Menon would not have taken action because Nehru’s Congress party favoured a wait and watch policy.

  Goa was able to retain Portugal’s culture even after many years of its merger with India. Today, it is only a tourist resort. A few structures still remind you of Portugal but the builders from Delhi and Bombay have squeezed out whatever existed of bygone days. Indeed, Goa has lost its soul but is happy that it has not become part of Maharashtra, a demand occasionally heard in political circles of Mumbai.

  4

  My Training and Apprenticeship in English Journalism

  The proprietor of Anjam, Yasin, dismissed me because I had failed to recover for him the property that his brother had left when he migrated to Pakistan. Sabari, a colleague in Anjam, got me a similar job at Wahadat, another Urdu daily, also published from Ballimaran, not far from the house where Mirza Ghalib, India’s greatest Urdu poet, had lived.

  At the Wahadat office, I met Maulana Hasrat Mohani, a leading Urdu poet and a freedom fighter, who took a liking to me. He was an austere person with leftist leanings, who had been in the Congress for years and had gone to jail many times at Gandhi’s call. A little before Partition he had however joined the Muslim League. ‘Why did you do that and support the demand for Pakistan?’ I asked him at our second meeting. He admitted it was a blunder. He explained that the concept of Pakistan he had supported had proved to be very different in reality. He had expected it to be a liberal pluralistic state, similar to India.

  After he got to know me for a few weeks, he advised me one day to abandon Urdu journalism because it had no future in India. He gave me another piece of advice: to stop attempting to write Urdu poetry. I had shown him some of my verses. He described them as ‘tuk bazi’ or mere rhymes. I still remember one of the couplets I wrote:

  Uneh dekh kar hum ibadat ko bhule

  Jo dekha uneh to ibadat bhi karli

  Khudai ab to bula lo Qurab mein

  Gunaho se hamne to toba bhi karli

  (I forgot my prayers after seeing her. Yet I said my prayers when I saw her. God call me at least now near you [because] I have vowed not to commit any sin).

  I took Mohani’s advice on both counts. I gave up writing Urdu poetry and also resigned from Wahadat to join the United States Information Service (USIS). The new job enabled me to go to the US where I earned a master’s degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University.

  I had sought the assistance of Norman Cousins, editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, New York, who had hired me as an interpreter in Delhi when he came to India soon after Partition to write about the sufferings of refugees. When he was speaking to some of the refugees at Kingsway Camp one person intervened to exhort the crowd not to meet Americans who had helped the British to divide India.

  What has, however, remained etched in my memory is C.D. McDuggal, a tall, austere looking man, who taught us interpretative reporting. The US was in the midst of anti-communist hysteria initiated by Senator Joseph McCarthy. He was a liberal and withstood all the accusations and abuses showered on him by those who saw red in every expression of dissent.

  I felt the journalism course in the US was pedestrian. It was too remote from Indian requirements and I learnt nothing useful. All that I recall – which explains today’s America – is one press conference, which I covered as a student of journalism in Chicago. I asked an industrialist who was addressing the press conference what the effect would be on the US economy if there was no demand for military weapons? He said: ‘We will always seek wars to keep our industry going.’ He was quite right.

  I was unable to get money from home because my wife and I had a bank balance of Rs 1200 only and my parents were struggling to make both ends meet in Jalandhar. I must admit that working my way through university was tough. On some days I had to be content with only a loaf of bread and water. It was, however, great fun because I came to be known as the fastest dishwasher on the campus! In three terms I earned an M.Sc in journalism.

  On my way back to Delhi I stopped in London to appear before the Union Public Service Commission for the job of information officer in the Ministry of External Affairs but was rejected. Ironically, 35 years later, I returned to London as India’s high commissioner.

  Newspapers in India had a prejudice against a degree in journalism in those days. An M.Sc was of little help and I drew a blank at most offices. The Times of India, Bombay, was then in the midst of setting up its own news service. D. Thomas, a god-fearing Christian, who later became a good friend, interviewed me. All that he asked me was whether I could rewrite copy, still a rare quality in the Indian media. I do not recall what I said but he must have been satisfied because I received a letter of appointment. As in every profession, however, and this is particularly true in journalism, the tale-carriers became active and the appointment letter was withdrawn before I could join the newspaper. J.C. Jain, general manager of the paper, was told that I did not know how to write, a stigma that has hounded me throughout my journalistic career.

  My efforts to obtain a position in the Hindu of Madras also came to naught. The closest I could get to the editor was his secretary who gave me every hope until he found that I was a Nayar from Punjab, not from Kerala. At that time the Hindu was a closed, insular place. The USIS, for which I had worked before going to the US, had no opening but it helped me find an assignment at its Technical Cooperation Mission in Delhi.

  I did not, however, survive there. The US Embassy traced my connections in
Lahore to the Students’ Federation, which was considered a communist organization. I was dismissed and remained unemployed for nearly a year. I was not willing to start at the bottom rung of a newspaper and I lacked sufficient experience to claim a higher position. The few articles which I sent to newspapers came back with a printed regret slip.

  I did not want to return to Urdu journalism and found no opening in English newspapers. I approached Humayun Kabir for help. He asked me to write for his feature agency which published my first article: ‘To Every Thinking Refugee.’ Three newspapers used it. This was my debut in English journalism. Almost 35 years later I began syndicating my weekly column, ‘Between the Lines’, to almost 80 newspapers in 14 languages in India and abroad.

  In those days an ad hoc recruitment by the publicity unit for the Five-Year-Plan gave me a job in the Press Information Bureau (PIB), a central government organization. My work as a features writer took me to different parts of the country.

  This was the first time that I truly experienced India: the lovely texture of fields, the sturdy strands of faiths, the diversity of local cultures, and the modest huts of hardy farmers. I saw dams, factories, and laboratories rising in the wilderness which Nehru described as the new temples of modern India. Probably, they were. Many years later, I discovered the futility of big dams. When I joined Medha Patkar’s movement, I realized that small dams could harness the same benefits without creating the havoc of uprooting huge numbers of people.

  The widespread poverty, illiteracy, and disease which I witnessed during my travels in India left an indelible impression upon me. It appeared to be an impossible task to defeat hunger on the scale that it was prevalent in the country. Even so, I had an unshaken faith that we would one day overcome our problems of poverty and of parochialism based on class, community, and caste. I have always believed that optimism is a moral duty.

  I felt more settled in the government when I was sent as regional officer of the PIB to Jalandhar, which was the centre of the then Punjab, embracing Haryana and Himachal Pradesh. It was a sort of homecoming because it was in Jalandhar that my parents had settled after migrating from Sialkot. My father was once again a leading physician in the city, which was also the state’s Fleet Street. As many as 23 daily newspapers in Urdu, Hindi, and Punjabi were published from there, rather like Lahore before Partition.

  The Urdu press dominated Punjab in the 1950s. Although the language was no longer taught in schools, a fallout of Partition politics, Urdu was still the language of communication in the courts and government offices. Both Hindus and Sikhs aired their differences in Urdu. Hindus, who constituted a majority in the state at that time, declared Hindi to be their mother tongue. Their reasoning was that Punjabi was only a dialect of Hindi. Sikhs resented this. The Hindus were also afraid that if ever Punjab was divided on the basis of language, they might have to leave the Punjabi-speaking area with a Sikh majority, a fear ingrained after Partition.

  Still suffering from the ravages of Partition, the Hindus disowned Punjabi to ensure that the Sikhs who embraced it as their language would not benefit. This however proved to be unproductive for them. Many years later, when Punjab was divided on the basis of language, the Hindus in the Punjabi-speaking area, now Punjab, were reduced to a minority. They realized then that had they affirmed Punjabi, which they spoke at home, as their mother tongue in the census, they would have been part of a larger bilingual state because it would have been difficult to determine the line of separation as Punjabi was spoken right up to Sonipat, the outskirts of Delhi.

  The repudiation of Punjabi by the Hindus became a grievance of the Sikhs who convincingly argued that if the Hindus could go to the extent of disowning their mother tongue from prejudice or fear that the Sikhs would gain, there was little left for the two communities to share. Even so, both constituted the warp and weft of the same Punjabi culture and could not be separated, as subsequent events have shown. I have, however, maintained that the two communities with no future in India are Punjabi Hindus and Kashmiri Pandits.

  The majority of Sikhs were upset because their demand for a linguistic state on the basis of the Punjabi language had been rejected in 1955, by the States Reorganization Commission which argued that ‘to take a decision regarding the future of this area on the assumption that the Hindus and Sikhs are destined to drift apart will be short-sighted and unwarranted in these circumstances’.

  The commission’s point was that ‘the whole of Punjab from the Sutlej to the Indus was obviously intended by nature to be a single natural area’. Strangely, these ideas were expressed eight years after Punjab was partitioned following the birth of Pakistan in August 1947.

  The demand for a Punjabi suba generated bad blood between Hindus and Sikhs. Hindus felt that it would lead to the foundation of Khalistan. The Sikhs were not mollified by mere talks. Nehru had promised them a place where they would feel the glow of Independence. They wanted autonomy and some leaders confided in me that if Hindus could get Hindustan and Muslims Pakistan, why not Sikhs their Khalistan?

  Together with my friend Sadhu Singh Hamdard, editor of Ajit, I tried to stop the division of East Punjab. At his initiative I met Congress President K. Kamaraj, Haryana leader Bhagwat Dayal, and the Akali leader Sant Fateh Singh. Hamdard’s and my proposition was to take Hissar out of Punjab and constitute the rest of Punjab as a single state with Punjabi in Gurumukhi script as the official language. Kamaraj, who was for a united Punjab, supported our proposal on the assumption that the Akalis would agree to it. Bhagwat Dayal said that he would make noises on forgoing the formation of Haryana but would eventually remain silent.

  The key was Fateh Singh, the president of the Akali Dal. When I placed the proposal before him he rejected it and stuck to the idea of a Punjabi suba. He said he wanted it to be a small state and only for those who believed in the philosophy underlying a Punjabi suba. ‘You mean the Sikhs?’ I asked. He denied the charge. I warned him that he would not be able to ensure that Punjab would be a Sikh-majority state because the constitution gave the right to people from other parts of the country to move freely to any place in India for jobs, business, labour, or residence. Not only the Sikhs but even the Punjabi-speaking population would be reduced to a minority one day, I argued. I was, however, unable to convince Fateh Singh. He was convinced that he could convert a Punjabi-speaking state into an autonomous unit and keep out non-Sikhs. Many years later Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale picked up the thread from where Fateh Singh had left it.

  Before I could see the end of the debate on the Punjabi suba issue, I was transferred to Delhi to serve Govind Ballabh Pant as his information officer.

  I was already married when I became information officer to Pant. Bharti, my wife, was the daughter of a top Congress leader, Bhim Sen Sachar and sister of Rajinder Sachar, my best friend since our college days in Lahore. Rajinder married my sister, Raj, several years later. He wrote at the instance of the government a report, known as the Sachar report published in 2006. It revealed the extent of Muslim deprivation in India. He found that the plight of Muslims were worse than that of dalits. It was a pitiable condition in which the Muslims in India lived. He was most critical of the communist-run West Bengal where he said that the employment of Muslims by the state was only 2.1 per cent as against 5.4 per cent in Gujarat. He did not recommend reservations for dalits among Muslims and Christians but observed that their plight was no better than the plight of Hindu dalits. Muslims did get reservations on the basis of backwardness but not on the basis of religion which is banned in the constitution.

  5

  Govind Ballabh Pant as Home Minister

  Linguistic Reorganization, Administrative Reforms, the Sino-Indian Border Question, and the Indus Waters Treaty

  When I stood before Home Minister Govind Ballabh Pant as the new information officer, I was nervous, daunted by his stature in public life. My spirits had sunk after a wait of five hours in the durbar-like surroundings where job-seekers, hapless bureaucrats, and petty politic
ians queued up to solicit crumbs of favour.

  Pant, sensitive to public opinion, attached great importance to the information officer. He was concerned when a newspaper criticized him. There was a practice to send him press clippings of what the PIB felt would interest him. He read each of these and often acted on the information provided.

  Once in a while he liked to tease. On a clipping from Current, a tabloid, he wrote: ‘Please speak.’ It was a news story that declared in bold letters: ‘Sardarji duped.’ What Pant was trying to get at were the words ‘semi-clad’ used to describe the Minister of State Tarkeshwari Sinha who had ‘allowed’ her name to be used by a friend to ‘cheat’ a Sikh seeking a favour. Pant asked me, with a twinkle in his eyes, what the phrase ‘semi-clad’ meant. I was nonplussed because he had never before indulged in loose talk. Noticing my embarrassment, he wondered how a woman could appear ‘semi-clad’ in public? Alternatively, did the paper mean that she always wore clothes that made her look ‘semi-clad’? Then he burst into paroxysms of laughter.

  Nonetheless, he took the press seriously. Once when the Evening News, a tabloid from Delhi, published a picture of local sweepers on strike, he sent me to the editor who was understandably rude. When I quoted Pant’s words that such photos fomented discontent, the editor said, ‘Mind your own business’. Pant did not realize that my visit might be misconstrued in a society that took pride in a free press. I returned embarrassed but the editor did not survive long in his position.

  Pant was, however, particular about not coming between a proprietor and a journalist, accepting the delicacy of the relationship. Frank Moraes, when ousted from the editorship of the Times of India, met him to seek his intervention but Pant did not oblige; indeed, he admonished me for having invited Frank to a dinner party, the only one Pant hosted during his tenure. He thought Frank’s presence at the party conveyed the message that the government was taking sides.