Beyond the Lines: An Autobiography

by Kuldip Nayar

  Ayub Khan and Abdullah met in Rawalpindi on 24 May 1964. According to what Ayub told me, Abdullah brought no specific proposals but wanted ‘me and Nehru to meet’. Ayub’s version was:

  I asked Abdullah what made him think that a meeting would bring about a solution of the Kashmir problem. His reply was that Nehru was a changed man. I knew that Abdullah was wrong but I did not want to disappoint him. My impression is that Nehru wanted to tire me out.

  However, in his book, Friends Not Masters (1967) Ayub Khan wrote: ‘Abdullah brought the absurd proposal of a confederation between India and Pakistan and Kashmir.’ Refuting Ayub’s claim, Sheikh Abdullah later told me that no specific proposal was placed before Pakistan. Checking government records and Nehru’s papers on his talks with Abdullah, I found no mention of the confederation proposal.

  The version of K.H. Khurshid, president of Azad Kashmir and formerly Jinnah’s private secretary, whom I met in Lahore, was that he met Abdullah for nearly four hours during his visit to Pakistan and did not find any evidence that Abdullah was proposing a confederation. ‘What he was seeking was a soft border between the two parts of Kashmir so that people on both sides could travel, meet, and trade freely,’ Khurshid said. ‘This might have led to other things.’ I thought Khurshid was right.

  Whatever the proposal might have been, it proved to be a non-starter because Nehru died when Abdullah was still in Pakistan.

  Those were days when the Government of India was experimenting with inducting experts from the private sector to head ministries. Mantosh Sondhi was hired as secretary of the ministry of steel. I too suggested to my ministry that if the government could bring persons from outside to man ministries why could it not loan its employees to the private sector. This was in the context of my wishing to have a stint in the private sector. The then Information Minister Satya Narain Sinha agreed to my suggestion and gave me two years leave with a lien on the PIB job. That made it easy for my family to let me join UNI, but I never returned to the government.

  UNI’s principal handicap was that it did not have a good address. It had started its operations from a flat in Khan Market (then a sleepy little market and now one of the most expensive commercial areas in the world to rent). As the sponsors were keen to start a news agency without any delay, any premises would do. The key sponsors of UNI were: the Hindu, Hindustan Times, Amrita Bazar Patrika, Hindusthan Standard cum Anand Bazar Patrika and the Nation from Patna. Later, Deccan Herald too joined them. I was able to persuade Shastri to allot UNI a government bungalow near the office of the Indian Eastern Newspaper Society (IENS), an association of newspaper proprietors.

  Though started on a very positive note, UNI was soon making such a loss that the sponsors wanted to close it down. S. Mulgaonkar, editor of the Hindustan Times, then chairman of the UNI board, was in favour of running it a little longer in order to see whether the agency could emerge as a competitor to the Press Trust of India (PTI), a premier news agency.

  He had once offered me the editorship of Searchlight, a paper which the Birlas, owners of the Hindustan Times, had started from Patna. He asked me whether I would like to try my hand at running UNI and was confident that he could persuade the sponsors to continue with the agency for another six months and extend the period if it showed improvement in its operations. I accepted his offer despite my wife’s opposition to my leaving the PIB.

  UNI had limited staff which was conscious of the sword of damocles, i.e. closure, hanging over its head. The agency’s outside stations were generally manned by a single individual who functioned as a journalist-cum-teleprinter operator. My first job was to boost their morale and inspire them with the expectation that UNI could survive.

  I wanted to make a mark and this occupied my thoughts. It could be effected by breaking news first and giving short tight copy to lessen the burden of editing in newspaper offices. As I had maintained contacts with the home ministry I could do exclusive stories. My friend, Rajeshwar Prasad, Shastri’s secretary, helped me, both wittingly and unwittingly. For politicians, I was a familiar figure because they had seen me first with Pant and then with Shastri. This enabled me to get to know and report on what was happening in the government and the Congress party.

  Our best bet, I told the staff, was the economic field which was beginning to yield news and catch attention. The Planning Commission was the principal source of this. One UNI reporter covering the beat, after obtaining permission from me, regularly paid an operator who gave us a copy of every document he cyclostyled. We broke stories on economic subjects almost everyday. Tarlok Singh, a senior member of the Planning Commission, knew me well. He called me once because UNI had carried a top secret note from the ministry of commerce which it had sent to the commission for its comments. He asked me how I got the information. He was too much of a gentleman to threaten me but he used every other method at his command. My reply was that journalists never disclose their sources.

  What was frustrating for the editor and general manager, the title I used, was to wait outside the rooms of editors and proprietors to sell the UNI service at a pittance. Ram Nath Goenka (RNG), proprietor of the Express group, was a difficult nut to crack. Along with Shanti Prasad Jain, owner of the Times of India, he had started a news agency which had failed within a few weeks. Goenka was wreaking his vengeance, although the Times of India had become one of the agency’s sponsors. Many months of patient waiting resulted in Goenka eventually buying the UNI service.

  The Express group of newspapers was forced to buy UNI because it felt that it was missing stories, as Goenka told me. Doing political stories with inside information and taking the path which news agencies did not follow made newspapers and politicians take notice of what UNI transmitted.

  We would freely report on cabinet meetings. Once Indira Gandhi held a two-day meeting of the cabinet without officials to ensure there was no leakage. She did not suspect her ministers when we reported discussions in cabinet meeting in detail. She remarked that it seemed as if Kuldip was sitting in at the cabinet meeting.

  The best compliment came from the PTI within six months of my joining UNI. The then general manager, Ram Chandran, approached me to come to an arrangement whereby the two agencies did not compete but divided their spheres of activity. His proposal was that UNI should cover world events and have exclusive contracts with foreign news agencies. PTI, he said, would confine itself to domestic affairs; the Indian scene. I declined his offer because a news agency which did not cover its own country had no role.

  News agencies were in a way indebted to the establishment because a substantial amount of money in our form of subscriptions came from the government. All India Radio was the top buyer. There was no TV those days.

  The government was, however, annoyed with UNI because of our story on the negotiations that the government was holding with the Nagas in Delhi. For days, newspapers reported only the daily press note that the talks were being held in a cordial atmosphere. Nothing more was mentioned. I met members of the Nagas National Council conducting the dialogue, and found that there was a deadlock. The Nagas had stuck to their original demand for independence and the government had once again rejected it. It was a situation which I thought the public should know about. I told the PIB that UNI would be running what the Nagas had said, but would like to include the government’s version in the story. The PIB told me not to run the story because it was not in the ‘country’s interest’.

  We ran the story that the Nagas had not abandoned their demand for an independent sovereign state. The Government of India, the story said, had rejected the demand outright. When Prime Minister Indira Gandhi saw the story, she was livid. Yashpal Kapoor, then Indira Gandhi’s aide, asked me over the phone to withdraw the story. We knew each other well. I had advised him to get into the Foreign Service which was being constituted some years earlier. He had replied that he saw no reason to accept a clerical post when Indira Gandhi would be the prime minister one day. He proved to be correct. His long service wit
h her had enabled Kapoor to acquire considerable political weight, which he used at her bidding.

  I told Kapoor that we were willing to run the government version, an offer we had made earlier. The government never came back to us but the cabinet presided over by Indira Gandhi rejected the UNI application for an increase in subscription. Raj Bahadur, then minister for information and broadcasting, telephoned to inform me that Indira Gandhi was angry about the Naga story. The note he had put up before the cabinet had proposed Rs 2 lakh as the subscription, and Indira Gandhi had slashed this to half. He said the story had cost UNI a lakh of rupees a month.

  When in the home ministry, I found that it maintained tabs on the various political parties. Information about them, received from the intelligence bureau, was maintained and updated. Every political party, except the Congress, was profiled and an assessment made of how close it was either to the communist views or communalists’ views.

  The emphasis on the communist relations was greater in relation to China than the Soviet Union. A section of a note, captioned ‘Anti-national Propaganda by Communists in Border Areas’, prior to China’s attack on India, is reproduced below:

  The Communist Party has launched a systematic propaganda in the frontier districts with a view to subverting the local population. The modes of propaganda are, holding of meetings, enacting of dramas and circulation of publication. The extension of the party’s influence is carried out by formation of Kisan Sabhas, Student Fronts and Unions of low-paid workers. To ensure their support, local issues are invariably exploited.

  State inspector generals of police still discuss the Left movement at their annual meeting in Delhi. Of course, the focus is now on Maoists from the law and order point of view.

  7

  Lal Bahadur Shastri as Prime Minister

  Nehru Passes Away, Succession, the Indo-Pak War and the Tashkent Declaration

  Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru died on 27 May 1964. His physician, Dr K.L. Wig, had given specific instructions that he should not be left alone and yet there was no one with him when Nehru went to the bathroom, where he fell and died. Wig told me that Panditji must have been lying on the floor for over an hour before he was found in that condition. It was pure negligence, he said. Though his poor health was no secret, nobody expected him to die so soon.

  The news of Nehru’s demise spread throughout India like wildfire. The nation was numbed; a sense of insecurity and uncertainty prevailed. After the cremation, I rewrote the introduction of the UNI story: ‘The man who was Jawaharlal Nehru was now a handful of ashes.’ For me, he represented all that India was after Independence. In sixteen years he had built institutions, public-sector undertakings, and a polity that was open, democratic, and secular. Above all, he had been instrumental in giving the nation a constitution that would ensure the fundamental rights of individuals, which his daughter, Indira Gandhi, suspended eleven years later.

  For the cremation, priests were flown in from the temple town of Varanasi to chant Sanskrit mantras. Water was brought from the holy Ganga to be sprinkled over the body. Fragrant sandalwood was stacked over the pyre. As is customary among Hindus, the closest younger male relative present, Sanjay Gandhi, then 18 years old, lit the pyre.

  All this was in stark contrast to what Nehru had stood for. He had declared in his will, written a decade earlier, on 21 June 1954:

  I wish to declare with all earnestness that I do not want any religious ceremonies performed for me after my death. I do not believe in any death ceremonies and to submit to them, even as a matter of form would be hypocrisy and an attempt to deceive ourselves and others.

  That Nehru was opposed to religious mumbo-jumbo was narrated to me by his private secretary M.O. Mathai, who was one of the two signatories to Nehru’s will, and had served him for almost fifteen years until 1960. He blamed Indira Gandhi for disregarding his wishes. ‘This was all Indira Gandhi’s and officiating Prime Minister Gulzarilal Nanda’s doing; it was they who had earlier arranged at Teen Murti House (then the prime minister’s residence) the jaap for Nehru’s long life,’ Mathai said. A Delhi-based astrologer, who performed the jaap, claimed that Indira Gandhi ensured Nehru’s presence during these ceremonies.

  According to Mathai, Vijayalakshmi Pandit was also opposed to such religious ceremonies but ‘she was helpless’. When I inquired about this from Nanda, he said that the recitation of ‘the death-conquering mantra’ was done 4,25,000 times with Nehru’s ‘understanding’, and he would often attend the ceremony.

  Nanda claimed that the jaap did help lengthen Nehru’s life by four to five years. ‘Nehru would have lived longer,’ he said, ‘had he not taken a particular individual into his cabinet after his illness at Bhubneshwar.’ On the astrologer’s advice, Nanda said, ‘Nehru had tried to withdraw the name but by then the list had reached the president.’ Nanda was of course referring to Lal Bahadur Shastri. I did not believe Nanda because the prime minister could always have altered the list before the swearing-in ceremony.

  Tiruvallur Thattai Krishnamachari (TTK), who was a close associate and a minister in Nehru’s cabinet for almost a decade, once told me that Nehru had ‘become religious’ in his last days. ‘In 1954 he refused to go into a south Indian temple when asked to take off his shirt but at the time of his death copies of the Gita and the Upanishads were at his bedside,’ TKK said.

  Whether the Gita and the Upanishads are scriptures or philosophical treatises is a matter of opinion. For Nehru, as he once wrote, ‘there was a compelling reality about them’, and he considered them to have been written not by any supernatural power but by human beings, ‘very wise and far-sighted but nevertheless ordinary mortals’. He always carried with him a copy of the Gita and an abridged version of the UN charter.

  Was his religion godless like the Buddha’s because he found himself incapable of thinking of a deity or of any unknown supreme power in anthropomorphic terms? Mathai told me that if he adhered to any faith at all it was Buddhism. Otherwise, Nehru’s religion was like the Deist Movement in England, barely distinguishing God from Nature. Alternatively, was his religion merely humanism? A painting of beautiful Kullu hills adorned his study. André Malraux, a French intellectual and author told me in New Delhi that Nehru had once said: ‘It may be that Truth is my supreme value. I don’t know, but I can’t do without it.’

  Someone once asked him: ‘What do you think of God and man’s relation to God?’ Nehru reflected for a moment and then answered ponderously,

  It is a difficult question to answer precisely. Man’s conception of God itself is not fixed and constant throughout the ages. For example, God is conceived in the Old Testament as a disdainful, fearful father, as a wrathful creature, a punishing agent for every sin and sacrilege committed by Man. But in the New Testament, the conception of God changed. Here God is conceived as a loving, benign father; he is ready and willing to forgive you even if you commit wrong. This change in concept was a development that shaped man’s ideas about God throughout the course of human civilization.

  Agnostic or believer, people loved him. I was present at Nehru’s funeral, a dot in an ocean of mourners who had been swelling on the bank of the Jamuna in the rapidly-gathering gloom of 27 May 1964. A vast stretch of the riverside, including Raj Ghat, 300 metres from where Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru’s political guru, was cremated sixteen years earlier, was inundated with people. As smoke rose from the pyre, I heard the sobbing of thousands and watched their faces wracked with agony. Grief had fused us all – Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs – into a community of sorrow.

  I believed Nehru always chose soft options, making compromises when he should not have and was painfully slow in changing India’s economic contours which made poverty indelible. He was, however, my hero and I would rationalize the deficiency on the ground that he had to carry with him all interests, regions, and religions to keep the country united. Even so, I felt that after Patel’s death and before the rupture with China, Nehru had twelve years when he could have taken In
dia on the path of development and laid deeper foundations for a welfare state.

  There was too much of Gandhi in him to convince him that only through harmonizing different interests, characterized by him as a mixed economy, he could lead the country to rapid growth which, to use the phrase of my friend Raj Krishna, had remained anchored to the Hindu rate of growth of 3.5 per cent.

  A man of the world, a man of the masses, a master of the written and spoken word; innumerable images flashed through my mind at this death. I was stirred by his thoughts which combined the modern with tradition. I went back to his Discovery of India to read: ‘Life is a continuous struggle of man against man, of man against his surroundings; a struggle on the physical, intellectual, and moral plane out of which new things take shape and fresh ideas are born.’

  How Nehru would cope with poverty was the nation’s dilemma. I thought, and wished, he would follow Gandhi’s concept of self-sufficiency, with villages as the base. At the same time I wanted India to be a modern developed country like the US and UK with a large middle class with pronounced socialist policies. Was the Gandhian way of ushering in preeminence of villages possible, employing democratic, non-violent methods?

  Even as Nehru’s body lay at his residence, talk of who would succeed him began. The syndicate, as elderly Congressmen were described, was united behind Lal Bahadur Shastri, a minister without portfolio. Home Secretary V. Vishwanathan read too much into the succession battle, and sent a message to all state governments that there was great tension in Delhi. This was quickly followed by his directive that the security forces should take all precautions against subversive activities. Military officials and men were recalled from leave. This notwithstanding, there was never even a whiff of a coup d’etât.