by Kuldip Nayar
After devaluation, I found a deluge of statements, mere statements, by the US businessmen that they would invest in India in a big way and set up many ventures. Raw materials and spares that the Indian industry required were also released. Manubhai Shah, then commerce minister, told me: ‘It was we who flinched. Otherwise Washington was willing to give us $4,500 million it had promised for devaluation. Our problem was that we could not absorb all that money in industry which was at a nascent stage.’ Donor countries were also surprised to find that New Delhi was repaying the loans that they were willing to reschedule or write off.
The general impression was that India would have to abandon her socialist policies if it were to tie itself to the US. Hurt by such comments, Indira Gandhi explained that socialism did not become any less acceptable if it was achieved through foreign aid. The common man would suffer if foreign aid was rejected, she argued.
Because of devaluation, Kamaraj had Morarji Desai inducted in the cabinet. Kamaraj told me on the day the rupee was devalued, ‘I decided that there must be some person in the cabinet to balance her.’ Having successfully met the attacks on devaluation, Indira Gandhi thought of building a new house for the prime minister in the President’s Estate at Rashtrapati Bhawan but subsequently abandoned the idea in favour of moving into Teen Murti House. By then her proposal for a new official residence for the prime minister was before the cabinet. She absented herself from the cabinet meeting. Morarji Desai, by then deputy prime minister, told me that ‘at her instance’ he scotched the proposal. Nehru too had a proposal at one time. This was to build flats for ministers on either side of the road, now called the Rajpath, New Delhi’s lungs, from which he was dissuaded by his cabinet.
Because of its newfound pro-US bias, New Delhi found no objection to the proposal of American industrialists that in the fertilizer plants in which they would collaborate they would hold 51 per cent shares, as in the case of the Cochin Oil Refinery. One could see the new shift reflected elsewhere. At one time, the government had changed the title of a US film From Russia with Love to From 007 with Love so as not to offend Soviet sensibilities. Now Moscow’s protest that Dr Zhivago, a film relating to the days of the Russian Revolution, was ‘unfriendly and incorrect’ did not evoke any response beyond a couple of inconsequential cuts.
Asoka Mehta continued to follow Indira Gandhi but not Ashok Mitra, an angry liberal, who was her secretary when she headed the ministry of information and broadcasting. He leaked to me the news about Voice of America installing a transmitter in India, which appeared to be at Washington’s dictation, in return for aid. The reaction of Indira Gandhi’s own friends was unfavourable. Kamaraj rang me to confirm whether the news was correct. He was annoyed. It was given out that the deal with the Voice of America had Nehru’s approval, but this could not have been true because he had opted for a high-power medium wave transmitter from Russia on rupee payment.
Flushed with confidence after receiving US assistance, Indira Gandhi stopped at London and Moscow on her way back from Washington. At both places, she was told that devaluation was against India’s interest. What upset the Soviet leaders was the fear that Indira Gandhi might align India with the US. They showed their annoyance by telling her to implement the Tashkent Declaration which included talks with Pakistan on Kashmir. This came as a surprise to Indira Gandhi. She said that she was not opposed to a discussion on Kashmir so long as it was understood that the territory was an integral part of India. The Soviets had come a long way from their earlier stand that Kashmir was part of India and that India had only to ‘whisper’ and ‘we would be there’.
Indira Gandhi took the opportunity of talks with the Soviet leaders to check on reports that Russia was thinking of supplying arms to Pakistan and was assured that this was not true. However, the Russians had not stated the correct position because by then the equipment had already been earmarked for Islamabad. Nevertheless, Moscow repeated the line that it had tried to sell to Shastri: it would be in India’s own interest if Russia were to ‘retrieve’ Pakistan from China’s influence.
New Delhi followed up on Alexei Kosygin’s suggestion that they hold talks with Sheikh Abdullah. Ayub Khan had reportedly told the Soviet prime minister that if New Delhi could effect a settlement with Sheikh Abdullah, Pakistan might accept it. Sheikh Abdullah met Indira Gandhi but both chose to be cautious. If Morarji’s speech at Jammu at that time was any indication, the government was not willing to dilute Kashmir’s integration with the Indian Union.
New Delhi, however, realized that it was helpless to do anything in the state against those who in the name of ‘plebiscite’ worked against the country’s integrity and never sought separation which would fall within the ambit of law. The home ministry had another look at the Unlawful Activities Act. Woefully, it realized that it should have stuck to the original bill which empowered the government to ban a party or organization working against the integrity of the country. The Centre had at that time added the qualifying word ‘territorial’ before ‘integrity’ to placate the Opposition which feared that any demand for regional autonomy might be interpreted as a challenge to India’s integrity.
However, the fact that the legislation had specifically mentioned ‘territorial integrity’ did not discourage hostile Nagas and Mizos, against whom it was primarily directed, from continuing to fly the standard of revolt. Nehru would say that the Nagas were not ‘tactfully’ handled, which was true to an extent. What they had in mind was the ‘Coupeland Plan’ (1946) under which the hill tribes of the Indo–Burmese frontier were to be grouped into a separate British colony. The entire scenario changed when the British left without any specific announcement for the Nagas.
I was still heading UNI when K. Rangachari, resident editor of the Statesman, met me to ascertain whether I would be available for a job in his newspaper. I imagined he was offering me the post of political correspondent but to my surprise the position offered was that of resident editor who was to be second-in-command to Pran Chopra, selected to be the newspaper’s editor based in Calcutta, the Statesman’s headquarters.
The salary offered was more than double of what I was drawing at UNI. It was not so much the money as the opportunity to be the editor of a leading newspaper that excited me.
What made me delay my decision to quit UNI, which I had built from scratch with the help of ill-paid employees, was the close relationship I shared with the staff. The agency was financially weak; so precarious was the situation that if All India Radio, the lead buyer, did not send the subscription payment of a lakh of rupees, on the first of the month, salaries to staff were delayed. I always received mine two months late.
During the switch over in 1967, I met Dr Ram Manohar Lohia, the socialist leader. He had heard that I was joining the Statesman and chided me in Hindi about how I had not yet overcome my ‘love for the British even after their departure’. ‘UNI was something Indian and turning back on it was like leaving something of your own India,’ he said. I told him that the sponsors were not willing to put in more money which would have enabled me to increase the pittance that the employees were paid.
I met Lohia many months later when he was lying on his deathbed in a government hospital. He did not refer to UNI or the Statesman, only saying, ‘Kuldip I am dying because of doctors’. This proved to be true, in that his illness was incorrectly diagnosed.
I was able to persuade, not convince, UNI employees to let me go. They feared that the agency would not last after I left, but I knew their misgivings were mistaken. I went to say goodbye to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. She had already heard that I was joining the Statesman. She said: ‘Kuldip, maa kabhi bache ko bhi chorti hai [Does a mother ever leave her child?]’ I was overwhelmed by her remark and told her that UNI had made a niche for itself.
In contrast, the Statesman was a well-oiled machine, with the employees earning substantial salaries. On the very first day I realized it was a classy organization. I wanted some water which the peon refused to bring, inste
ad going all the way to the kitchen to ask someone to serve me water. The peon explained to me later that such chores were assigned to the people of a particular caste. Those walls crumbled but it took me some time to accomplish that.
What made me happy was the start of my weekly column, called ‘Between the Lines’, which I have continued for the past forty-five years with a break of a year when I went to London as India’s envoy. My first book was also entitled, Between the Lines, a title which the distinguished editor Chalapathi Rao (editor of the National Herald for over 30 years) had suggested.
In the Statesman I did not have to run after ministers to seek information. It was quite the other way round. Ministers were keen to see a speech or photograph of theirs in print. The newspaper enjoyed far greater prestige than its circulation warranted. A typical example was that of a union minister requesting me to publish his wife’s photograph when distributing prizes at a sports function. When I pointed out to him that I had seen the photograph used in a Hindi newspaper that had over three times the circulation of ours, he said that the intelligentsia read the Statesman.
When in the Statesman I founded the All-India Urdu Editors’ Conference and said in my presidential address that any language that was not linked to people’s livelihood was bound to suffer. I wanted it be declared the second language in UP, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, and Delhi.
Urdu was my first love. I do not think one ever gets over his first love. I had begun my career in journalism in Urdu and I was keen that the language received recognition in India which was jettisoning it on the ground that it was the language of Pakistan. True, Urdu was Pakistan’s official language but it was born on the outskirts of Delhi. It represented the Ganga–Jamuna culture, our secular ethos.
The central government appointed several committees to find out how Urdu could be helped to flourish. Many Urdu academies were opened but they, as my friend Ahmad Faraz, one of the leading Urdu poets of the subcontinent, after visiting the academies, described as mere ‘translation bureaus’. This is true even today because very little original work comes out of these academies. Pakistan spends less than India on the development of Urdu and the language alas continues to languish there. Maulana Azad once said that Urdu lost its case after Partition. This happened because the language was associated with a particular religious community. There is a deep-seated prejudice against Urdu and the Hindutva elements consider anything done for its promotion to be tantamount to appeasement of Muslims.
Within a month of my joining the Statesman, Pran Chopra, the deputy editor, was appointed the newspaper’s first Indian editor. The proprietors, a group of industrialists, including the Tatas, created a trust, above the board of directors, to ensure the freedom of the newspaper, and particularly of the editor who was responsible for its contents. Motilal C. Setalvad, former attorney general of India, was appointed the trust’s chairman.
The board also appointed a managing director, C.R. Irani, who chaired the board. He was a nephew of Nani Palkhivala, lawyer to the Tatas. The trust was authorized ‘to safeguard the policy’ which was laid down by the board of directors ‘to uphold the principle of democratic government as set out in the Constitution of India and specially the fundamental rights provided by it’. The trust was also intended to protect the ‘reasonable customary and necessary editorial freedom given to the editor by the board’.
The board was not happy with Pran’s editorial policy, and particularly unhappy about the news disseminated in relation to the United Left Front (ULF), which came to power in West Bengal in 1967. J.R.D. Tata and Palkhivala met Setalvad and argued that Pran’s handling of news and editorials ‘showed a communist bias’. They wanted Chopra to go. The trust discussed the comments and the news with Pran Chopra and came to the conclusion that he had ‘in no manner’ deviated from the newspaper’s policy.
Then all of sudden, the trust was abolished. Palkhivala, as a lawyer, knew that the board he chaired could do so. Though Setalwad regretted the trust’s dismissal, he could not legally do anything to save it.
The disbandment of the trust and the way it was effected gave the Statesman a bad name. During that period I ran into S. Sabawala, a journalist who had become Tatasons director. He too was worried about the criticism of the Statesman for having wound up the trust without giving any reason. He had heard of this in the drawing rooms of New Delhi. I told him that the Statesman’s prestige would be retrieved if Pran Chopra were to stay on as its editor. He had to be persuaded to take back his resignation which he had submitted in protest against the disbandment of the trust. His argument was that by doing so the board had unilaterally changed his conditions of service. The following day I received a call from Bombay that J.R.D. Tata would like to meet me. It was obvious that Sabawala had spoken to him. I rang Pran to inform him that JRD had summoned me to Bombay.
JRD was sitting with Palkhivala when I was ushered into his office. I could make out that both had been discussing the Statesman when they were told about my arrival. No pleasantries were exchanged, and JRD came straight to the point and asked me why Pran was leaving the newspaper. I said that Managing Director Irani and Pran had not been getting along well. Pran’s fears were that in the absence of the trust, Irani would dictate terms and interfere in the editorial freedom of the editor. His experience of Irani had not been pleasant and he would rather leave now than be forced to do so later.
JRD looked at Palkhivala and said: ‘I told him [Palkhivala] that I did not like the look of that man [Irani].’ Palkhivala first remained silent, but when JRD repeated his criticism of Irani, Palkhivala said ‘Why should Irani interfere. I will see to it that he doesn’t.’ JRD was not satisfied. He asked me if I knew the terms on which Pran would agree to continue to remain as editor. I told him I did not.
JRD said that he had a proposal which I should convey to Pran Chopra: JRD would deposit in his (Pran’s) personal account the salary and other emoluments for the unfinished period of his contract (probably two and a half years). Pran Chopra would then be entitled to decide how and when his editorial freedom had been curtailed. Whenever he felt that, the money deposited in his account would be his. He could walk out without explaining how he felt that his editorial freedom had been violated.
I thought it was a fair proposition: Pran would himself be the judge. After returning to Delhi, I telephoned him to convey JRD’s proposal. He was not interested in the offer. I pleaded with him to accept it because I thought it was fair and left it to him to decide whether he had been restricted as editor. I also told him that the paper needed him at that time to provide it with the stability that it required. I did not know the reason for his rejection. True, Irani was an opinionated individual with strong right-wing views while Pran was liberal and tended to tilt towards the Left, a point of view that went down well in West Bengal.
The case went to court. Pran would have fought on but withdrew it when the judge told him that the case would drag on for years before a decision was forthcoming. Pran was paying lawyers from his own limited resources while Irani was fighting on behalf of the Statesman.
JRD was disappointed with Pran’s rejection of his offer and took no further interest in the newspaper. Pran was dismissed and he launched the Citizen in Delhi. I attended the launch party and signed the register of invitees. Whether Irani liked it or not bothered me little. However, the Citizen flopped.
A few years later when Irani pushed me out of the Statesman, I wondered whether my presence at the launching of the Citizen had remained with him, but there was yet another reason: I had refused to be party to Irani’s scheme to oust N.J. Nanporia whom he had brought in as editor from the Singapore Times. Nanporia was a professional and had no commitment to any view, but Irani’s ambition was to control both the editorial and the managerial side. That was why he removed first Nanporia, then Amalendu Das Gupta, and finally Nihal Singh.
Irani succeeded, but in the process he ruined the newspaper, probably the best in India. He saw to it that the pap
er was run by mediocrities who were ‘his men’. He eventually came to own the newspaper because the proprietors were so scared of being associated with the Statesman during the Emergency that they sold their shares to him at their face value. I met him to buy some shares when he said he had no money to pay all the owners. He bluntly refused, although he gave me a pair of cuff links for my ‘role’ during the Emergency.
JRD rang me up twice when I was still the Delhi editor. Once he requested me not to publish anything against the Shah of Iran. The latter had telephoned him to protest over a story that portrayed him in poor light. I recall JRD telling me that he had never faced as much trouble in running any of his ventures as he had in associating himself with the Statesman, and wondered why the news had spread that he owned the newspaper when in reality he had less than 10 per cent of the shares.
The second time when JRD called me was regarding our printing in the Delhi edition, of Rajinder Puri’s cartoon on Indira Gandhi watching a puppy, the press, barking at her. (Nanporia had stopped using him in Calcutta.) JRD phoned me and said that he had received a call from Indira Gandhi objecting to the cartoon. Puri, who had been given the rank of assistant editor, was a regular employee of the newspaper. I did not say anything to him. A few days later, Puri drew a cartoon showing Indira Gandhi in a haughty mood, again with a dog barking in the background. I did not use the cartoon. He was so angry that he accused me in his book of suppressing the freedom of the press by withholding the cartoon. I never told him about JRD’s telephone call.
The Statesman’s circulation of the Delhi edition was only 30,000. We commissioned a study to examine why the circulation was so low. We found to our embarrassment that the general complaint was that its English was too difficult, requiring readers to consult a dictionary. The general impression was that the newspaper was edited by the British. The truth however was that there was no British hand involved with the Delhi edition. There was an Englishman in Calcutta but he too had been there for over thirty years and had become an Indian citizen.