by Kuldip Nayar
As it was a Sunday, there was a congregation of nearly 2,000 Sikhs. They sat quietly, oblivious of what had happened at the entrance. On our way out, I was jostled so vigorously that I nearly fell. The security man rushed me to the car and my chauffeur, Avtar Singh, a Sikh, drove me off at break-neck speed. In the melee, I was unable to retrieve my shoes but my wife did. She and Salman joined me later at a Hindu temple where we were welcomed.
I wanted to visit a mosque as well but was advised to do so on a Friday. The visit did not eventually materialize because even after planning a reception in my honour, the Indian Muslims in London cancelled it. They did not want to stick their necks out as the community was strongly influenced by Pakistan. The former Indian deputy high commissioner to the UK, Azim Hussain, living in London, had warned me about the Muslims’ attitude.
The Pakistan high commissioner, Shahriyar Khan, was clearly solicitous towards the Muslims in London. His wife told us that they were reluctant to entertain Hindus in their home because the Muslims did not like it. However, the Muslims in Leicester, mostly Bohras, were quite liberal in their attitude. They invited me to inaugurate a mosque, a rare honour for a non-Muslim.
The gurdwara incident ruffled public opinion in India. Gujral rang me up and advised me to be cautious. The jostling I had received had a favourable fallout in the UK. The majority of Sikhs were generally critical of the demonstration staged against me because I was considered ‘sympathetic’ to them. I had in my writings condemned Operation Bluestar and the massacre of Sikhs in 1984. Soon after the incident, some leaders of the Sikh community met me at the high commission to apologize for the behaviour of the ‘boys’. The community wanted to make amends and therefore I was subsequently inundated with invitations from gurdwaras from all over the UK.
I found the Sikhs a community with moderate views. They had strong ties with Hindus, particularly those from Punjab. Operation Bluestar had, however, alienated the community which enabled those of an extreme persuasion to exploit the injured feelings evoked by the fact that those guilty of the 1984 massacre of Sikhs in Delhi and elsewhere had not been brought to justice.
I was startled by the initiative of the Sikh Human Rights group within a fortnight of my arrival. One of its representatives met me at my house after consulting some militant organizations and argued for ‘a negotiated settlement of the Punjab problem’. I told him that the talks could take place on condition that the solution arrived at would be within the parameters of the Indian constitution.
Two days later he sent me a long letter which stated: ‘Your government’s recent statements indicating its willingness to talk to any Sikh organization regardless of its political policy opens up the avenue of talks as a serious and useful possibility.’ Despite my telling him that no settlement was possible at the expense of India’s unity, he said in his letter that ‘the government has to show a genuine attitude towards talks by avoiding putting constraints regarding allegiance to the political structure or constitution of India’.
When he met me he told me that the proposition of a ‘status within India’ was acceptable to them provided there was a guarantee of the Sikh identity, its culture, and its traditions. I told him that the two Houses of parliament might be willing to pass a resolution providing assurances regarding Sikh culture and identity. He would not say whether the resolution alone would suffice. I asked him to clearly spell out his demands to enable me to forward them to New Delhi. He did not return, nor did I report the letter or the meeting to New Delhi.
The turning point came at a huge Sikh congregation in London. I appealed them to differentiate between the government and the country. I told them that if the government failed to fulfill its promises, such as bringing the perpetrators of the 1984 massacre to justice, it could be defeated in the next elections. After all, Indira Gandhi had been swept out of power at the polls. If, however, I argued, India as a country was harmed it would be as much their loss as of other Indians because the country belonged to all, be they Hindu, Sikh, or Muslim. Sacrifices made for the country by Sikhs were no less than those made by others. This went down well with most of the people.
When this was followed up by multi-entry visa for people of Indian origin in the UK for five years for five pounds there was great jubilation. The Sikhs came in hordes to India and returned happy. This atmosphere was a setback for the Khalistanis who, I thought, could have been defeated had there been speedy justice in the 1984 pogrom. Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd congratulated me for my initiative to reach out to the Sikhs. He said he had vainly suggested the same thing to my predecessor. I could see the initial reservations of the Sikhs gradually melting away. The open-door policy had worked.
I also took up the revision of the ‘black list’ bearing the names of Sikhs debarred entry into India to whom the high commission had no authority to grant a visa without individual reference to the home ministry. At my request, two officers came from New Delhi who, together with the commission’s officers, reduced the list of 500-odd to 20. Even the extremists admitted that Hindus and Sikhs had once again begun mixing freely, which had more or less ceased post-1984.
Indeed, the atmosphere had been transformed. This was apparent at a meeting where, from an audience which was 90 per cent Sikh, I collected $ 15,000 (Rs 7 lakh) for the flood victims of Andhra Pradesh.
Another change I made, and instructed my staff accordingly, was not to interfere in the local affairs of the Sikhs. On one occasion a few Sikh leaders approached me for financial assistance to pursue their legal case to wrest the gurdwaras from the hands of militants. I refused to interfere and did not allow officials in the commission to do so. The community was, in any case, making its own efforts to clean up its affairs.
News stories on my contacts with the Sikhs and my visits to gurdwaras did not elicit a favourable reaction from Congress MPs, and the party’s supporters in the UK. A couple of them even went so far as to issue a statement criticizing me for ‘placating the Khalistanis’. The former minister of state for foreign affairs, K. Natwar Singh, said in a statement that I was behaving as if I was accredited to Southall, where most of the Sikhs lived, rather than to Whitehall. It was the kind of comment I expected from someone like him.
What upset me most was Inder Gujral’s telephone call on this issue. He said there was an increasing impression in parliamentary circles that I was hobnobbing with the Khalistanis. He should have known me better because both of us had been close associates in the Punjab Group which had helped the Akalis and the government to hold talks. It was evident he was under pressure, and wanted me to issue a contradiction because some Congress members sought to raise the issue in parliament in the form of a short-notice question.
I issued the contradiction, ruling out talks with ‘supporters of Khalistan until they abandoned their demand for secession’. The storm in Delhi blew over but some bureaucrats, who had disapproved of my opening the front gate of the high commission to Sikhs and their accessibility to me, continued to be hostile.
The Gujaratis in the UK outnumber the Punjabis and are a disciplined community; richer but quieter. I attended my functions organized by them and I found women serving food which they had cooked themselves. At one of the functions I met Chimanbhai Patel, the then Gujarat chief minister, who had come to London to sell bonds for the construction of the Narmada dam. The name of Mahatma Gandhi went down particularly well in Gujarati circles. I often shared with them my experience of attending Gandhi’s prayer meetings in Delhi.
My first political report from London was on the defeat of the Conservatives in a by-election in mid-Staffordshire within days of my arrival. I had a feeling this might prove similar to the Allahabad by-election after which V.P. Singh’s caravan began rolling till Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress government fell in 1989.
At a dinner hosted by a leading Gujarati solicitor, S.H. Ruparell, in honour of Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister Geoffrey Howe, I raised many eyebrows when I said that I did not wish to see the end of Conservative rule
during my tenure. As it happened, Margaret Thatcher lost her prime-ministership just before I left London.
Tony Benn, a Labour radical, told me that those wearing ‘grey suits’ had advised her to quit. I recalled one of our conversations when she said that political opponents ‘within your own party stab you in the back’. Something like that happened even though she was otherwise on the top of the world because the UK and US had won the Cold War and the Soviet Union had collapsed. When I congratulated her for defeating communism, she said: ‘Mr High Commissioner there is yet another enemy before the West named Islam. I am therefore not surprised when Washington and London are going out of the way to pick on the Islamic world.’
Since the middle of 1989 the party had slumped in the opinion polls and its image had been mauled. Margaret Thatcher’s own personal popularity was at an all time low. She had administered harsh medicine after becoming prime minister, ruthlessly cutting subsidies and remorselessly privatizing state-owned industry inviting a head-on collision with the trade unions. In so doing, she had succeeded in eradicating many of the ills afflicting the British economy. The price for this had however been high in terms of unemployment and a divided nation.
What seemed to have worked in the 1980s and saw the UK grow more rapidly than all its European competitors barring Germany did not seem to be succeeding any longer. Margaret Thatcher and the Conservatives thought they had found a formula for inflation-free growth were shocked when 1989 proved to be a year of considerable economic hardship.
How far I had left journalism behind dawned upon me when I heard about the hanging, by the Iraqi authorities, of the London Observer correspondent, Farzad Bazoft. I wanted to issue a statement to protest the murder of a journalist who was only doing his duty but Salman Haider advised me to desist from any public comment. He appreciated my feelings but reminded me that I was no longer a journalist and that anything I said could be misconstrued. All I had intended was not a policy statement, but just an expression of grief over the execution of a journalist.
After Salman’s advice, I checked with Gujral, who sternly told me not to issue any statement that might annoy Iraq. He said over the phone that he was trying to improve relations with Iraq following Iran’s uncompromising attitude on Kashmir. I thereupon tore up the statement I had prepared. I, who had once defied Indira Gandhi on press censorship just fretted and fumed, and eventually remained silent.
It was very apparent that whenever the British government spoke about the state of Jammu & Kashmir, it only mentioned Muslim-majority Kashmir, none of the other parts of the state figuring anywhere, neither the Hindu-majority Jammu nor Buddhist-majority Ladakh.
The British press did not discuss the integration of Kashmir with India but only UN resolutions concerning the Kashmir Valley. Forever critical, the press took us to task for disturbances in the Valley. I joined issue with the Independent, a leading British daily, sending it a letter for publication which, inter alia, said:
What India is defending in the State is not its territory alone. It is fighting to preserve the principle of secularism which sustains the Indian democratic structure. India did not accept the partition of the subcontinent on religious grounds. Nor will it now accept the demand that a Muslim area can secede from the Union on the basis of religion … your editorial has missed the real point: how does India reconcile a religious demand of the five million Muslims in the Kashmir valley with its secular dispensation where the Muslims number 110 million, in excess of Pakistan’s population? This is not the “politics of weakness but the politics of commitment to secularism”.
Pakistan issued a contradiction challenging my thesis of secularism. Aware that Margaret Thatcher had recently visited Moscow, I asked her about her meeting with President Mikhail Gorbachov. She said he had asked her how he could stop the two republics of the Soviet Union slipping away from his hands. She said she had told him to visit India and see how people of different religions, castes, and regions had been able to coexist for centuries. Then she turned towards me and asked: ‘Mr High Commissioner, what do you attribute it to?’ It was a question for which I was entirely unprepared.
I told her that we in India did not see things as either black or white. We believe that there is a grey area which we continue expanding, and that is the essence of our pluralism; the glue that sustains it is a spirit of accommodation and sense of tolerance. She nodded in agreement, but in my heart I felt that the glue that united such sentiments was drying up and that in India the spirit of tolerance was gradually dissipating. A delegation from the local Soviet embassy met me a few days later and expressed its desire to visit India. A large team from Moscow visited New Delhi to study our experiment with pluralism.
Soon after the end of the Emergency, I was invited to one of the RSS shakhas (cadres). The entire programme was Hindu in content and anti-Muslim in spirit. The sanchalaks (members) did not like my speech because I emphasized on our secular ethos and the pluralistic core of our national struggle.
The British foreign office had a largely Col. Blimp attitude, nose up and treated India patronizingly or cursorily, seldom normally. Once when the Gujarati community sought special facilities of travel for their head, the British foreign office made me attend a junior level meeting to underline the point that even for a minor concession the high commissioner must come in person to plead the case.
The worst example was that of Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd summoning me to his office and alleging that India was smuggling arms into Iraq in ships in which we were transporting food supplies on humanitarian grounds. I denied the allegation, saying that the US and UK forces had already searched our ships twice and had found nothing. Still not convinced, Hurd said that they would maintain a close watch, not a pleasant remark to make to a friendly country.
There were some other instances that made me feel that India was being intentionally slighted. When I took up the case of the return of the Koh-i-noor diamond to India, the response was an imperious regal negative, with the British government disinclined to enter into a debate on the subject. However, I argued with its foreign office about how Lord Dalhousie had forcibly seized the Koh-i-noor from Dalip Singh, the son of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, who originally owned it and wore it on his turban. Dalhousie was so secretive about the spiriting away of the Koh-i-noor from India that he took the diamond through the South Africa route rather than the regular one through the Suez.
I cited to the British government the UNESCO resolution that colonizers must return the relics seized by them to their countries of origin. I failed to make any headway because the British government just stonewalled the issue. However, one individual who sustained my effort was our servant Murli, who had accompanied us to see the Indian jewels in the Tower of London. He told me after seeing the Koh-i-noor: ‘Babuji ise zaroor le jana. Yeh heera hamara hai. [Sir, we must take this diamond back because it is ours’].
In fact, the British have in their custody thousands of relics that should rightly be the property of the subcontinent. When the Nehru Gallery was opened at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1990, during the last days of my tenure, only a part of the treasure in the museum’s basement was displayed. I asked the then curator how much had been displayed. She said: ‘Only 5 per cent.’ I offered to take some of the relics to India at our expense, promising to return them safely after they had been displayed in various parts of India. I was brusquely brushed aside as if the objects were their property. I did not find our government particularly concerned about the issue, as if they had reconciled themselves to the loss of objets d’art like the Koh-i-noor. When I subsequently took up the case as MP with Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh he appealed to me not to press my point in the interest of good relations between New Delhi and London.
An even more reprehensible act on the part of British government was the distribution of books, documents, maps, and other historical material in the India Office Library among various libraries in the UK. The India Office Library held all the original docume
nts concerning the 150-year-long British imperial rule and the national struggles waged against it. A treasure-trove of documents about India and its history, extending even to the Mughal period and earlier, they provided essential source material for historians and researchers in single venue. Now they are all scattered.
It is true that India and Pakistan could not agree on the division of the India Office Library and its documents but that did not mean its appropriation by the UK. There was a time in the early 1980s when India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh jointly demanded all the material stored in the India Office Library, but the British government dragged its feet and linked the division of the library with other problems.
I once suggested to the British foreign office that they hand over all the material to Pakistan with which we and Bangladesh would negotiate a share. There was no response. The British foreign office has no intention of returning the most valuable material which attracts research scholars from all over the world to the UK. Even the photostat copies we obtained of some documents for the Indira Gandhi Centre in Delhi were acquired at a huge price.
I found too many Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) men at the high commission working under sundry designations. Although they were headed by a soft-spoken poet, Keki N. Daruwala, who later became director of RAW, their methods were dubious. I asked Salman what their role was. His cryptic reply was: ‘They keep an eye on us.’ I suggested to New Delhi that their number be cut, but was told that the agency was directly under the control of prime minister who did not favour any reduction.
I was receiving top secret reports on the Sikhs from the RAW, but after reading two or three reports I discontinued them because I had read more or less the same thing a few days earlier in the Punjabi newspapers.