Beyond the Lines: An Autobiography

by Kuldip Nayar

  I was disappointed with the nonchalant atmosphere in the Rajya Sabha. Both the content and quality of speeches had fallen very substantially since I had covered the Rajya Sabha some 45 years earlier. Most members would look at the press gallery whenever their turn came and often spoke only for effect. A few even distributed a prepared copy of their speech among journalists.

  I was also disappointed that even the best presentations went unreported or were cursorily dismissed by the media. Once the chairman of the Rajya Sabha consulted me on how they could get the proceedings reported in the media. I told him that it was largely dependent on the reporters covering parliament or the space a newspaper devoted to parliament on a particular day.

  I suggested that meetings of the parliamentary standing committees be thrown open to the press to motivate greater coverage. Both the Speaker of the Lok Sabha and the chairman of the Rajya Sabha opposed the idea. I could see little logic in their rejection because the proceedings of standing committees were recorded verbatim, including the testimonies of bureaucrats, experts, and other outsiders, and placed on the table of the House, along with the report. Therefore, the argument of secrecy did not hold.

  Somnath Chatterjee, the Speaker during those years, did some PR exercise and invited editors and senior journalists in batches to his house to persuade them to carry the proceedings in parliament. Nothing came of the exercise. A noisy, boisterous House still made a far better story than a serious, well-researched presentation by an MP.

  During his tenure, Chatterjee did pioneering work in inviting intellectuals, legal luminaries, and other eminent persons to the three round-table conferences he convened to discuss the situation in the country. The public never learnt about such an exercise which was a serious attempt on the speaker’s part to diagnose the nation’s ills. How the conditions prevailing in India could be improved was the subject of the conference I attended. In my presentation I dwelt upon how the total negation of morality from politics had adversely affected all aspects of life in India.

  Somnath Chatterjee and I became quite friendly. He confided in me how hurt he was when the Communist Party of India (Marxist) unilaterally expelled him and cancelled his membership of the party. The fault ascribed to him had been that he had presided over the debate on the nuclear energy agreement with the US. The CPM was totally opposed to any such understanding with the US. He wondered how he could have avoided presiding over the debate when he considered the issue crucial for the nation. He could not have run away from the responsibility of maintaining decorum when he saw how hopelessly divided the House was. He said he would have carried out the party’s fiat to resign after the fate of the bill had been decided. I believe the decision to expel him was that of the hard-line Prakash Karat, and in consequence the CPM lost an honest and dedicated leader of the masses.

  I invited Chatterjee to speak at the function I held to release my book Without Fear on Shaheed Bhagat Singh’s life. He was very complimentary about the book and said it was the work of someone who had lived through the ups and downs both of the freedom movement and of the march of free India. ‘In more ways than one, Shri Nayar has been one of the activists in that march and one who has walked by the values that our Founding Fathers cherished.’

  I was a member of the Standing Committee on Home Affairs when it was entrusted with the Right to Information Bill (RTI). We discussed it threadbare and I was constantly in touch with Aruna Roy, a pioneer of the Right to Information movement to learn what she thought of its provisions. I defended her points of view at the committee.

  Many of Aruna’s suggestions were incorporated in the bill. Sometimes I consulted her over my mobile while at the meeting of the standing committee. The bill did not fulfill all her expectations. She advised me to accept whatever was offered so that the country would at least have some legislation to establish a citizen’s right to information.

  When some of my suggestions were accepted I left it at that. I had not, however, anticipated the revolutionary effect the act would have in bringing about some transparency in the government. I knew there were some loopholes but I had never imagined that officials would exploit those to keep most secrets under wraps, on the plea that the discloser of this or that piece of information was not in the ‘public interest’.

  A few years earlier Aruna Roy had invited me to Bhilwara in Rajasthan where she and some villagers were sitting in a dharna to demand the right to information. I sat in the burning sun to demonstrate my solidarity with what she was doing.

  Subsequently, I participated in many other agitations for the same purpose. Twice or thrice, I headed the delegation to meet the then state Chief Minister Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, to demand access to details of expenditure incurred on projects in the rural areas of Rajasthan. I told him how his own engineers had appeared before the public in certain villages and made a clean breast of their dishonesty and admitted to having pilfered funds allocated for a particular project. Bhairon Singh did nothing about it.

  Many months later Shekhawat met me to inform that the demand we had made had already been granted in the Gazette notification he had brought with him. I have never been able to resolve the mystery of the notification because if there had been one he would have shown it to us much earlier.

  I used the RTI facilities in 2008 when I wanted access to the Henderson Brooks inquiry report on the 1962 border debacle with China. This was written by two senior army officers, Lt Gen. Henderson Brooks and Lt Gen. Prem Bhagat. Their report is nearly fifty years old and yet the government has kept it under wraps.

  The government got away under cover of ‘public interest’. Nowhere in the world has the army been able to deprive the public on facts on such an important chapter in India’s history for such a long period under the cover of secrecy. It is a pity that the Central Information Commission comprising two retired civil servants, Wajahat Habibullah and M.L. Sharma, were unable to rise above the hangover of their loyalty to the establishment. They rejected my plea to make the report public. Even so, I would say that Wajahat Habibullah has expanded the contours of the act. I have disagreed with him sometimes but there was no doubt about his commitment to transparency.

  The non-disclosure of the report confirms my view that the army in India is a sacred cow. The public, particularly the media, is so circumspect when it comes to discussing the armed forces that even mild criticism is avoided, lest it should adversely affect the ‘morale’ of the armed forces. This craven attitude has allowed the armed forces to get away even with murder.

  The commission’s verdict was so palpably wrong that it went against the grain of intelligence. It considered the issue of the India–China border to be ‘alive’ because of the ‘ongoing negotiations’ between the two countries. It did not want to lift the lid from a scandal of cowardice and arrogance. The commission should be aware that the negotiations began long before the hostilities, and were in progress when I was information officer with the then home minister, G.B. Pant, in 1957.

  The former chief of the army staff, General V.P. Malik reacted appropriately to the withholding of the report. He publicly criticized the judgement, arguing that it was not in the public interest to keep the 1962 report secret. He said that both weaponry and tactics had undergone an enormous transformation since those days so there was no question of secrecy in the national interest.

  My feeling is that as the responsibility for the India–China war had been laid at Nehru’s door the government was unwilling to make the report public. It is amusing that Justice Hamoodur Rahman should lay the blame on the army, not politicians for Pakistan’s defeat in Bangladesh while the Henderson Brooks Commission headed by a former army officer absolved the men from the services and held politicians responsible. A war lost because of the failure of the army and the then rulers’ ineptness can neither endanger external nor internal security. My appeal against the order at the Delhi High Court is still pending.

  When the bill to spell out the control over CBI came before the home affa
irs parliamentary committee, I was still a member of it. The Chief Justice of India J.S. Verma had proposed in a hawala case an independent Directorate of Prosecution (DOP) control the CBI. No political party – all of them were represented in the committee – wanted the CBI to become autonomous. I was disappointed when Justice Verma’s proposal was rejected and administrative control of the government was endorsed. So much so, that the committee restored the Single Directive which the Supreme Court had thrown out. The Single Directive meant that the government’s permission was required before initiating an enquiry or action against joint secretaries and officers above them. There is hardly any minister who does not use the CBI for his or her party’s interests. Details of the 2G Spectrum scandal, now revealed by the CBI, shows how ministers flouted all rules in the allotment of licences and were in league with corporate houses.

  At the standing committee on home affairs we also discussed Kashmir and visited the state once when Pranab Mukherjee was still the chairman. However, it was disappointing that no one from the Hurriyat, the Bar, or the students met us. Even so, we wrote a long report, underlining the state’s ‘permanent’ integration with India. The committee was reluctant to venture beyond the beaten track.

  Farooq Abdullah, who was the state chief minister, had done better. Leading the National Conference, he got the state assembly to pass a resolution that Kashmir should return to the status it enjoyed immediately after its accession to India in 1951. The resolution reiterated that New Delhi would only exercise control over foreign affairs, defence, and communications, the three subjects which the Maharaja of Jammu & Kashmir had ceded to the Centre when signing the instrument of accession. The standing committee was unhappy about the resolution but even more so about the violence that had begun overtaking the valley. The alienation was so palpable that I could taste it.

  While in Srinagar, I received a call from Prime Minister Vajpayee to request Farooq not to press the state assembly resolution. I met him over breakfast and conveyed the request which he accepted. I wondered why New Delhi was not willing to honour even the terms of the instrument of accession. How then could there be any meeting point with the Hurriyat which had demanded azadi.

  However, Vajpayee never consulted me on Pakistan. In fact, one day, when intervening in the debate on the general budget he made an observation relating me and Pakistan. I had gone to the Notice Room of the Rajya Sabha to make an urgent call. In my absence Vajpayee looked toward my vacant seat and said: ‘Where has he gone? To Pakistan?’ Some leftist members protested his comment, and told me about it when I returned to my seat. Vajpayee responded that it had been a jocular remark. Even so, the anti-Pakistan feeling was strong in the BJP. Vajpayee was an exception because he realized that without an equation with Islamabad he would not receive the attention he sought from world leaders.

  The party’s bias was clear from the uproar an observation of mine evoked during a speech by Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani. He was blaming the ISI for the minutest disturbance in any part of India. Standing up in the House, I said the reaction in Pakistan was no different. Whenever there was even a tyre burst on any road they blamed RAW. The anger voiced by the BJP members to my observation was so noisy and prolonged that I was at a loss to understand why this was so. They demanded the deletion of my remark from the parliamentary proceedings, and the chairman ordered this to be done.

  I was shocked when the BJP’s unofficial organ, the Pioneer, demanded my impeachment the following day. I knew that it was a command performance because the editor was nominated to the Rajya Sabha by the BJP government. Even so, I wrote to the newspaper to register my protest against the charge of India’s betrayal in an editorial. The newspaper published my letter along with two others, one in my support and another against.

  I also sent a complaint to the Privileges Committee of the House, arguing that the newspaper had violated a member’s right by demanding his impeachment for views he was at full liberty to express. Najma Heptullah, deputy chairperson, was the head of the committee. For months I did not hear anything about my privilege motion. When I asked her about it, she cursorily remarked that it had been dropped because the editor had expressed regret. I said it was surprising that I had not been summoned by the committee and that its decision had not been communicated to me as was the practice. She did not heed my protest. For the first time I felt that even the privileges committee had given a judgement to suit the ruling party’s position. I was therefore not surprised at all when the BJP gave her a Rajya Sabha ticket.

  I got many threatening calls from Hindu chauvinists. I reproduce part of one letter which I received: ‘I have been going through your articles for the last several years and have concluded that opposing Hinduism is your only and only “motto”, which certainly is not expected from journalist of your calibre.’

  Almost a decade later I was attacked for having attended a seminar convened by Ghulam Nabi Fai in Washington. He had been arrested as Pakistan’s spy working for ISI on its Kashmir agenda. Those were the days when Washington and Islamabad were distancing from each other and asking their respective intelligence agents working in their countries to leave. This was a fallout of Osama Bin Laden’s killing in Abbottabad at the hands of US navy SEALS.

  I had been called a pro-Pakistani earlier but this time at least one television channel working for aman (peace) between the two countries characterized me as an ‘anti-India intellectual’. I took the criticism as an instance of their ventilation of prejudice. I was unaware of who was financing Fai when I attended the one-day conference held at Capitol Hill. Some hot-headed Kashmiris, who have settled in Middle East, brought before the meeting a resolution to support Kashmir’s azadi. I vehemently opposed it, as did the other three Indian participants. All that happened was the issue of a statement urging upon India and Pakistan a peaceful and amicable resolution of the Kashmir issue.

  I do feel, however, that the Indian mission in Washington should have warned us against attending the seminar which they knew about. I had in fact contacted the embassy much in advance and shared details about the seminar.

  What however surprises me is that all journalists go on free and lavish junkets organized by the US, UK, Germany and other countries without compunction but when it comes to Pakistan there is a deep prejudice. If it is a question of ethics, then all hospitality from other countries, including our own, should be refused but double standards prevail.

  I found in the Rajya Sabha that the BJP was out to polarize the country and convert it from a secular to a Hindu state. The BJP was forever seeking any issue to communalize the atmosphere because that is their fundamental agenda. To them Pakistan is an enemy country. I do not agree with this formulation. True, Pakistan is intransigent but it is a neighbour with whom we have to live in peace, recognizing its sovereignty and independence of action. India and Pakistan have already fought three wars but neither has totally supervened. Now that both the nations have nuclear weapons the question of an all-out war doesn’t arise. Even so, some fanatics and the Hindutva brigade want to wage a war but they too will one day have to realize that there is no alternative to peace.

  A proposal before the committee on information was whether foreign equity should be available to the media. This question was confined to the press because television channels had already entered into contracts with foreign networks. I argued that foreign equity was of no benefit to India because the Indian press was inferior to none. Foreign journalists were no better than ours. At that time I carried the day. I found almost all the members, particularly Chairman Somnath Chatterjee, on my side.

  On the virtually negligible opposition side was my friend, the late Narinder Mohan, editor of Jagran. He, however, had the last laugh because the craze for globalization made the Congress government to agree some years later to 26 per cent equity for foreigners.

  In fact, all this began when Manmohan Singh was finance minister in the Narasimha Rao government and N.K.P. Salve was minister for information and broadcast
ing. I was able to persuade Salve to postpone the proposal for foreign equity in the mass media till after the polls which were due. He agreed and the press got a breather because the Congress lost the elections. It was, however, a different story altogether when the Congress returned to power. Foreign equity was one of the economic reforms which the party was proud to undertake.

  One regrettable aspect of the standing committees’ tours was its extraordinarily lavish life-style. Members were accommodated in 5-star hotels, provided with personal cars, and presented with gifts, all at the expense of one or other of the public-sector undertakings. I pointed out to Chairman Somnath Chatterjee that this was a waste of public funds and members should stay at the MLA hostels in various states. The chairman was not happy with the way things were conducted but rationalized the practice by saying that if members enjoyed luxury once in a while I should not object. Several years later, he wrote against the waste of public funds by the standing committees.

  I had completed almost two-third of my tenure when terrorists attacked Parliament House on 13 December 2001. There was no business in the Rajya Sabha on that day and, as had been the case the day before, the chairman adjourned the house till Friday morning. I was making my way towards the exit near the Rajya Sabha when I remembered I had to take a form for a short-notice question. The Notice Office is just a few yards away from the entrance to the Rajya Sabha.

  I initially ignored the few shots I heard, but then the shots continued uninterrupted and seemed to be coming from more than one direction. I was more curious than afraid. I rushed to the veranda that runs between the offices and the outer stone wall of Parliament House. There were security men running up and down. One of them said openly, ‘We have been asking for arms but the home ministry has been rejecting our demand.’