Devil's Advocate

by Karan Thapar

  Devil’s Advocate

  THE UNTOLD STORY

  KARAN THAPAR

  For Mummy, Daddy, Waffles and Abo

  CONTENTS

  1.My Unexpected Arrival

  2.The Cambridge Union Society, and Meeting Benazir

  3.Charlie, and My First Job

  4.My Wife, Nisha

  5.Starting a Career in Television

  6.Benazir Becomes a Close Friend

  7.Getting to Know Sanjay Gandhi and Aung San Suu Kyi

  8.Rajiv Gandhi and My Return to India

  9.Four Memorable Prime Ministers

  10.L.K. Advani: The Friendship and the Falling-out

  11.Three Stories about Pranab Mukherjee

  12.When I Made Kapil Cry and Sachin Talk

  13.A Hop, Skip and Jump—and a Bomb Blast

  14.Disillusionment with Amal Clooney and Barack Obama

  15.The Wrath of Ram Jethmalani

  16.An Acrimonious Interview with Amma

  17.Why Modi Walked Out and the BJP Shuns Me

  Epilogue

  A Final Word

  Index

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Copyright

  1

  MY UNEXPECTED ARRIVAL

  I

  ’m not sure if it was a bright and sunny day in Srinagar, but 5 November 1955, the day I was born at twenty minutes to 9 in the morning, was a Saturday. My arrival was not what my parents had expected—after three daughters and twenty years of trying and failing to have a son, they were convinced that I would be another girl. In fact, they had already arranged to leave their ‘fourth daughter’ and a nanny with my grandmother when they would depart six weeks later for a year in London.

  Mummy was even reluctant to accept either the doctor’s word or Daddy’s that she’d finally had a boy. She thought they were hiding the truth from her. So as soon as she got a moment on her own, she undid my nappy to check for herself. Unfortunately, she got caught in the act and was mercilessly teased thereafter!

  Once my parents accepted the fact that their long-sought-after son had arrived, everything changed. The nanny, Abo, and I were part of the family that sailed from Bombay. This little anecdote is an example of the upbringing I have had and, for some, an indication of the sort of person I would grow up to be.

  My eldest sister Premila, who was a year old when Abo first joined us, couldn’t pronounce the nanny’s proper name, Dharmo Devi. And her married name, Havaldarni Khazan Singh Salaria, was even more complicated. So Premila called her Abo and the name stuck. In turn, Abo taught me to call Premila Bobo, the Dogri word for elder sister!

  I adored Abo, as did my three sisters, Premila, Shobha and Kiran. By the time I was born she’d been with us for nearly twenty years. By the time she died it was over half a century. All four of us were brought up by her and I guess each one was spoilt in the same way. But I suspect that my relationship with her was different, for one significant reason. By the time I was born, my parents were a lot older, and that accounted for the difference. Daddy was a senior general in the Indian Army, commanding XV Corps. The demands on their time meant that I was placed more in Abo’s charge than my sisters had been when they were young.

  Abo would wash, scrub and dress me. She’d supervise my eating. At night I’d insist on sleeping in her bed. Except for the fact that she wasn’t, she was like a mother to me.

  When I was young, I often wondered why my parents had named me Karan. One of the explanations given was that my third sister, Kiran, was determined that her brother should be called Karan. Perhaps she thought there was something apt about names that almost rhymed. But it turns out that the idea of calling me Karan was proposed by a dear friend of my mother, Maharani Tara Devi of Kashmir. During the years my parents spent in Srinagar, Mummy had become close to the maharani, who used to call her ‘Generalni’. It was her idea that if the child my mother was expecting turned out to be a boy, he must be named after her son Karan Singh. In fact, when I received the G.K. Reddy award in 2018, Dr Karan Singh, who was presiding over the ceremony, regaled the audience with this story. As he put it: ‘I’m to blame for his name!’

  Given that my parents were quite old when I was born (Daddy was fifty), it was perhaps inevitable that I would be pampered. Rarely did Daddy scold, and there was nothing that he would deny me. He was unfailingly indulgent. He seemed to enjoy my occasional naughtiness, as if it was proof that his son was spirited and not a sissy.

  There was, however, one occasion when I was five when he did try to discipline me. I’m not sure what I had done, but I remember sensing that he would not be forgiving. At the time, we were living in Army House in Delhi and he was the army chief. As I saw the anger on his face I scarpered out of the room, ran down the corridor and out of the house. Daddy ran behind me. When the guards on duty saw us, they joined the chase.

  This hilarious situation ended when I stumbled in the garden, giving Daddy and the guards the opportunity to catch up. But instead of the slap I’d expected, he picked me up in his arms and roared with laughter. Even though my behaviour had been unforgivable, my spunk had won his admiration.

  After I was packed off to boarding school at the age of eleven, it was usually Daddy whose eyes would fill with tears when I would walk into his room to say goodbye before every school term. The paradox of the situation would lift my downcast spirits. His parting words were always the same: ‘Remember,’ he would say, ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.’ I could never fathom why he thought his son was a tedious bookworm!

  Mummy was different. She consciously attempted to make up for Daddy’s softness by putting on a tough exterior. Consequently, although everyone could see that she adored her son, I knew she wouldn’t forgive my pranks and lapses.

  ‘You’re ruining the boy!’ she would admonish Daddy each time he laughed away my bad behaviour.

  ‘Oh come on, Bimla, he’s only a child!’

  ‘And he’ll remain one,’ she would riposte, ‘if he doesn’t learn how to behave himself.’

  I guess that’s why I was put into school when I was barely two-and-a-half years old. Perhaps Mummy also feared that in the company of three older sisters, her precious son would start behaving like a girl. So the nuns at Loreto Convent, Tara Hall, Simla, were prevailed upon to take me into their kindergarten. This, of course, meant that I began my education as a convent-school boy!

  I’m not sure how much I learned, but I’m told that my daily hollering would bring the school to a stop. Kiran, who was sitting for her Senior Cambridge exams at the time, was repeatedly summoned to calm me down. Mummy, however, was adamant about keeping me in school and, despite the chaos I created, I was unfailingly sent every day.

  A few years later, when Daddy was the Indian ambassador in Afghanistan, I was admitted to the American School in Kabul. It was the only English-speaking educational establishment in the country. It was here that I acquired a fondness for peanut butter, which my parents put up with and which, consequently, I’ve retained all my life. However, Mummy didn’t take too kindly to the Americanisms I picked up. She wasn’t happy with the ‘gee whizzes’ and ‘aw shucks’ I would expostulate when I came home but, no doubt, she hoped I’d grow out of them. But as soon as she heard me pronounce aluminium as ‘aloominun’ she decided that the situation needed immediate rectification. There was no way she would let her little boy end up with a Yankee accent!

  So I was packed off to Doon School in Dehradun. Mummy organized my departure with the exactitude of a sergeant major. At the time I almost thought she was happy to be rid of me. Daddy, on the other hand, took to his bed. He didn’t demur, but he wasn’t at all convinced that his little boy needed to be sent to boarding school.

  I can’t den
y that I didn’t like the idea at all. As I waited in the airport departure lounge, surrounded by my mother and sisters, the Indian Airlines manager, a well-built gentleman called Anwar Malik, came up and addressed me. He thought he was speaking to a happy eleven-year-old looking forward to a big change in his life. ‘Well, young man, everything under control?’

  ‘Yes,’ I bawled. ‘Everything but my tears.’

  Whoever said that schooldays are the best days of your life was more than an ordinary pessimist. Logically, he must have been close to suicide!

  These days I look back upon Doon with fondness and nostalgia but as a schoolboy I wasn’t exactly ecstatic to be there. Of course, I would never have admitted it; that wouldn’t have been the done thing. But every time the school train would pull out of New Delhi railway station at the start of another term, I would mentally compose a letter to my parents to tell them why I didn’t want to continue at boarding school. The arguments I thought of were long, detailed and—or so I felt—undeniable. I was certain they were convincing.

  The letter, however, never got written. Once I reached school, there was so much to do and so many friends to catch up with, I would postpone writing to the next day and then the day after that. Soon, so much time had elapsed that it felt silly to go ahead. ‘I’ll do it next term,’ I would promise myself. But that day never came. I guess the charms of the school’s seventy-acre Chandbagh estate, nestling in the Doon Valley and just fourteen miles from Mussoorie as the crow flies, eventually captivated every student no matter how homesick. It made you forget home and become completely immersed in your tasks at school. Since every boy was in the same boat, you soon learnt to sail together.

  To tell the truth, I was a bit of a nerd at school. I knew I was undistinguished at sport and never tried to prove otherwise. Be it cricket, hockey or football, I carefully and deliberately kept away. And let me admit, I’m confident that that could only have helped the school or my house team!

  My interests were not just non-athletic but individualistic. I acted, debated and took part in elocution competitions. I joined the editorial board of the school weekly and, eventually, rose to become its chief editor. Yet in all of this, I was unashamedly competitive. In my mind I was running a race and always wanted to be both first and best.

  Vikram Seth, who was three years my senior and the Jaipur House debating captain, attempted to teach me the tricks of his trade. Seated cross-legged on a rickety wooden school chair, not unlike a meditating Buddha, he’d make me endlessly repeat a speech I had been told to learn by heart. As I did so, he would listen intently with his eyes screwed shut.

  ‘Put more feeling into what you’re saying,’ he would occasionally interrupt. ‘Your delivery has to make people listen to you. At the moment you sound like a broken-down record player.’ When I tried to do as he said, Vikram would swiftly change his mind and say, ‘Don’t be so dramatic. You’re sounding hysterical. Stop overdoing it.’ However, when I tried to achieve the elusive golden mean, all I could get out of him was: ‘Hmmm … let’s start again.’ And so we would go on and on and on.

  Vikram would literally wear one out. But I guess practice makes perfect. If nothing else, this ensured that Jaipur House team members knew their speeches so well that even stage fright on the night of the inter-house competition couldn’t drive them out of our minds. Perhaps this is also why today, I have an infinite capacity to learn by rote. Alas, once the need to remember is over, I seem to forget pretty promptly too.

  If not at the time then years later, as a television anchor, I realized the value of Vikram’s instructions. Speaking carefully and deliberately, and learning to pause for effect, can often make the difference between an effective presentation on screen and a garbled one. However, what Vikram didn’t teach us—how could he, his aim was to ensure that we spoke fluently and effectively—is that sometimes, not saying anything at all is the most powerful statement you can make. And it’s a particularly useful trick for an anchor. It often encourages guests to carry on talking till they end up saying things they never intended to.

  The ‘low’ point of my acting career in school was a performance of Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man. Another Vikram—this time Raja Vikram Dhar—was Sergius, the intended hero. I was Louka, the maid. Instead of falling for the beautiful and eligible daughter of the house, Sergius falls in love with the flirtatious maid. This misplaced romance reaches its climax when he embraces her. As Vikram Dhar sought to do so, the stockings I had worn started to fall. The more passionate he became, the faster they slid down to my ankles. Vikram, of course, was blissfully unaware of this denouement.

  ‘Look, look, look, Vikram,’ rose a loud, collective shout from hundreds of Doon School boys seated on the steps of the school’s amphitheatre, known as the Rose Bowl. ‘This girl’s got horribly hairy legs. How can you kiss her?’

  This so disconcerted Vikram that, forgetting himself, he looked down at my bare legs and visibly winced, before he resumed what he was supposed to be doing, which was embracing Louka. For the next few weeks Louka became my new name before, mercifully, everyone reverted to KT, my original nickname.

  I’ve always been a bit reserved—or perhaps shy?—but at school, this did not prevent me from making firm and lasting friendships. The two friends who have stayed with me for decades thereafter are Praveen Anand, who was a year senior but later became my best man; and Analjit Singh, who was nicknamed Crack at school but whom I’ve always known as Manu. I have a third good friend, Prathik Malhotra, who was also at school with me but paradoxically, in those days we weren’t close. At that time our worlds were rather different, although they’ve converged considerably since then. Today I see a lot of Pertie, as I call him, but I have few memories of things we did together at school.

  I’m not sure why but in my last year, to my surprise—and, no doubt, to everyone else’s dismay—my housemaster, Gurdial Singh, appointed me captain of Jaipur House. In those days it was exceptional for a non-sportsman to be chosen for this honour. I can only guess that perhaps Guru, as we fondly called him, was determined to show that there was more to achievement than sporting prowess.

  At this point my dislike of boarding school gave way to the thrill of being house captain. After four years of being treated as a bit of a wimp—and laughed at because I couldn’t kick a ball straight and had no idea how to hold a bat—it wasn’t just unusual but exciting to be in a position to exercise power over my erstwhile detractors. Even though I tried to be modest, I can’t deny that I enjoyed being top dog. Indeed, there must have been many occasions when that was blatantly obvious.

  In the 1970s, the acme of achievement for most Doscos—as students of Doon School call themselves—was the sports blazer. It was what every sportsman wanted most of all. It also left the rest of us feeling both jealous and cheated because there was no equivalent for non-sportsmen. Then, in my last year, the headmaster of the day, Col. Eric Simeon, created an equivalent for scholars. He called it the scholar’s blazer, which sounds odd but was rather appropriate because it was devised as a direct rival to the sports version. I was awarded the first one, which meant that I got to design what scholar’s blazers would look like. At the age of fifteen, it was a heady experience.

  The sports blazer was navy blue and double-breasted. Some people felt that the scholar’s version should be markedly different. Red and single-breasted with three buttons was one suggestion, but it didn’t appeal to me. I opted for a black double-breasted blazer. It was different from the sports blazer, but from a distance they were almost indistinguishable. I’m delighted that nearly fifty years have passed but the colour and style have stayed the same.

  In my time, most Doscos headed for college after finishing school. I ended up at another school. This time it was Stowe, a stunningly beautiful if academically undistinguished public school in England. My Senior Cambridge results had won me a scholarship to complete my A-levels in Britain, and Stowe became the first stage of what ended up as a long stay in that country
.

  Set in an eleven-hundred-acre estate just outside the little town of Buckingham, Stowe was not intended to be a school. It was built as the Duke of Buckingham’s country seat. The architect was Sir John Vanbrugh and the gardens were landscaped by the famous Capability Brown. Later, both men combined to build Blenheim, but Stowe is aesthetically more disciplined and, therefore, a more pleasing product. If nothing else, every Stoic—the understandable if unfitting name that the school has given its students—leaves with an unparalleled experience of beauty. Eton and Harrow pale in comparison to the splendours of Stowe.

  It was here that I first discovered and came to love English eccentricity. This was entirely because of Patrick Filmer-Sankey, a lanky, blond semi-aristocrat with whom I shared a study. His mother was the actress Adrienne Corri. No one ever spoke of his father and it was assumed that Patrick was illegitimate. I never asked and, consequently, was never told.

  In 1972, the year I joined Stowe, Stanley Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange was the big hit of the season. For many, its most striking scene is when Adrienne Corri is assaulted by the psychopath Alex. Few, if any, at Stowe brought this up in front of Patrick but on Saturdays, once classes were over, the media would descend on him, demanding to know what it was like to watch his mum being raped onscreen.

  Patrick was utterly nonchalant. ‘Honestly, old chap,’ he would reply, ‘no different to last week when you asked the same question.’ The truth was that Patrick cared more about newts, his pet obsession, than his mother’s recent if substantial fame. For the rest of Britain, the film was a popular watch. Patrick, however, pretended that he found it long and dull.

  Patrick was also an incorrigible prankster. One Saturday night in summer, after picking the chapel keys out of the chapel prefect’s pocket, he purloined the headmaster’s secretary’s Mini Cooper and drove it up fifty steps to the chapel entrance, then down the aisle and parked it where the altar was meant to be. The next morning, a Sunday, when the headmaster, Mr Drayson, strode in, followed in formal procession by the staff and students, he discovered a yellow Mini parked at the centre of the chapel nave. More than humiliated, the headmaster was apoplectic. The police were summoned, but they had no idea how to get the car out of the chapel. That’s because no one could work out how it had got there in the first place. Patrick’s ploy—which he kept a secret—had been to use the chapel kneelers to create a ramp over the stairs. The police, in ignorance but also in desperation, simply drove the car down bumpety-bump-bump over fifty stone stairs and wrote it off.