Big Book of Malice

by Khushwant Singh

  Ask yourself what was the object of this high-powered exercise? It could not have been the concern for the health of a, man they did not know. All they wanted was to show to the people that they were deeply concerned. Not to be left out of the picture, Opposition leaders also turned up at various hospitals to go through the same ritual. If heads of hospitals and clinics wrant to avoid this VIP nuisance, they have to impose a single regulation: ‘No press photographers or TV cameramen are allowed inside the premises.’ Once convinced that their visits will get no publicity, the VIPs will automatically stop visiting hospitals and shedding crocodile tears. It is as simple as that.

  It would be interesting to know whether any of these VIPs bothered to call on S.S. Sidhu who lost seven members of his family in the Uphaar tragedy. I think not. Sidhu was so crazed with grief that he flailed press photographers and reporters and told them to get out—fast.

  28 June 1997

  On losing a friend

  For many years we were the closest of friends. Our jobs took us to distant cities. Nevertheless, we remained in constant touch. The closeness lasted for over thirty years. Then he turned indifferent and I felt hurt. He was one of the people I wrote about in my Women and Men in My Life. He was hurt by what I had to say about him. That had not been my intention. Nevertheless, when I heard of his death on the morning of Sunday, July 6, I was overcome with remorse and sorrow. Our past association haunted me for several days and nights.

  Our friendship began in 1932 when we found ourselves in the same class in Government College, Lahore, studying the same subjects and living in the same hostel. Chetan was a very pretty boy: fair, with curly hair and dreamy eyes.

  He started seeking my company more to protect himself, not so much because he shared common interests with me. We ate our breakfasts together, attended classes together, played tennis in the afternoons and at least twice a week, went to the movies. During vacations he went home to Gurdaspur. We wrote to each other. He was into writing poetry a la Gurudev Tagore. He sent his compositions to me. It was soppy stuff, but I was flattered.

  Chetan had to count his rupees. One year he put himself up for election for the secretaryship of the Hindu-Sikh dining room, and, as was the custom those days, had cards printed soliciting votes. I could not understand why anyone would want to oversee cooking and feeding arrangements in a college hostel mess. I discovered that catering contractors bestowed extra favours to secretaries by not charging them for meals. The elections were as fiercely contested as those of the college union. Chetan won.

  After we passed out of college we found ourselves together in London. I was studying law; he came to take a shot at the ICS. We both took the examination. Neither of us made the grade. Chetan could not afford to stay on in England and returned home.

  We resumed our friendship when I came back to Delhi. He and Iqbal Singh were the only two friends I invited to my wedding in October 1939. A year later, when I set up practice in Lahore, Chetan spent many months of the summer in my flat. Though till then he had not found a job, he was highly successful in winning the favours of young ladies. His technique was simple. On hot June afternoons he would go in his overcoat carrying a single rose in his hand. When the recipient of the rose asked him why he was wearing an overcoat, he would answer ‘because it is the only thing I possess in the world.’

  One who fell heavily for this approach was the ravishing Uma, daughter of Professor Chatterjee. We celebrated their engagement in my apartment. That very evening I caught him flirting with another girl. He was never a one-woman man. Uma married him, had two sons and then left him to become Ebrahim Alkazi’s second wife. Chetan shifted to Bombay to try his luck in films. There he shacked up with Priya, a good twenty years younger than him. He did his best to turn her into a film star. He did not succeed.

  Chetan did not make his mark as a director or an actor as his obituaries now claim. He made one good film Neecha Nagar; the rest were second-rate, and earned him neither fame nor money. He did an excellent job reproducing the light and sound show at the Red Fort in Delhi for which I had written the master script in 1965. He got assignments from the Punjab government which he was unable to fulfil.

  It was not his successes or failures in the films that affected my affection for him; it was his indifference towards me when I moved to Bombay to take up the editorship of the Illustrated Weekly of India in 1969. I was there for a whole of nine years and expected to see a lot of Chetan. I saw something of my other college friends: Balraj Sahni, B.R. Chopra, Kamini Kaushal and even Chetan’s own brother Dev Anand. But Chetan, with whom I looked forward to resuming my close friendship, did not bother to contact me even once. Only a month or so before I left Bombay I ran into him and his lady friend at a party. Very airily he said, ‘Oi Sardar! Tu milta hee nahin—O Sardar! You never meet me.’ I exploded with anger, ‘Besharam! You shameless creature!’ Is this the way you fulfil obligations of a forty-year-old friendship?’

  His lady friend tried to protest and invited me to come over. ‘I don’t want to set foot in your home or see this fellow’s face again,’ I replied and stormed out.

  Now I regret what I said as I recall Chetan with tears in my eyes.

  19 July 1997

  Talk, talk—do nothing

  I.K. Gujral mentioned the problem of increasing population in his first speech in Parliament as prime minister. Renuka Chaudhury referred to it in her first interview after taking over as minister of health. On July 11, full-page advertisements appeared in all national newspapers (the cost must have run into lakhs, if not crores) warning us to face the truth that if we keep on adding 45,000 baby boys and girls (thirty-one every minute) to our population every day, we will have sixteen million more to feed, clothe, house, educate and find employment for, every year. We have been hearing and reading this sort of thing year after year. And yet we go on breeding recklessly like rats and rabbits without concern for the generations to come and the future of the country.

  Isn’t it time for the government and the political parties to take practical steps to prevent this suicidal lemming’s race to damnation? There is only one answer to our population problem: prescribe limits to reproduction and pass a legislation making it compulsory. There will be nothing dictatorial or undemocratic about it if it is passed by our Parliament. The simple provision would be to require every married couple to undergo sterilization after the birth of their second child voluntarily if possible, forcibly if they are reluctant.

  At the same time we should disenfranchise all men and women who hereafter have more than two children, and make them non-eligible for all elective posts—from membership of panchayats, zilla parishads, state legislatures, Parliament, right up to those of the Vice-President and President.

  This will be a challenging task. But if our leaders are not up to it, they don’t deserve to lead the country. Let Renuka Chaudhury take the lead by introducing legislation to this effect in the next session of Parliament. All enlightened Indians will support her and she will win the gratitude of the nation and have her name put down in our history books.

  19 July 1997

  Laloo’s antics

  The day Laloo Prasad Yadav finally agreed to step down from the chief ministership of Bihar, I happened to be in Jaipur. I had gone there to speak on problems facing the country. No one was interested in my analysis of the legacy left behind by Pandit Nehru, Indira Gandhi and the prime ministers who followed them. All they wanted was my reaction to Laloo’s antics, how a man like him should have been handled and what should be done to him. About his antics, I echoed Harkishen Singh Surjeet’s opinion ‘drama khel raha hai’. How he should have been handled, I have no idea. I marvel at his cockiness and arrogance; he never refers to himself as mein (I) but hum, the royal plural. The way he struts about gives the impression that he is still the badshah of Bihar. Like everyone else, I took sadistic pleasure in seeing his pride humbled. It is truly said that Tride goeth before a fall.’ About his having nominated his wife Rabri Devi as lea
der of the party and chief minister of the state, all I could say was ‘how sweet’!

  What should be done to Laloo to meet the ends of justice? That is not for us but for the courts to decide. If they find him and his colleagues guilty of the charges framed against them, they deserve punishment which will be a lesson to others who may be tempted to fiddle with public money. But I think it is only fair that Laloo should not be singled out for punishment till others against whom similar charges are still pending for a much longer time, are tried, absolved or punished. The Bofors case is still pending, the Hawala scam, St. Kitts forgery case, Pathak’s allegations against Chandraswamy and Narasimha Rao and Sukh Ram’s unaccounted crores have yet to reach their final conclusions. At least nineteen members of Narasimha Rao’s government have still to clear themselves of criminal charges of large-scale corruption and forgery. Most of all, Narasimha Rao himself managed to rule the country for five years by bribing four members of Parliament to switch over to his side to win the crucial vote of confidence. Cases against them have been pending for a much longer time than the fodder scam against Laloo. Unless they are brought to trial first, the inevitable conclusion most people will draw is that they are picking on Laloo Yadav for reasons other than the desire to stamp out corruption.

  2 August 1997

  Not so golden a jubilee

  How does a fifty-year-old man whose vision is so impaired that he cannot see far beyond his nose, who is so hard of hearing that you have to yell words of advice in his ears, who has lost his teeth and can eat only soggy, mushy food, and whose guts have been eaten up by the cancer of corruption, celebrate his birthday? Does he have a chocolate birthday cake with fifty candles lit up before he cuts it? No, he is too asthmatic to blow out all the candles and is too diabetic to eat chocolate and cream. Do his children and grandchildren gather round and sing ‘Happy Birthday Bharat Papa, Happy Birthday to you?’ No, they do not. They would rather send him to a hospital to get him cured of his many ailments, or perhaps pray that he departs peacefully and lets them manage affairs of the country as best they can. In short, we may well ask ourselves what do we have to celebrate? Why all this hoo-ha when Bharat Papa (or Bharat Mata) is stricken with paralysis and on the verge of death.

  Make a quick balance sheet of our achievements and failures and the items on the debit side will far outnumber those on the credit side. On the credit side will be self-sufficiency in food and clothing, and the fact that we have been able to hold together as one nation. On the debit side, a galloping population rate which swallows up whatever we produce from our land and factories: We have learnt to live with shortages of every kind. Not enough schools, colleges, hospitals. Poverty and ignorance, violence and corruption have reached record heights. We have become a nation of one-eyed people led by the totally blind. Let us be more realistic. Instead of crowing over our non-achievements, let us take a hard look at where we went wrong. And instead of talking about it, do something about it.

  9 August 1997

  Banning and burning books

  When books are banned or burnt in public, one or the other of the following excuses are given for doing so: they are politically unacceptable to the government, they offend the religious sentiments of some community, or, they are pornographic. I oppose the proscription or destruction of books on any grounds whatsoever and regard these practices as medieval barbarism unworthy of any society which calls itself civilized. The only proviso I admit is that the State or one’s parents have the right to prevent boys and girls below a certain age from being exposed to explicit portrayal of sex in writing or illustrations.

  In the middle ages, the Roman Catholic Church not only banned books which went against its cherished beliefs (even though they were irrational), it also burnt them along with their authors. In more recent times, Nazi Germany banned books critical of fascist ideology and forced many authors to flee the country. In present day Communist China, books disapproving of the regime are destroyed and their authors put behind bars. Somewhat worse is the fate of authors living in countries where religious fanatics hold sway as they do in many Islamic nations like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Not only do they ban books but issue fatwas condemning their authors to death. In India, self-appointed censors of Sikh orthodoxy have not lagged behind; they have summoned scholars, declaring them tankhaias to be ostracized from Sikh society, making them recant and undergo punishment.

  Books are not banned or burnt in America or Canada, in England or in any European country; they are not banned in Australia or New Zealand. These countries are democracies and they regard the intolerance of views unpalatable to themselves as being undemocratic. So did leaders of our freedom movement, notably Bapu Gandhi and Pandit Nehru. By banning or burning books we do grave disservice to their memory and to the country. If members of our Parliament who indulged in this form of vandalism when they burnt Arun Shourie’s book on Ambedkar had thought of the harm they were doing to the country’s image, I am sure they would have desisted from doing so. Unfortunately, they only thought of pandering to a certain section of the vote bank. One effect of their thoughtless action will inevitably be an increase in the demand for the book. Truly had Emerson spoken when he said ‘Every burnt book enlightens the world.’

  When the British ruled the country, they banned books critical of their Raj, mainly those suspected of preaching Marxism. Among those that fell into their foolish net was Gurudev Tagore’s Red Oleanders simply because of the word ‘Red’ in the title. After Independence, our governments took to banning books suspected of blasphemy. They include Aghanand Bharati’s The Ochre Robe, Aubrey Menon’s Rama Retold, Wolpert’s Nine Hours to Rama and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. When I was abroad, I read all of them for the simple reason that they were banned in India. Pandit Nehru was right when he wrote, ‘human nature is notoriously perverse. One has to forbid a thing or taboo it to make it attractive.’ He was strongly against State censorship. ‘It is dangerous power in the hands of a government: the right to determine what shall be read and what shall not.’

  My dear countrymen, read books, criticize them as harshly as you like but raise your voices against the burning or banning of books by the government, the law courts, or an intolerant public.

  16 August 1997

  Crime and punishment

  There are almost as many cases of abduction and extortion of ransom in Delhi as there are in the rest of the country put together. The reason is simple: Delhi is an island of prosperity in the middle of a sea of impoverished villages, with a tradition of robbing the rich. Their ancestors robbed Mughal nobility, their descendants rob the nouveau riche found in abundance in the capital. While those who have been rich for some generations learn not to flaunt their wealth, parvenus display their possessions thus exposing their family members to criminal designs. One recent example was the abduction of ten-year-old Tarun Puri of Golf Links, barely a hundred yards away from where I live. It was carried out in the morning with dozens of people watching. Fortunately, the kidnappers were a bunch of idiots and the police were smart enough to nab them. Tarun is back home unharmed.

  A more glaring case was the kidnapping of Ninia Singh on July 19 from the entrance gate of her house in Noida. It took place at 5.30 p.m. and was witnessed by many bystanders. Ninia was hit on the head with an iron rod and pushed into a car. She was driven past police chowkies and the car was refuelled. Though dozens of people saw her lying bleeding on the rear seat of the car, no one came to her rescue. The kidnappers took her to their home. Neither neighbours nor relatives took any notice. ‘Yeh to inka roz ka dhanda hai (this is their daily business),’ remarked one of the women. Extorting huge sums in ransom has become the way of life of many villages ‘Jamna paar’—accross the river—in Ghaziabad district adjoining Delhi.

  Ninia was allowed to make two telephone calls requesting ransom. One was on a mobile phone (which can be traced). The other was from a public telephone booth. As instructed, she warned the person on
the other end that if the money was not sent, she would be killed. Her abductors lost patience and drove her towards a sugarcane field where they meant to finish her off. Then they had a flat tyre. There were some Muslim farmers working in the fields with a lady and her son supervising their work. While the abductors were busy changing the tyre, Ninia ran out of the car screaming for help. ‘Save me, I am a Mussalman. They are going to kill me.’ The appeal to communal passions helped. The farmers ran to her help and captured one of her kidnappers. The Muslim lady took Ninia home, cleaned her wounds, fed her and informed the police. Ninia is in fact, a Sikh.

  The point for serious consideration is what kind of punishment would fit the crime of abduction and extortion. The immediate response is ‘Hang them in public. Jail is not good enough for them.’ That, obviously, is not worthy of consideration. Where common people accept a heinous crime as a dhanda, and regard abductors as bread-winners (and perhaps heroes), the punishment should be exemplary and designed to disgrace them in the public eye. I am sure if the law is amended and public flogging added to the term in jail, it would have a salutary effect on the crime graph. Parade these gangsters through the lanes of their villages, tie them to trees under which elders of the village meet to gossip and smoke their hookahs, pull their pants or dhotis down to their ankles and lash them on their bare buttocks. That will knock out all their bravado and make them objects of ridicule in the society in which they live.

  23 August 1997