More Salt Than Pepper

by Karan Thapar

  I would suggest that Vikram write another book but this time of the sort he likes to read. I don’t know for sure what tomes lie by his bedside but I can safely guess that a man who writes with such power of description could not be satisfied with John Grisham or Tom Clancy. And when he does – I refuse to shelter behind the silly conjunctive if – it will be a great book.

  9 October 2000

  A Comforting Thought for 2001

  Flicking through the pages of a book can bring back long- forgotten memories. It’s like opening the door to a locked room and rediscovering its belongings. They may be familiar but they can also feel new. Old memories are not dissimilar.

  Last Wednesday, as I turned the pages of the sumptuously produced commemorative volume marking the 75th anniversary of the Hindustan Times, the door to the past snapped open. The book is called History in the Making and I strongly recommend it. Prem Shankhar Jha’s essay on the history of the HT is fascinating. I had no idea it would be so rich and absorbing. But it’s the pictures that are truly haunting. There are two I’m particularly struck by. The first is of Jinnah in a rickshaw in Simla with a solar topee on his head and a half-finished cigar in his left hand. The men around him are wearing a fez and seem to belong to a different century. The other photograph is of Pothan Joseph’s departure from Delhi after resigning the editorship of the paper. The year is 1937 and Joseph is standing on a railway platform surrounded by Sham Lal and E. Narayanan, two of the other greats of this profession. At the time Joseph drew a salary of 500 rupees a month. Narayanan earned just Rs 180.

  I suppose it was the salaries that did it. Before I realized what was happening my mind transferred back in time. As I passed into a reverie I saw myself entering the Hindustan Times building for the first time. I was twenty-four, back home researching for my D.Phil., and the year was 1979. It was my first association with this paper.

  In those days the editor was Hiranmay Karlekar and as I climbed the stairs to his office my heart beat furiously. I had telephoned and asked to meet him. I wanted to write although I wasn’t sure what or even in what style. But I had a commission from the Spectator in London and I felt I could also get one from an editor in India. I was, I suppose, acquiring brownie points for my CV. I was investing in the possibility of a future career.

  ‘Come in, young man,’ Karlekar greeted me from behind his desk. In fact, in 1979 he was a young man himself but as I walked the long distance from his secretary’s office to the chairs in front of his desk he seemed intimidating. I’m not sure if he asked me to sit down. At least to begin with I don’t think he did.

  ‘Yes,’ he boomed after a while.

  I wasn’t sure how to begin. Why would the Hindustan Times be interested in pieces by me? What possible qualities did I possess to recommend myself? Wasn’t I simply trying my luck and hoping for the best? In which case, what should I say? To admit to the truth seemed unwise.

  So I did what I often do. I spoke. I started, continued, carried on and on, injecting enthusiasm and passion, contrived conviction and youthful zest, whenever I thought each would help, and, of course, I smiled a lot. I tried to be convincing and likeable.

  ‘Hmmm,’ he said from behind the enormous desk. At the time I had not seen anything quite as big.

  I waited hopefully, expectantly, impatiently.

  ‘Hmmm,’ he said again. And for all I know he probably repeated the sound a few more times. Now what sort of answer was that? Was it the start of a positive response, an indication of rejection or was he thinking of something else?

  ‘And do you expect to be paid?’

  To be honest I hadn’t thought about it. I certainly had not come to offer my oeuvre for free but nor had I any expectations of making a fortune. I assumed the discussion, if any, would be about my capacity to write or the paper’s desire to publish my efforts but not about the quantum of remuneration.

  ‘Let that not be an obstacle,’ I replied trying to minimize the problem by a display of magnanimity. I really wanted to write and if the only way to do so was for free, so be it.

  ‘Sit down, young man,’ Karlekar said, smiling for the first time in ten minutes. His eyes also smiled, although at the time I was too nervous to notice. In the weeks that followed, I learnt to judge his moods by those revealing liquid pods.

  ‘Never undersell yourself and never offer to write for free.’ He sat back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. As I would later discover that was another habit.

  ‘If we publish anything you write, we’ll pay at the same rate we pay everyone else. Is that okay?’

  Of course it was. There was no way I was going to dissent. And so my career in journalism began. Over the next six months – it was a long spell of research and the Hindustan Times was an inviting escape from the damp and dark innards of Sapru House library – I wrote frequently. My ramblings – for that is what they were – ranged from domestic controversies to pompous thoughts on Britain, visits to Afghanistan and a juvenile attempt to understand Pakistan.

  After a bit Karlekar asked me to write leaders. I was stunned. I’d never done one before and I wasn’t confident that my opinions were worthy of such treatment. No doubt I expressed myself freely, even strongly, but to put all that down in a leader and expect people to read it and possibly respect it was different.

  I should have demurred but instead I said yes. I’ve never missed an opportunity and when it is gifted – as this was – I grab it. In time Karlekar offered me the use of one of the assistant editor’s cabins located on the paper’s prestigious second floor. It was meant as a grace and favour offer but I embraced it totally. I stopped visiting Sapru House altogether and instead would while away the day at the HT. It felt great.

  Of course, not a word I wrote ever made it to the top of the leader column. Usually mine was the third throwaway piece. But on a few occasions I crept up to second position. On 1 January 1980 – a Sunday, if my memory is correct, and the first after Mrs Gandhi’s election victory – I woke to read myself pontificating both from this centre point as well as from the columns of the op- ed page. Nothing has given me a greater sense of achievement. I think that’s probably true even today.

  Six months later my research ended and I returned to Oxford. I could never have imagined that after a decade – virtually to the day – I would be back at work in the HT building, this time a proper employee, with a legitimate office and a secretary all to myself. At the time few people knew of this earlier association.

  Today I suspect the number is probably negligible. In fact, until the pictures in the Hindustan Times commemorative volume reminded me, it had slipped my mind. But I now realize that I’ve been writing for this newspaper for twenty years and a little bit more. I feel good about that.

  23 December 2000

  Secrets from the Past

  I had no idea a diary could be so fascinating. To be honest, I’ve never kept one, I haven’t read many and I didn’t finish Anne Frank’s. But at the moment I’m engrossed in Field Marshal Ayub Khan’s. It’s a 599-page book sent by his son Gohar. Even though it’s published thirty-three years after Ayub’s death, I have to admit I’m hooked.

  Let’s start with the pictures. There are 110 but what stands out in each and every one is how dashing, well-dressed and suave Ayub was. These days few officers are gentlemen or vice-versa but Ayub was definitely both. My favourites are of him shaking hands with Mao, standing in a shark’s skin dinner jacket beside Ike, sitting at the Elysee with de Gaulle, striding out with Jackie Kennedy and patting Lyndon Johnson on the cheek. As a general’s son I can tell you they don’t make them like this any more!

  However, it’s the political revelations that are spellbinding. Although I’m still skimming through the book I’ve already come across seven different references to intelligence leaks from India. If they’re credible – and why would a man lie to his diary, particularly if what he’s confiding is not for immediate publication – India, it would seem, was a leaky sieve.

  Re
ad the entry for 1 July 1967: ‘We are now in full possession of India’s plans of attack against East and West Pakistan.’ Or this from 12 April 1968: ‘The Director of Military Intelligence came to see me and showed a copy of the latest Indian plan of attack … (its) well-made and is designed to bring overwhelming force against us … we shall have a hard task in meeting this challenge.’ And then, a few months later, on 16 July: ‘(General) Akbar showed me a copy of the offensive plan of the 1st India Corps against West Pakistan. It has been marked out in great detail, right down to the battalion, especially the crossings and bridges over the Ravi.’

  Even when India discovered that Pakistan had details of its war plans, Ayub’s diaries show that Pakistan found this out as well. This is what the field marshal writes on 11 October 1967: ‘The Director of Intelligence brought me certain documents indicating that the Indians had become suspicious that we have some inkling of their plan of attack on West Pakistan. They had, therefore, changed their plan, but told their commanders to continue simulating the original plan for the purpose of deception’. It seems our defence ministry and army headquarters were riddled with Pakistani spies!

  Two years ago, Ayub’s son, Gohar, claimed his father had given him the name of an Indian director of military operations from the 1950s who had sold the country’s war plans to the Pakistanis for 20,000 rupees. At the time this was dismissed as a silly, if not pathetic, lie. However, a few journalists like me tried to take Gohar Ayub Khan seriously. We quizzed him about the six officers who had served as DMO in that decade. They were brigadiers Manekshaw, Daulet Singh, R.B. Chopra, K.S. Katoch, D.C. Mishra and Amrik Singh. But Gohar Ayub Khan refused to name the one. If I recall correctly, Pranab Mukherjee, who was then defence minister, dismissed the allegation as laughable. But now I wonder. Does Gohar know something we don’t?

  Equally absorbing are Ayub’s opinions of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. He was just twenty-nine when Ayub made him minister of commerce. Bhutto rose to become foreign minister before he was sacked in July 1966. The diaries suggest Ayub was both fascinated and repelled by him.

  Ayub says Bhutto was sacked because ‘he started drinking himself into a stupor and led a very loose life’. Calling him ‘a clown’, Ayub recounts how he discovered after their parting that ‘he (Bhutto) had volunteered to spy for the USA’. A few days after Bhutto took over as president of Pakistan, Ayub predicted he would ‘come a cropper … in any case the government will be that of the goondas, for the goondas’.

  No less fascinating is Ayub’s portrait of Yahya Khan. This ‘loyal’ army chief was plotting to replace the field marshal and succeeded: ‘If it was not for his treachery, the agitation (which forced Ayub’s resignation) would have been controlled’. There’s definitely a lesson here for General Musharaf!

  Ayub writes that Yahya indulged in ‘big corruption, which was carried on by him through Alvi of the Standard Bank’. Finally, Yahya Khan ‘attempted suicide twice but his brother, who lives with him, managed to save him in time’.

  Writing a month before the outbreak of civil war in East Pakistan, Ayub says: ‘The best solution would be to withdraw the army … and to think about a confederation … we’ve gone beyond the stage of a federation’. On 16 December, after Niazi agreed to surrender to Jacob, Ayub unemotionally comments: ‘The separation of Bengal, though painful, was inevitable and unavoidable … I wish our rulers had the sense to realize this in time and let the Bengalis go in a peaceful manner instead of India bringing this about by a surgical operation’.

  I don’t know of any Indian politician who has kept as forthright and fulsome a diary. If any had, I wonder what we would have learned?

  4 May 2007

  History or His Story?

  Was Jinnah the cause of partition or did the British think of the idea first? Did the Muslim League push inexorably for partition or did the Congress leave it with no other option? Ultimately, was it individuals who determined the partition of the sub-continent or was it done by the ‘Great Game’ of politics? These are questions that we in India have hesitated to ask or, when we have, we haven’t answered fully or even truthfully. Now, however, they have been posed – and rather forcefully – by a new book that I’m in the middle of reading and find difficult to put down. Yet it’s not the questions that are irresistible so much as the answers.

  In The Untold Story of India’s Partition, Narendra Singh Sarila, who was once Lord Mountbatten’s ADC, has dug out evidence and stitched together an analysis that provides a very different insight into the developments that led to independence and partition compared to what we have been told. I’m not a historian or, to be honest, even knowledgeable about this period so I cannot provide a definitive opinion. I leave that for others to do. But as a journalist – with a nose for the interesting – I can sniff out a good story. And this is one.

  Sarila reveals that the idea of partition owes as much to the British desire for a foothold in the subcontinent to secure their defence and political interests after independence as it does to Jinnah’s perception of what suited the Muslim minority or, if you are a cynic, his ambition. He offers a welter of evidence from British documents to substantiate this.

  First, Lord Wavell realized that after India’s independence ‘the breach to be caused in Britain’s capacity to defend the Middle East and the Indian Ocean area could be plugged if the Muslim League were to succeed in separating India’s strategic northwest from the rest of the country’. Thereafter a succession of military advisers, including General Leslie Hollis and Field Marshal Montgomery, realized the utility of an independent pro-western Pakistan to Britain’s defence and political interests. ‘From the broad aspect of Commonwealth strategy,’ wrote Field Marshal Montgomery, ‘it would be a tremendous asset if Pakistan, particularly the northwest, remained within the Commonwealth. The bases, airfields and ports in northwest India would be invaluable to Commonwealth defence.’ Certainly, Winston Churchill seemed to agree with this. More surprisingly, Ernest Bevin, foreign secretary in Clement Attlee’s Labour government that gave India independence, perhaps concurred as well.

  Sarila shows that Jinnah quickly realized the advantage such thinking offered him and fashioned his policies to build on it. He used every opportunity to reassure the British of his loyalty and the supportive pro-western position Pakistan under his leadership would adopt. In fact, Sarila claims that, as far back as 1938, the British position ‘was not lost on Jinnah’. As he comments: ‘This development marked the beginning of the policy of “mutual support” between Jinnah and the British, which had far-reaching consequences for India.’

  It was this burgeoning coalition of interests – not yet, if ever, a full-fledged relationship – which Congress policies, wittingly or unwittingly, further promoted. Sarila argues that by asking its provincial ministries to resign in 1938, the Congress cleared the deck for Jinnah to cosy up to the British, who, in contrast, came to look upon the Congress as if it were a party of deserters. In a sense, this happened again when the Congress spurned the Cripps offer in 1942. As he puts it: ‘If Congress Party leaders had used the Cripps proposal to get into the seats of power in the provinces and the Centre, there was a reasonable chance they could have turned the tables on Churchill,’ who was determined to deny India independence. Had that happened, it’s arguable that a united India might have succeeded British rule rather than a partitioned subcontinent.

  Sarila’s book does two things which I find fascinating. First of all, it illuminates certain turning points when, in fact, our history failed to turn. These are therefore moments of ‘if only’ reflection. They hint at what could have been if a different course had been taken. Secondly, in doing so Sarila sheds a contra-factual light, although, to be honest, it doesn’t shine very far or illuminate very much. But it does hint and provocatively so!

  This book is compelling reading for interested laymen. But I wonder what informed historians would make of it? Sadly, in India, rarely, if ever, do we get to find out.

  27 October 2005


  It’s Not Easy to Understand Mrs Gandhi

  Mrs Gandhi is back in the news. No, not Sonia and certainly not Kasturba but the one we always knew as Mrs Gandhi. The original one and, for me, the only one: Indira Gandhi. Katherine Frank’s biography has drawn attention to her alleged love life. To be honest, the book does so only in passing and in the briefest of detail. But for many Indians that will be enough to spark interest and possibly ignite controversy.

  I have read the book and at no point was I convinced of the alleged affairs. They may have happened and then again they may not have. I won’t say they do not matter nor that the book has no business to discuss them. It’s a biography and the loves of your subject are a legitimate part of any biographer’s subject matter. It’s just that we don’t know enough to conclude either way. Nor does Katherine Frank herself. She accepts that what she is purveying is the gossip of the day. It’s worth knowing – and I am not so puritan as to be shocked by any of it – but I wonder if in publishing gossip – even if you admit it’s no more than that – you don’t end up giving it credence and credibility?

  It’s a dilemma Ms Frank would undoubtedly have faced. Should she have left out the stories and left her book incomplete or included them and run the risk of conferring a plausibility they do not merit?

  I don’t pretend to know the answer but the question is well worth asking. Yet the sad part is that this biography – a very competent and readable one even if a bit inadequate in its political analysis – will be submerged by the different answers to just this one question. Everything else will be ignored and a lot else about Indira Gandhi will remain forgotten.