Ends and means

This is a biography of Ramnath Goenka, the man who built a newspaper empire all by himself. There are few newspaper barons who would be so closely identified with the fortunes, the trials and the tribulations their newspapers went through as Ramnath Goenka. It is difficult to think of Ramnath Goenka without the Indian Express and vice versa.

A biography of such a man, however, comes with a rider that the volume under review deals with the life of Ramnath Goenka and is not a history of the Indian Express.

Inevitably, though, the book sheds more light on the Indian Express history than you would expect, as Goenka and the newspaper chain that he set up were inextricably linked and much of what he did was to do with the newspaper.

Lack of available research work or resource material on Goenka's life may have led to several sections of the biography""especially pertaining to the last few decades of his life""dwelling almost entirely on controversial political developments of that period and how they were reported in the Indian Express.

This may make the reader wonder what specific role the newspaper baron might have played in those developments or in their reportage. There is a vague hint of RNG, as he was known among the senior Express staffers, having played a role in each of those events in the 1970s and 1980s. But there is no detailed account of the nature of his intervention.

Verghese, a veteran and respected journalist who also edited the Indian Express, has employed a useful technique to capture the many facets of Goenka's personality. Instead of relying on a chronological listing of events, segmented into chapters, Verghese has focused on about a dozen aspects of Goenka's life and narrated them as eminently readable stories.

While the first five chapters focus on Goenka's early life, family, marriage, his move to Madras, days as a member of the Madras Legislative Council at an early age of 29, the founding of the Press Trust of India and his non-newspaper business interests like his takeover of the National Jute and the failed bid to acquire Indian Iron and Steel (which those days cost the Express over Rs 15 crore), the more interesting details of his activities are captured in the second half of the book.

His role in the anti-Congress movement launched by Jayaprakash Narayan and the manner in which the Express took on the Congress government before and during the Emergency period have been brought out with riveting details of who did what and how.

The many legal battles and the campaigns the Express launched against politicians and companies (the exposes on Reliance Industries in particular) will take you through almost all the major controversies that took place in the last 35 years. You may not always agree with the sharp turns and twists in Goenka's views on different leaders and issues, but they provide some understanding of why he remained till his death in 1991 an enigmatic person.

Goenka's stormy relationship with several of his editors too has come through in the book. Beginning with Khasa Subba Rao, Verghese has painstakingly put together in different chapters events that led to the controversial exits of many of his editors.

Express editors enjoyed immense freedom. But that freedom was defined by Goenka. And the definition was not framed by Goenka either through consultation or an objective set of criteria.

The book does not go too much into detail in evaluating whether Goenka was right in dealing with some of his editors. But in both this and many other issues (like the Express building case), it was apparent that Goenka believed that the end justified the means.

There are many interesting anecdotes of how some of his editors were asked to leave. Someday, all this will be a subject of a more detailed scrutiny of how Goenka dealt with the issue of editor's freedom.

But for a newspaper baron who wanted his institution to survive him, Goenka's failure to create an uncomplicated succession plan was a matter of extreme irony. The Express split soon after his death.

Verghese's biography ends with the hope that the Express groups could reunite to serve a larger cause, which would then be a "fitting tribute to the man who, despite many failings and foibles, strode the scene like a colossus."

WARRIOR OF THE FOURTH ESTATE
RAMNATH GOENKA OF THE EXPRESS

BG Verghese
Penguin
Price: Rs 450; Pages: 342