Intimate draft of history

Some political mysteries never die, though they might fade away from public memory with the passage of time. So, a book that unravels not one or two but several of these mysteries at one go cannot be given a miss.

Kuldip Nayar served on both sides of the journalistic divide. He was the press information officer to first Govind Ballabh Pant and then to Lal Bahadur Shastri. Later, he worked for UNI, The Statesman and the Indian Express. Either way, he was privy to insider information, which he has shared with readers in his latest book. The end result is a book that is almost as readable as the original Scoop by Evelyn Waugh.

Nayar started his career as a journalist with the Delhi-based Anjam (the end) in 1947. Little did he know that it was actually the beginning (ibteda) of a career spanning over six decades. Nayar spent his best years chasing stories of how independent India was made after the British left.

The first section of the book deals with people responsible for India's partition: Jinnah, Mountbatten and Radcliffe. The insights are interesting. Jinnah, for instance, told Nayar in 1945 that he did not expect any rioting if the country were to be partitioned! He also said that if India were to be attacked by another country, Pakistani soldiers would throw in their lot with Indians! None of it, of course, ever held true. Clearly, the way history chose to unfold itself was very different from Jinnah's idea of Pakistan.

The conversations with Mountbatten are no less interesting. God, Mountbatten was sure, would forgive him the one million lives lost in Partition as he had saved two-and-a-half million lives in Singapore when it was attacked by the Japanese in the Second World War. After Bangladesh had been surgically sliced off from Pakistan, Mountbatten told Nayar that he knew Pakistan would be dismembered within 25 years. Prophetic words, though none of Mountbatten's close associates remembered him saying this.

Nayar then moves on to the Nehru years and the shadow boxing between the various claimants to the prime minister's office after Nehru's death. The question people have asked for several years is whether Nehru really wanted his daughter, Indira Gandhi, to succeed him. Though Kamraj finally settled on Lal Bahadur Shastri as the next prime minister, Nayar says Nehru was convinced she had it in her to occupy the hot seat. Never mind if the Opposition called her "Goongi Gudia" (dumb doll) in Parliament.

She did become the country's prime minister in a few short years, defeating archrival Morarji Desai, who would often refer to her as "that chit of a girl".

The next high point in the book is the chapter on Shastri's death. After Subhash Chandra Bose died in an accident at Formosa (or escaped, as his diehard followers would have us believe, in order to avoid a trial for war crimes during the Second World War), this was another case of an Indian leader dying under mysterious circumstances. For a long time, his family maintained that he had been poisoned in Tashkent. Some conspiracy theorists even said he was close to a historic agreement with the Pakistani leader, Ayub Khan, and was eliminated by people who didn't want the deal to go through. Nayar pieces together all that happened at Tashkent between the three leaders (Shastri, Khan and Alexei Kosygin) as well as what happened at Shastri's dacha. So, was it murder? Going by Nayar's account, it was a natural death.

Indira Gandhi is best remembered for the nationalisation of banks in 1969 and then for imposing the Emergency in 1975. (Nayar was put behind bars at the time for writing that press censorship was a violation of the Fundamental Rights enshrined in the Constitution.) What is now forgotten is that she had also talked of a "committed judiciary" that did not try to impede the work of the executive. Nayar's account of what went on behind the scenes is an eye-opener.

Then came the Janata Party years: Morarji Desai's leadership, Charan Singh's intransigence, Raj Narain's political somersault and the Congress shenanigans. These pages make for some fascinating reading.

Perhaps public figures of those years lent themselves to better copy from journalists. Just as George Orwell grieved for the decline of the English murder, one could feel sorry for the decline in the Indian polity over the last few decades.

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SCOOP!
INSIDE STORIES FROM THE PARTITION TO THE PRESENT

Kuldip Nayar
HarperCollins
Price: Rs 250; Pages: 214