In the face of fate, we should be shameless and defiant: Arun Shourie

Source: DNAINDIA

“The secret to writing 26 books is to be unemployed from time to time,” quipped Arun Shourie, author, journalist, scholar and politician, releasing Does He Know a Mother’s Heart? - his 26th book.

“I am not a creative writer. I am lawyer, and all my books are arguments for the prosecution, whether it is on Ambedkar or on suffering.” That was a comment well in character with the man who is known for persuasive arguments while remaining as much self-effacing as an active public life allows.

Does He Know a Mother’s Heart? critically examines the explanations for human suffering in various religious scriptures, and in the teachings of prominent spiritual masters.

Shourie is no stranger to pain. His wife Anita suffers from Parkinson’s syndrome. And their son, “Aditya, our life, is 35 now. He cannot walk or stand. He can see only from the left side of his eyes. He cannot use his right arm or hand. He speaks syllable by syllable. Yet he laughs,” Shourie writes.

This book comes from what his wife and he learnt over 35 years. “All religions explain suffering. But they do not stand up to strict examinations. The theory of Karma always ends up blaming the victim,” he said.

His long quest for answers has taken him to the teachings of Buddha. “There is no use looking for explanations to suffering. Instead, attend to the problem at hand, to the cause, as if you are attending to a man whose hair is on fire, Buddha says,” Shourie said.

Despite the personal nature of this book, Shourie spoke with much humour, citing experiences and even cracking jokes—a few courtesy Anna Hazare. When asked how he managed his active public life with a stressful private life, he said: “The secret is to have a wife who will let you do other things while she takes care of the real issues.”

On a more serious note, he said, partially quoting Pandit Nehru: “We simply have to stand up to life. In the face of fate, we should be shameless and defiant—even fast unto death,” he said, to laughs from the audience. “There is a reservoir of strength in all of us and we should tap it.”

Citing an instance from Mahadev Desai’s diary, where in 1920s Mahatma Gandhi had spoken of feeling so discouraged with the freedom struggle that he wanted to retire, Shourie said: “Even the greats felt discouraged at some point, but persevered. Their words of discouragement should be words of encouragement for us. Buddha says, ‘Begin and persevere. As a silversmith removes impurities from silver, so the wise man from himself. One by one, little by little’.”

The Weight of Love

Sun Jul 10 2011, 04:13 hrs

Arun Shourie writes about bringing up his son Aditya, afflicted with cerebral palsy for many years now, in his new book, Does He know a mother’s heart? (HarperCollins). Adit’s pain and that of the author’s wife Anita, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease, leads him to ask: how can there be extreme suffering if God exists? Suffering, he says, refutes religion. Exclusive excerpts:

Your neighbours have a son. He is now thirty-five years old. Going by his age you would think of him as a young man, and, on meeting his mother or father, would ask, almost out of habit, ‘And what does the young man do?’ That expression, ‘young man’, doesn’t sit well as he is but a child. He cannot walk. Indeed, he cannot stand. He cannot use his right arm. He can see only to his left. His hearing is sharp, as is his memory. But he speaks only syllable by syllable...

The father shouts at him. He curses him: ‘You are the one who brought misery into our home... We knew no trouble till you came. Look at you — weak, dependent, drooling, good for nothing...’ Nor does the father stop at shouting at the child, at pouring abuse at him, at cursing the child. He beats him. He thrashes him black and blue... As others in the family try to save the child from the father’s rage, he leaps at them. Curses them, hits out at them.

What would you think about that damned father? Wouldn’t you report him to the police or some such authority that can lock him up? Wouldn’t you try everything you can to remove the child from the reach of the father?

But what if the father is The Father — the ‘T’ and ‘F’ capital, both words italicised? That is, what if the ‘father’ in question is ‘God’?

Why does the perspective of so many of us change at once? Suddenly, they exclaim, ‘There must be some reason God has done this.’ Suddenly, they shift the blame to that poor child: ‘Must have done something terrible in his previous life to deserve such hardship . . .’

And yet the child loves. He laughs. He is filled with joy at the littlest things — a tape of Talat Mahmood, lunch at a restaurant, the visit of an aunt or a cousin... What are we to conclude? That the cruelties rained upon him by his father have ‘built his character’? That they have instilled forbearance? Are we to infer, ‘See, while to us the father seems cruel, in fact he never inflicts more hardship on the son than the son can bear’?

Were we to say and infer as much, that would be not just obnoxious, it would be perverse. And yet those are the exact things that, as we shall see, a revered religious text says about God: He inflicts hardship upon us to build our character; He never imposes more hardship on a person than the latter can bear.

But that child is our son — Aditya, our life. Adit is thirty-five now. He cannot walk or stand. He can see only from the left side of his eyes. He cannot use his right arm or hand. He speaks syllable by syllable. Yet he laughs — you can hear his laughter three houses away. He enjoys going out to restaurants. He loves the songs of Talat Mahmood, Mohammed Rafi and Kishore Kumar. There are some songs, though, the moment they commence, we have to rush and turn off the tape — he is so moved by them that he starts sobbing. There are others which he identifies with himself:Tu aake mujhe pehchaan zaraa Main dil hoon ik armaan bharaa . . .. . .Muskaan lutaataa chal Tu deep jalaataa chal Khud bhi sambhal Auron ko bhi raah dikhlaa...

‘Mere baare mein,’ he declares with joy — and laughs even more as in our rendering the last line has been altered to ‘Papa ko bhi raah dikhlaa...’

He loves these singers and their songs. He loves even more the tapes that his grandparents made for him, and the tapes that his uncles and cousins make for him now. He doesn’t watch television — moving images bother him. But he does listen to the news over the radio. The newspaper is read to him — among the things he calls himself is the ‘ghar kaa samvaad-daataa’. He loves poems being read to him. Seeing Adit’s spirit, and how many of his poems Adit knew by heart, Ashok Chakradhar has gifted him many of his books, and even dedicated one to him. Every time you read the books, you have to begin at the very first page, not just the title page, but the very first, blank page — for on them Ashok Chakradhar has written many an endearment —‘Pyaare, ati pyaare Aditya ke liye . . .’ And if, while reading the poems, you pronounce even a syllable wrong, he hoots with joy, ‘Galti’. That was one of my father’s favourite games with Adit. He would deliberately make a little mistake, and Adit would catch him out — hoot, and laugh, beaming with triumph... He loves everyone. Everyone in the family loves him. His maternal grandmother, Malti Shukla, was his life. He is ours.

And that God just does not stop pounding this helpless, defenceless child...

ADIT COMES

...A premature child. Barely four pounds. In distress. Placed in an incubator. As they could not locate a vein in his tiny arms, the doctors had stuck needles through his scalp... A horrible sight for us... His sugar level is not stabilising, some nurse came and said to us. ‘Will you please sign these forms for a blood transfusion?’...

Three days went by. A Pakistani lady doctor used to visit Anita to check up on her. I am not supposed to tell you, she said, and I will lose my job if they come to know I have told you, but something has happened. Insufficient supply of oxygen in the incubator...

Anita came back to our home in Alexandria. Adit stayed on in the incubator. For an entire month. A horrible month.

‘The child will finish your life as you have known it, may finish your life altogether,’ a senior at the World Bank said to me one day. He was a cheerful, warm-hearted person, but was speaking from first-hand knowledge as he had been bringing up a mentally handicapped son. ‘The doctors may well tell you, “We can do little more for the child.” And ask you, “Are you desperate that he lives?” When they do so, don’t let your emotions come in the way. Do you know what you will have to go on doing for the boy — not just now or for a few years but as long as the child lives?...’

That evening I reported the conversation to Anita and my mother-in-law. A person of iron-will, my mother-in-law said, ‘That is just not the case. Handicapped children live perfectly useful lives these days...’

Three months later we were advised to take the child to the head of paediatric neurology at the Georgetown University Hospital [in Washington]. We were exhausted, felled. The doctor was a kind, elderly gentleman. ‘I am going to use a word that you would have heard — it is used a lot these days to raise money. The word is cerebral palsy. It only means that the baby’s brain has suffered injury...’

We were too stunned to ask what exactly this was going to mean for our Adit’s future. I told the doctor, ‘We had planned to return to India. But if you feel that, for the sake of the child, we should stay on in Washington, of course we will. I will take back my resignation from the World Bank.’

‘I have not been to your country, young man,’ that kind doctor said. ‘If you are here, all that we will be able to do will be to tell you how your son is faring against the milestones. But as observant parents you will notice that yourselves...’

‘I have not been to your country, as I said,’ he continued. ‘But from what I have heard, you have strong, well-knit families there. That is what this child will need as he grows up — a net of love and security. So, if I were you, I would stick to your decision, return to your country, and bring him up in the embrace of your family.’

Among the wisest bits of advice we ever received.

We returned to India. We stayed with our parents. Soon, Anita’s mother came to stay with us...Adit became the centre of many lives.

THE SCHOOL

Adit was growing up. Shanti-amma, his maid, would sing to him, tell him stories, take him to the park. She was ever so possessive of him — always ticking off anyone who expressed the slightest doubt about Adit’s condition, or who uttered a word of pity or condescension. My mother-in-law would teach him — from news, to stories, to rhyming games, to poems, to arithmetic. ‘But why arithmetic, Mummy?’ I would remonstrate. ‘Why make him do sums? Why make him learn tables? He is never going to use them.’ ‘But just see his sense of achievement when he gets the answer right,’ she would teach me. ‘And he learns fast. He has excellent memory.’

….One day, as Anita was driving Adit and herself to school, a jeep coming in the opposite direction lost control. It rammed into Anita’s little Fiat. She and Adit were tossed inside the car. They were shaken, of course, but neither seemed to be badly hurt.

Soon after the accident, however, Anita began to feel peculiar sensations on her left side. We thought the problem was a ‘frozen shoulder’. But soon, the stiffness and pain developed into tremors... One doctor after another... Eventually she was diagnosed as having developed Parkinson’s disease. She was just about forty-two at the time — another one of those ‘one in ten million’ blows.

By now the tremors have spread to the right side also. Every time Anita does something with her hands — for instance, when she eats — her legs flail uncontrollably. That is dyskinesia, another one of those words with which our circumstances have enlarged our vocabulary. The symptoms became worse every winter. This winter — of 2009, in which I begin working on this book about Adit and her — Anita has fallen four times...

With my parents having passed away, with Maltiji also having gone, I am now the servant-in-chief, not just of Adit but of the two of them. The help of many friends and relatives sees us through the day. But more than anything, Anita’s strength and equanimity keep us afloat. ‘I had another toss today,’

I heard her tell her sister the other day, describing a fall so bad that we were lucky she had not fractured her skull. And so helpless and shocked was she that, while there was an alarm bell next to where she lay, she could not reach out to it. She now wears another alarm on her wrist... Even though this is her own condition, she manages the entire household; she husbands our savings; she runs everything so that every need of Adit is met — at once; and so that I am absolutely free to do my work.

‘We have to be thankful for an ordinary, boring, eventless day,’ Anita taught me long ago.

Her fortitude is a daily, ever-present example of another one of the lessons she taught me once: ‘You have to remember, there are many types of courage.’

My father’s courage as he evacuated Hindus in July-August 1947 out of Lahore — where he was City Magistrate at the time. The courage with which he settled, comforted and on occasion quelled the raging refugees in camps across Punjab. My mother’s courage as she comforted her mother and father when they lost a young son, as husbands deserted two of their daughters. My mother-in-law’s courage as she went on looking after all of us even as rheumatoid arthritis twisted and turned and crippled her hands and feet.

Malini’s courage, Veena’s courage evident in the dignity and fortitude with which they have borne blows of unimaginable severity, faced life, brought up their children single-handed, and, on top of it, continued working... Here we are: we get so puffed up just because we have stood up to some authority-of-the-moment. And here are these girls: they have stood up to life itself.

‘But I will never get over what God has done to Adit,’ Anita says. How true:Ghaayal ki gati ghaayal jaane Jauhar ki gati jauhar...

Copyright@Arun Shourie 2011

Arun Shourie: Mediocrity has become the norm

Source: Rediff
Journalist, author, columnist, editor, politician and administrator, Arun Shourie wears multiple hats with equal ease. Revered and reviled in equal measure for his politics, even detractors admit his intellectual prowess and tenacity.

A veteran of many battles against the authority, Shourie, discusses philosophy, politics and policies in a freewheeling conversation with Mahesh Sarma, editor, Careers360. Excerpts:
You studied at Modern school. Then St Stephen's College. So it wasn't a struggle, right?I have been very fortunate, meaning I have not had to struggle with poverty so to say. I am the son of a very honest civil servant, a very creative one. But I struggled against authority, which would mean governments, dominant intellectual fashions etc. For instance, when everybody was a socialist, I felt that those controls, and the License Quota Raj is going to cost us a generation and everybody condemned what I wrote at that time.

To ascribe a certain elitism just because someone is educated in good institutions -- is it right?Of course not, in fact much of the change is brought about by very small elites. The great masses of India [ Images ] can't produce metal alloys that are needed for rocketry, for missiles, for the Arjun tank. So, we must respect elitism when it is based on merit and competence. Now, mediocrity has become the norm. Intimidation has become argument, and assault has become proof. Because I can assault you therefore I am right.
So, I am much for elitism, which is based on opportunity or everybody, positive help for everybody. And, based entirely on performance and merit. The current, reducing elitism to be a prerogative word has come entirely from this Leftist discourse. Which is, under the guise of equality, you pull down the standards. And anyone who has achieved something, you say, damn fool, elitist.
Somewhere you said that your career has had various happy accidents. What were these accidents?Being born to my parents, complete accident. Meeting my wife (our aunts knew each other), complete accident. I was called for a tea party at my wife's aunt's place and she was such a dazzlingly beautiful girl that I couldn't take my eyes off her. Similarly meeting Mr Ramnath Goenka, who had been putting up a great fight during the emergency was also a complete accident.
How did you get the Express editor's job?Emergency passed, I got to know Ramnath Goenka through many episodes. And the Janta Party had come to power and we were staying in Mr Goenka's house in Bangalore. He asked what I was doing and I said, "What do you mean what am I doing? I can't find a job, I am writing a book. He said, 'Stupid, who is going to read your book? No one is going to read it. You are not finding a job, I can't find any young man, you come. I'll tell the editor to give you some big title.' That is my letter of appointment.
So all goods things that happened, happened by accident?
No, being dismissed is also an accident. By 1982, Mrs Gandhi put so much pressure on him to dismiss me. My good friend, Tavleen came one day and asked what I am planning to do now. And I said, 'I don't know'. She said, 'I'll speak to that person, who runs a syndication service so you start writing and he will syndicate it.' There's a very good friend called Lokesh Sharma who was then running that syndication service. So, that led to columns, led to books.
After reading your book I think you wouldn't mind private entrepreneurs coming into education.Firstly, they will come only if there is profit involved. But, they will not be able to build an institute, an institution of excellence, if they keep interfering and running it as a business. A good model is American institutions; they are all set up by millionaires. Somebody gives a million dollars, someone donates acres of land. But, after that he doesn't interfere, he has that self-restraint to leave it to professionals, each of whom has been selected on the only criteria of their extreme dedication to education.
Exceptions like IISc, TISS, TIFR do exisit but they were all pre-independence institutions.That is a good point, they have been sustained in that spirit. My regret is that a larger number of Indian industrialists who have done well and set up institutes of excellence in their own industries have not done the same thing in education. I am quite hopeful that the new breed of entrepreneurs are self-made men, who did not have much money to begin with but are now billionaires.
If they are enabled to come into the field of education, they will bring the same spirit into education; that is my plea. If we don't do that, the field will be open to racketeers, they will definitely come in and fill up the vacuum. That is the scene as of now, which happens in every society.
What according to you would be an appropriate policy framework?
The greater freedom to persons of worth to set up educational institutions, is one. But, at the same time strong rating agencies which are not in the hands of anybody, they are free spirits. True rating agencies, regulations but ratings that will put pressure for excellence. Some of those will be corrupted, no doubt.
Racketeers will suborn those who are doing the rating. But, some will arise among them saying 'No, our future depends, even our business future depends on being a credible rating.' Second thing that will improve standards is surfeit of supply. Today, racketeers are prospering, because there is a shortage. That is how regulaters get corrupt.
If you were part of Ministry of HRD, what would be your first move on the regulatory regime?To clean up the regulators, because that is the most accessible thing that a Minister can first do, UGC, AICTE and all. The main thing would be to encourage a large number of publications and freelancers to monitor their contributions. That would go a long way. Third, to do everything possible to turn our education system to the future. It's not looking far enough, in terms of the syllabi, that's very important.
Probably use technology to get over the shortage of good teachers. That's very possible today and that would be a quick way to multiply quality in India. We can use institutions which are known for excellence to do their corporate social responsibility by becoming places to upgrade teacher quality in their regions.
Is Mr Sibal going in the right direction?I greatly welcome Kapil Sibal's [ Images ] initiatives. For instance, this move that he has made against deemed universities, it is a wonderful move. But probably it should have been accompanied by much more exposure of the intrinsic worth or worthlessness of some of these institutions. Then, the public opinion would have been created much better. But the objective is a very good one.
Photograph: Jitender Gupta/Outlook Group

I am now distant from the BJP: Arun Shourie

Source: ibnlive

Your Call with Arun Shourie NDTV

ndtv on Jul 17, 2011
Your Call: An author of 26 books, Arun Shourie's latest describes him as a scholar, author, formal editor and minister. Take a look at the highlights of Mr Shourie's career, as he answers your questions on Your Call.

I am now distant from the BJP: Arun Shourie

A few lessons

Source: Indian Express
Wednesday, Sep 16, 2009 at 0232 hrs

“Arun Shourie has attacked the Chief Minister, A.R. Antulay because the latter has opposed America’s decision to give arms to Pakistan... Arun Shourie’s well-known connections with the American CIA... He was got a job at the World Bank... Since his return to India, he has been using the pretext of his son’s illness to regularly visit his bosses abroad. . .”

Across the top of the page was a photograph of our helpless little son laughing away in my arms.

Though twenty-seven years have gone by, I still remember the smear that a glossy magazine put out when I wrote the series that led Mrs Gandhi to eventually have Antulay resign. That was a load of nonsense, of course. It constituted no answer to the facts that had been printed. Even that bit about the CIA was of no consequence. After all, it was a conventional slur in those days — Mrs Gandhi herself had insinuated that a “foreign hand” had been behind even as saintly a person as JP and his movement. It was that bit about “using the pretext of his son’s illness to regularly visit his bosses abroad” that infuriated me no end. The least of it was that I had scarcely been abroad since I had returned during the Emergency — only once after our child had been reduced to a handkerchief by the sedatives he was fed by doctors here and we were told to urgently take him to London. It was the pretext business.

Pretext? PRETEXT? My head screamed. Our son could not walk: thirty-four now, he still cannot. He could not stand: he still cannot. He could not use his right hand and arm: he still cannot. He could see only as if through a tunnel: that is still the limit of his vision today. He could barely speak: he still speaks syllable by syllable. And here were some swine who said his illness was a pretext that I was using.

I sued the magazine for defamation. Through its lawyer — quite a famous man in Bombay at the time, and, I am sure, a very highly priced one — the magazine ensured one adjournment after another. Eventually, it filed an affidavit: through this sworn document and its famous lawyer, the magazine said we hold Arun Shourie in the highest esteem; indeed, he has blazed new trails in Indian journalism; far from having proof for what we published, we do not believe a word of what was printed, it swore; we only wanted to alert our readers to the kind of things that are being said even about such a person in our society. . .

“They can drag the case on forever. . .” I was advised. “In the end, you will have to settle for an apology. . . They are prepared to print straightaway the apology you draft. . . Why not settle the matter? Why not draft the apology you want printed? They will print it promptly. . .”

I drafted an abject text for the apology. They printed it — conspicuously. For all I know, gleefully. That I succumbed to the advice burns my heart to this day.

This time round also, there has been the usual crop. “These have been the pampered boys of the BJP. . . They came to the party only for cream. As the party, having lost the elections, cannot give them any cream now, they are hurling these accusations. . . He is doing this only for publicity. He wants to be a political martyr. We will give him the opportunity. . . He is saying all this only because he got to know that he will not be given a third-term in the Rajya Sabha. . .”

Nor was I the only one who had such pejoratives flung at him. Jaswant Singh had written a letter asking the party leadership to hold those who had been responsible for the electoral campaign and defeat “only because he was upset that he would be losing a room in Parliament”! Yashwant Sinha too had demanded that the party make an honest and open assessment of the shortcomings that had led to its defeat. He had himself won the Lok Sabha poll, and handsomely. But he was dubbed “a frustrated politician” in the stories that were planted.

Mr Advani had been maintaining that he had not known about various aspects of the Kandahar exchange of terrorists for hostages. Jaswant Singh disclosed facts that put Mr Advani’s account in question. Brajesh Mishra set out further facts. Yashwant Sinha endorsed what Mishra had stated. With these statements, four members of the cabinet committee on security, excluding Mr Vajpayee all four other than Mr Advani, had called Mr Advani’s version in question — for George Fernandes had already said that Mr Advani had perhaps forgotten that he had been in, and participated in, the meetings at which each of the decisions had been taken. There must have been a way to set the doubts at rest. But what did the spokesman do?

“Mr Mishra’s statements are unfounded, unfortunate and politically motivated,” declared one of the current spokesmen of the BJP. “He is not a member of the BJP.”

What had the veracity or otherwise of Mishra’s statements to do with his being or not being a member of the BJP? He was the national security advisor at the time as well as the principal secretary to the prime minister. He had participated in every single meeting and decision relating to Kandahar. Neither the spokesman-of-the-moment nor others holding party offices at the time could claim to have known first hand anything at all about what had transpired then. Nor were they producing or even pointing towards any documentary record to show that Mishra was wrong. Did those formulaic words — “unfounded, unfortunate” — prove the facts to be otherwise?

Just as important is another question, indeed from the point of view of the media, an even more important one: Is there another country in which such words are taken to be ‘“refutations”? Is there one in which they are even reported as they are here?

As for “politically motivated”, not one, but two things stand out each time the words are flung. Everyone has a motive, it seems, except them! Second, in the reckoning of our politicians, the most devastating abuse is that the other fellow is “politically motivated”!

(To be continued)

The writer is a Rajya Sabha MP from the BJP

A few extracts from the book

Source: Indian Express
Tuesday , Aug 25, 2009 at 0529 hrs

Now, it so happens that I profoundly disagree with Mr. Jaswant Singh’s assessment of Jinnah. Ever since I read the multi-volume Jinnah Papers — brought out by the National Archives of Pakistan; the two-volume, Foundations of Pakistan, edited by Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada; and the four-volume History of Partition of India, edited by the Pakistani historian, K.K. Aziz, Jinnah has seemed to me a pinched, narrow-minded, diabolic schemer — one who used and was used by the British to divide India. To use his words, he ‘forged a pistol’, the armed thugs shoring up the Muslim League. He unleashed them in his ‘Direct Action’ against Hindus. He paralysed the Interim Government through Liaquat Ali. From 1937 onwards, he worked stealthily and continuously with the British to thwart every scheme that might have preserved a united India. His contemptuous characterisations of India, of Hindus, of our national movement and its leaders, make one’s blood boil to this day. That he talked Islam and drank whiskey, ate ham, and the rest, that he hardly knew the Quran to say nothing of living by it, do not prove his secularism to me, they make him out to be a hypocrite. In a word, far from being ‘attracted’ by Jinnah, as my senior Jaswant Singh is, I am repelled by him.

And book after book that I have read regarding those decades since I wrote about him and his stratagems twenty-five years ago has etched that image even deeper. My perspective also differs for another reason from the one that informs Jaswant Singh’s book, and that, if I may add, of those who still dream of a ‘grand confederation of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh’, of those who still talk of Akhand Bharat. Having waded through the writings of Islamic leaders and clerics of the period, and seeing the direction in which Pakistan and Bangladesh have evolved — have inevitably evolved, given the principles on which they were founded, principles that Jinnah articulated and insisted upon incessantly — I have come to realise that Girilal Jain was the one who was right. You are dead wrong, he told me, after reading what I had written about Jinnah. The best thing that has happened for us is the Partition. It has given us breathing time, a little time to resurrect and save our pluralist culture and religions. Had it not happened, we would have been bullied and thrashed and swamped by Islamic fundamentalists. So, my lament is the opposite of Jaswant Singh’s today. And it also so happens that I am an adorer of Sardar Patel as of the Lokmanya, and a worshipper of Gandhiji.

But first the book, and a few extracts.

A glimpse of the contents

A chapter, ‘Compromise on national symbols’ — not by the British nor by Jinnah, but by the Congress leaders. By Congress leaders does the author mean, ‘Sardar Patel’, or even “Congress leaders, in particular Sardar Patel”?

A chapter, ‘Boost to Jinnah by Congress’.

A sub-heading: ‘Azad shocks Gandhi’ — when Maulana Azad, then Congress President, conveyed acceptance of the Cabinet Mission Plan, in particular of excluding non-League Muslims from the Cabinet, and his assurance to the British that he would carry the Congress with him, that they need not worry about any misgivings that some, including Gandhiji might have. All this without telling either the Congress or Gandhiji, and he ‘mis-stated’ the facts, to boot, to Gandhiji’s face, till he was confronted with the letter he had sent. The author sets out the ‘devastating effect’ of the episode on Gandhiji.

Citations from Sardar Patel

He recalls how the Congress Working Committee, in spite of the strenuous, indeed broken-hearted opposition of Gandhiji, accepted the British proposal to divide Punjab and Bengal. He quotes the letter that Sardar Patel wrote to a member of the Working Committee, and points out how very unrealistic the Sardar was in this case:

“If the League insists on Pakistan,” the Sardar wrote, “the only alternative is the division of the Punjab and Bengal... I do not think that the British Government will agree to division. In the end, they will see the wisdom of handing over the reins of Government to the strongest party. Even if they do not, it will not matter. A strong Centre with the whole of India — except East Bengal and part of the Punjab, Sind and Baluchistan — enjoying full autonomy under the Centre will be so powerful that the remaining portions will eventually come in.” The author remarks,

“Both Nehru and Patel surmised that by this counter-strategy Jinnah would be paid in his own coin; he would be made to realise that his argument would be turned against him; that what would be left to him ultimately was the ‘truncated, mutilated, moth-eaten Pakistan’ which he had scornfully refused to look at some years ago.”

Recounting subsequent events, the book records, “Patel was so fed up with the League’s tactics inside the Interim Government that he saw nothing but endless intrigue and troubles ahead in any kind of working with the League; it was better to have a clean separation rather than have pinpricks every day. Nehru too had lost all hopes of joint action with the Muslim League in any kind of arrangement; the League would never see eye to eye with the Congress on any of the issues. He felt, despairingly, that there was no way out except Partition. Rajendra Prasad came out with the same explanation: ‘It was the Working Committee, and particularly such of its members as were represented on the Central Cabinet, which had agreed to the scheme of Partition... (They) did so because they had become disgusted with the situation then obtaining in the country. They saw that riots had become a thing of everyday occurrence and would continue to be so; and that the Government... was incapable of preventing them because the Muslim League Ministers would cause obstruction everywhere... It had thus become impossible to carry on the administration.’”

“With Nehru and Patel finally acquiescing to the demand for Pakistan, the atmosphere, especially in the north, began to hot up as never before”, the book records, and elaborates what followed.

‘Benumbed mental state of Congress’

The book turns to what it calls “Benumbed Mental State of Congress”, and cites Acharya Kripalani’s admission to nail it. Kripalani, then the president of the Congress, wrote about the crucial meeting in which, unknown to Gandhiji, the Working Committee met, and endorsed the Partition Plan: “The Working Committee met in a tense atmosphere. Everybody felt depressed at the prospect of the Partition of the country. The Viceroy’s proposals were accepted without much discussion. As a matter of fact, Jawaharlal and Vallabhbhai were already committed to the acceptance of the proposals. There was no critical examination...” Kripalani noted the manifest infirmities in the Plan that had been drawn up, and which the CWC approved, and wrote, “It was quite natural for our foreign masters to ignore all these inconsistencies in order to favour the League; one cannot understand why we of the Working Committee did not even draw their attention to these important details.”

The Plan had been accepted behind Gandhiji’s back. He was dead-set against it even after Panditji and Patel told him that they had already agreed to it in their meeting with the Viceroy, and had already got the Working Committee to endorse it. Gandhiji was torn — telling his closest associates one moment that he would put up a last fight, telling them the next that he was helpless. At the crucial moment, he told Congressmen that, as their leaders had already accepted the Partition Plan, they should do so also. The book quotes Panditji sort of placing the responsibility on this falling in line by Gandhiji! Panditji told Leonard Mosley, “But, if Gandhiji had told us not to accept Partition, we would have gone on fighting and waiting.”

The book records that, given the extent to which it had been weakened by the Second War, the British had come to realise that their time was up, that there was no way they could impose their conditions on the Indians. So, they set about their fallback option — to divide India so that they would have a strategic foothold in Pakistan. Having documented the mirages and miasmas of the Congress leaders, the book remarks, “the Pakistan demand assumed prestige mainly because of the Congress vacillation on that issue and pampering of the League...”

The book shows how the rationalisation the Congress leaders advanced — that the only alternative to Partition was civil war — is blown by the massacres that followed. It recalls Panditji telling a New York audience two years later, that if they had known the terrible consequences of Partition in the shape of killings etc., they would have resisted the division of India. It recalls, Rajendra Prasad exclaiming, “If only we had known!” “As for Acharya Kripalani,” the book records, “his choicest epithets in later years were reserved for those in the Congress High Command on whom he put the entire responsibility for Partition — so far had his own mind traveled from the position he had taken (of defending the June 3 Plan) in that fateful session of the AICC meeting in June 1947.”

The book records Pyarelal’s telling assessment: “Pandit Nehru’s speech revealed — what had all along been suspected — that it was the Interim Government’s helplessness, owing to sabotage from within by the League members in the Government and retention of control by the British, to cope with the spreading anarchy that had driven the Congress High Command to desperation, so that they were glad to escape from the intolerable situation they found themselves in, even by paying the price of Partition. The Congress leaders were past the prime of their lives. After a quarter of a century of wandering in the wilderness they had come within sight of the Promised Land. They were doughty warriors and were not afraid, if necessary, to take the plunge once more. But they were afraid that it might not be given them to see another successful fight through, and the fruit of their struggle and the countless sacrifices of a whole generation of fighters for freedom might slip through their fingers when it seemed almost within their grasp. If the hour of decision had come earlier when the Congress was in the wilderness, when they were young and before their experience in the Interim Government and the exercise of power had coloured their thinking and outlook, their choice might have been different.”

But that was not just Pyarelal’s assessment. Panditji’s own assessment was harsher. The book records what he told Leonard Mosley in 1960: “The truth is that we were tired men, and we were getting on in years too. Few of us could stand the prospect of going to prison again, and if we had stood out for a United India as we wished it, prison obviously awaited us. We saw the fires burning in the Punjab and heard every day of the killings. The plan for Partition offered a way out, and we took it.”

A few questions

I can go on reproducing extracts, but the main theme of the book’s thesis will be evident. According to the book, while the British had the manifest design to partition India; while Jinnah and his Muslim League subordinates were manifestly working for Pakistan, neither of the two would have succeeded but for the vacillations, mistakes and compromises of the Congress leaders.

To assess the anger that the Gujarat government has worked up, ask three questions:

• Is it just this book alone that asserts that mistakes by Congress leaders contributed to the outcome? Was that fact not acknowledged by the Congress leaders themselves?

• When the book speaks of the vacillations, mistakes and compromises of the Congress leaders does it mean, “the vacillations, mistakes and compromises of the Congress leaders - excluding Sardar Patel”?

Manifestly not. So, is the author guilty of insulting Sardar Patel or not? Should the Gujarat government not, therefore, ban the book? And so, the final question:

• Whose book are we talking about?

The book is The Tragedy of Partition by one of the longest-serving and most revered pillars of the RSS, H.V. Seshadri. It is the standard text of the RSS on the Partition. It is sold at every RSS bookshop, and read, its message is internalised, by every RSS swayam sevak.

Now that the Gujarat government knows the name of the author, two further questions:

• Is there one passage in Jaswant Singh’s book, even one passage that casts the Sardar’s role into graver doubt than Seshadri’s book?

• Is the Sardar’s reputation, in the view of those prancing about to shield it, so fragile that such references as there are in Jaswant Singh’s book or Seshadri’s will undermine it?

Nor is Seshadri’s book alone in documenting the lapses of the Congress leaders. Professor R.C. Majumdar nailed the lapses extensively in lectures that the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan published. He nailed them in his three-volume study, History of the Freedom Movement in India. The lapses are nailed even more firmly in Struggle for Freedom, which forms Volume XI of the great series, The History and Culture of the People of India, ‘prepared under the direction of’, as the cover of each volume says, that other distinguished son of Gujarat, K.M. Munshi — one of the closest associates of the Sardar himself. And they are nailed — not as lapses, but as inexcusable blunders — in the work on the Partition of India of the greatest constitutional scholar we have had since Independence, H.M. Seervai. The self-serving speeches of the Congress leaders are available in Mitra’s Annual Register. The anguish of Gandhiji, his torment at what Congress leaders, in particular the two closest to him, Panditji and the Sardar, had done is recorded from day to day in his addresses at the daily prayer meetings and in Pyarelal’s searing volumes, The Last Phase — “The purity of my striving will be put to the test only now,” Pyarelal records him saying as he lay in bed, having awakened earlier than he was meant to. “Today I find myself all alone. Even the Sardar and Jawaharlal think that my reading of the situation is wrong and peace is sure to return if Partition is agreed upon...They wonder if I have not deteriorated with age... Nevertheless, I must speak as I feel if I am a true and loyal friend to the Congress and to the British people as I claim to be...”

As all these books, as well as many more, can be stretched to cast the same doubts on the role of the Sardar, as one of the principal leaders of the Congress, how many of them will the Gujarat government ban?

(To be continued)

The writer is a BJP MP in the Rajya Sabha