With the passing away of Kuldip Nayar, 95, in Delhi this morning, India has lost an icon embodying the core values that define the Nation’s socio-political and cultural foundations — democracy, inter-religious faith, syncretic culture and harmony.
Born in Sialkot on August 14, 1923, Nayar worked as a journalist, press information officer to Lal Bahadur Shastri and Govind Ballabh Pant, a High Commissioner to UK, a Rajya Sabha MP and as a peace activist in his long career.
But among his many roles, including that of an author of as many as 15 books, what he was identified most was with that of a journalist.
His Emergency days
Beginning his journalistic career in 1948 in an Urdu newspaper Anjam, Nayar was to become the most celebrated columnist in the country, penning the first draft of all critical events in History, from the Partition, Lal Bahadur Shastri’s death, the 1971 war, insurgency in Punjab and Kashmir and, most importantly, the Emergency during which he worked with the Indian Express and was arrested.
In Emergency Retold, Nayar’s recount of what is counted as the darkest chapter in post-independence India, the memory and detailing of the events is sharp and fresh.
“JP (Jayaprakash Narayan) announced the formation of a five-member Lok Sangharsh Samiti (people’s struggle committee), with Morarji Desai as chairman and Nanaji Deshmukh, a top Jana Sangh leader, as secretary, to start a countrywide agitation on June 29 to force Mrs Indira Gandhi to resign. There were to be non-violent hartals, satyagrahas and demonstrations… JP asked the gathering to raise their hands to indicate that they, if need be, would go to jail to restore moral values in the country. Everyone raised his hand. Surprisingly, 24 hours later, most of them did not even protest, when protest was called for, much less offer to go to jail. JP also appealed to the police and the military not to obey any “illegal” order as their manual indicated,” Nayar wrote. The account is important not because of the lucidity of the prose or even owing to the detailing of facts which have been recounted by authors, journalists and politicians alike.
Detailed facts, lucid style
It is the conviction of Nayar as a journalist and citizen to brave a prison sentence to restore what he believed was moral values and continue championing them throughout his life that mark his criticality as a public intellectual.
Whether it was a case of wrongful confinement, arrest, a State-sponsored riot or attack on freedom of the press, Nayar saab lent his name and stature to any protest, however, small, against them.
Breaking news
He would stand at the Wagah border with a candle for peace and sit, moist-eyed, when young reporters and their senior colleagues would organise protests and meetings against riots in Gujarat in 2002 or the wrongful arrest of a Kashmiri journalist and censoring of the press by any regime. For us, as journalists, the man who broke the news of Lal Bahadur Shastri’s death and scooped the sensational disclosure by AQ Khan that Pakistan had a lab-tested atom bomb ready for delivery, had innumerable lessons to give.
In his Beyond the Lines: An Autobiography, Nayar’s account of how he squeezed the information out of the man widely known as the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb is an invaluable lesson for reporters.
“I thought I would provoke him. Egoist that he was, he might fall for the bait. And he did. I concocted a story and told him that when I was coming to Pakistan, I ran into Dr Homi Sethna, father of India’s nuclear bomb who asked me why I was
wasting my time because Pakistan had neither the men nor the material to make such a weapon,” Nayar wrote.
AQ Khan was adequately goaded and boasted to Nayar that Pakistan had not only made the bomb but “if you ever drive us to the wall, as you did in East Pakistan, we will use the bomb.”
In the same chronicle, a most striking feature in this age of almost infantile narcissism when news and news-gathering is personalised with even obituaries of late leaders laden with how well the authors knew them, Nayar’s focus even in his autobiography was only on public events, while he kept himself and references to his family completely out.
There is very little of what must have been personally significant, such as what his family went through when he spent over seven weeks in prison during the Emergency unless it makes a larger point.
Witness, for instance, one of the few personal experiences that he recounted in his autobiography that shaped Nayar saab’s most significant contribution to public life.
Recounting The Partition
“When I crossed the border on 13 September, 1947, I had seen so much blood and destruction in the name of religion that I vowed to myself that the new India which we were going to build would know no deaths due to differences in religion or caste.. I, therefore wept when I witnessed the mass murder of Sikhs in 1984 and saw a repetition of such inhumanity in Gujarat in 2002, viewing it as a microcosm of the communal violence I had witnessed in 1947,” Nayar wrote.
It was this conviction, his courage and the ability to speak truth to the power that Kuldip Nayar would be always remembered as a foremost journalist who adopted whatever role he thought was appropriate in larger interest.
For those who still believe the first content of news to be public interest, the passing away of Kuldip Nayar means that a moral reference point is gone forever.