Of Kings, courtiers, and lives less known

[1]

By Jaswant Singh [2]

Rs 350

This collection of newspaper and magazine articles by former BJP external affairs and fi-nance minister, Jaswant Singh, can best be des-cribed as a motley omnibus of his writing during the 1980s. That was the decade when the Bharatiya Janata Party, to which the author belonged, was far from power and as a bright but junior Rajya Sabha member, had plenty of time on his hands.

The articles, of which as many as 73 out of a total of 123 are of the 1987-98 period, are thus not representative of the author’s ideas as they evolved over his thirty plus years in active politics.
Most of the articles are on dead or half-remembered issues; controversies that have faded; and debates long confined to the archives. The author in his introduction admits that the book was impelled largely by the publishers and an enthusiastic editorial team that retrieved and put together the material for the book. The value of the book is not in the dated articles of past events, policies and predicaments but in the author’s views as a young Indian politician on the various facets of Indian politics and district life.
Particularly insightful are his essays in a section of the book called “Voice of the District”. These pieces were earlier published by MacMillan in a collection titled District Diary. In his brief introduction to the section, the author describes their origins: “English language newspapers, mostly, do not report issues other than of the metropolitan variety. When they do deviate, it is to report about ‘states’; seldom, though about districts which after all are the muscles and sinews of states. Once in conversation with my late friend Romesh Thapar, he said: ‘Jaswant, you keep speaking so lyrically about your home in the desert, and how “distant” the districts are from Delhi. Why don’t you write about them?’”
That was the inspiration for a column in the Indian Express which seems to have lasted between 1987 and 1989. Jaswant Singh is indeed at his brilliant best when he writes as a dispassionate observer of life and politics. In one of these stories or vignettes of district life, Jaswant Singh writes about Hammu, a villager of the desert who sings their ballads like none other on “moon washed dunes”. The author is curious when he learns that Hammu has paid ghoos (bribe) to a doctor at a government hospital in Jaisalmer to take care of his grandson, Kheta. Hammu then recounts how he and his son had tried to cure his daughter-in-law, Amadi. They had travelled across the state to Gujarat and back for a cure they could not afford and, after considerable wanderings in vain, ended up admitting her to a government hospital in Jodhpur.
“It is difficult to say what happened next; whether the anaesthetist was casual or Amadi had been debilitated beyond cure by the long illness and tedious journeys, but she died on the operating table, leaving behind three-year-old Kheta. ‘She is now cured’, said Hammu, ‘it is we who have been afflicted by sorrow. I had to spend more money bringing her corpse back to village for burial than I had done for her living body. And I am blessed that I could at least do that, for I earn through my kala (art). So many can’t afford even the bus fare. So you see, sahib, why I paid thirty rupees to that doctor in Jaisalmer for Kheta, don’t you?’” In another piece, the author describes his attempts to explain the Bofors scandal to some people in his village. After explaining what the scandal was all about, a retired JCO asks Jaswant Singh why the person who has committed the crime (Rajiv Gandhi) is not given field punishment. “My subsequent suggestion that all this was being inquired into and that Parliament was seized of the matter, etc., also trailed off, almost in mid-sentence, as I began to realise how absolutely irrelevant all this had already become…and how all the complicated sophistries of Delhi had become so many multiplying hoaxes. I attempted to play the trump. ‘But the prime minister says he wants a Parliamentary inquiry…’”
The villagers are not convinced and Jaswant Singh wonders “what is it that has happened to Delhi? Is it a curse that this incestuous city carries on its head? Why do those of us who live and work here lose our ability to see and to state that which the rest of the country does with unerring directness?” Particularly heart rending are the author’s accounts of the travails caused by the injustices of officialdom: Widows earning just a few rupees a day being deprived most of their earnings by corrupt junior engineers; an old villager’s land being misappropriated because it interfered with an official bungalow; an elderly army officer angry at the thought of his son fighting a war in Sri Lanka no one supports; the environmental disaster caused by a water guzzling dye factory in the desert; the travails of a villager trying to get wood to cremate his dead wife; and cynical villagers observing the all-pervading corruption of politicians around them and commenting “It is all a question of opportunity — today’s Opposition tomorrow’s ruler, but will that change anything? No, not at all, because this is not lok raj, it is swartha raj.”
A number of other essays in the book reflect the author’s disdain of the trappings of power and its insensitivities towards the common man. One article that grabs attention is titled “The Sociology of Grovelling” (1988), which is about obsequious courtiers surrounding the late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and how even the media made it out that Indians were joyous simply to be around the great personage. “It is impossible to accept such patent humbug even as behavioural abnormality,” wrote Jaswant Singh. “It is grossly corrupting of our psyche, because it encourages the worship of rank, inheritance of official position, not individual merit.”
In another introspective essay titled “National Integration and other Such Words” written in 1983, Jaswant Singh seeks to identify the cause of national drift and the resultant public cynicism about politics. The politician, according to him, is the problem; for they “gave to themselves a kind of sole propriety concern about India. Political leaders identified their persons with the country and spoke as if they alone represented it. Political parties cloaked their partisan, narrow interests in the national flag. The face of the Indian politician is ugly.”
What emerges from the writings is the picture of an amazingly perceptive writer looking at India and the world with compassion and often with anger and frustration. At times, it seems that the author could well be writing in today’s context. Nothing appears to have changed except the actors and of course the author as well.
Indranil Banerjie is an independent security and political risk consultant