Once Upon a Country

Yogendra Yadav

You can see so much more once you get your own nose out of the way. That’s what I felt as I closed Gopalkrishna Gandhi’s personal history of independent India, optimistically titled The Undying Light, released this month. It is no small achievement to look at big and small events, national and family drama, without placing oneself at the centre.

This self-effacement, to a fault, is not just a charming personal virtue. For Gopal Gandhi, this is a fly-on-the-wall method of reading and viewing history. To be sure, he is not attempting an objective history of India since Independence. So there are no fresh archival sources, no sensational disclosures (except one, to which we will come later), no attempt at offering a new theory of history. Nor is this a memoir. The book is what it says: A personal history, a history of the last 80 years, seen from the eyes of a person. A story of how big events of independent India unfolded in the life and mind of one Indian.

Gopalkrishna Gandhi is not quite an unknown Indian. If your paternal grandfather was the Father of the Nation, and your maternal grandfather was the last Governor-General of India, you can’t possibly remain unknown. The great achievement of Gopalkrishna Gandhi (and also his siblings) is to remain sahaj with respect to his ancestry. Neither does the author flaunt this connection, nor does he bear it like a cross. Of course, that does not shield him from accusations of using his surname. He shares this snippet from an angry letter he received from an unnamed person: “You have always encashed the Gandhi cheque and wrangled plump cushy postings… You are a very mediocre, average Jt Secy level officer… don’t you have any self respect?”

I first encountered Gopalkrishna Gandhi in 2007. I had written an article (in this paper, as it happens) explaining the rationale for OBC reservation in educational institutions. A few days later, I got an envelope (yes, the postal department worked in those days) marked Raj Bhavan, Kolkata, West Bengal. It carried my address in neat handwriting with an ordinary postal stamp (there used to be separate postal stamps for official communication). Inside, on the letterhead of the Governor, the same handwriting complimented me for my article and looked forward to a continued dialogue.

I couldn’t get over it for days — a Governor sending a handwritten letter and taking the trouble of writing the address on the envelope, something I had stopped doing in my own small office. This couldn’t be just a hobby or habit, this had to be sanskaar.

More than Mahatma Gandhi, who died when he was barely two-and-a-half, Gopal Gandhi was influenced by his maternal grandfather, C Rajagopalachari, or Rajaji. Although a self-confessed “grandfather-smitten grandson”, he is ready to acknowledge the truth about the dubious manner in which Rajaji became the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu in an election in which Congress failed to secure a majority: “The development was undemocratic, not so much for the nomination route but because it denied the spirit of the election results its deserved culmination.” Nor does it prevent him from recording this most embarrassing truth about his family. “Our family with all the inherited halo of ‘Harijan seva’ over its head, did not count, among its close friends, any Dalit. Not one. It had Muslim, Christian and Sikh friends. It had friends from the Black communities of the US, Jewish friends from across the world, but not one Indian Dalit.”

In our troubled times, this story reminds us of an era when public figures respected some norms. E M S Namboodiripad, the Communist leader whose government was unfairly dismissed by Nehru, could wax eloquent about Jawaharlal after his death. Jayaprakash Narayan could speak at St Stephen’s College in the aftermath of the Sino-Indian War of 1962 and remind his audience that the “Chinese are, after all, our Asian friends”. He insists that something of that tradition survived until Dr Manmohan Singh, the last politician to combine siyasat with sharafat (politics with decency).

Gopalkrishna Gandhi contributed to this tradition by creating a model of how people in constitutional offices must behave. Rectitude and fearlessness without ever crossing the constitutional maryada defined his term as Governor of West Bengal during the most turbulent Nandigram phase. He met Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya four days after his statement indicting the government for the Nandigram killings. Gopal Gandhi, who was welcomed by the Left Front as the Governor, now offered to the CM: “You can, if you want, ask Delhi to get you another governor”. Buddha babu could have done so, for his party was still a coalition partner at the Centre, but he said: “I’m not that type of person, I will never do such a thing.”

The book avoids salacious gossip, but offers some personality sketches to savour. Here is a sample on C V Raman, the famous physicist who did not turn up to receive his Bharat Ratna as he was too preoccupied with a PhD interview! “An example of vanity masquerading as duty.” But the one I love most is about T N Seshan: “The god of governance has not created a more potent self-loading, self-ejecting, self-directing cannonball.” He also discloses that in the wake of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, the Chief Election Commissioner approached President R Venkataraman and asked to be made the Home Minister of India!

The book is laced with insights like this one: “Deaths in India are magnets. Every manner of metal, precious, semi-precious, base, rusty, alloy, tin is drawn to it. And funerals are moving mounds of emotions mixed with some open and many more concealed motivations.” Here is another gem — “All capitals breed gossip. Delhi does so with a panache of its own.”

It also reminds us that history is not shaped just by great men and women, that ordinary people can often outdo them.

There is a story about the Nizam of Hyderabad gifting a diamond-studded necklace to Rajaji’s daughter, Namagiri. Rajaji returned the gift on the ground that his daughter, a widow, was not accustomed to wearing ornaments of this kind. She said, a few years later, that she did not regret her father’s decision but would have preferred that he had not alluded to her widowhood. He could have said, “We are Gandhi’s disciples and do not own costly things.” Gopal Gandhi concludes, “daughters of the great can, at the crosshairs of dilemmas, out-great their forebears”.

If there is one story you want to read this week, it is that of the martyrdom of Maqbool Sherwani — “among one of the greatest victims of bigotry, and the greatest symbols of human courage”. In 1947, when Pakistani armed forces used tribesmen to invade Kashmir, 19-year-old Maqbool, a follower of Sheikh Abdullah, organised local resistance. He was finally captured by the invaders, taken to the town square of Baramulla and ordered to shout “Pakistan zindabad, Sher-e-Kashmir murdabad”. When he refused, he was tied to the porch posts with ropes and nails were driven through his palms. Legend has it that Sherwani cried out “Victory to Hindu-Muslim unity” before 14 tribesmen shot bullets into his body. Gandhi describes Sherwani’s death as “a martyrdom which anyone — Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, or any other — can be proud”.

Last Tuesday, another braveheart lost his life as he stood up for Kashmiriyat. Syed Adil Hussain Shah, 29, a pony ride operator, and the only local among the 26 killed in the terror strike in Pahalgam, was shot trying to confront the militants in an attempt to protect the tourists he had ferried on horseback.