Speaking truth to power is passé

I recently read the book Pratap — A Defiant Newspaper, which was sent to me by Jyotsna Mohan Bhargava, the daughter of Chander Mohan, the last Editor and owner of the Urdu-language newspaper that was published from Lahore before Partition and later from Jalandhar. Jyotsna herself is a journalist with 30 years of experience. She reminded me that she had interviewed me for the book.

I could not put down the book till I had finished it. The newspaper was launched by Chander Mohan’s grandfather Mahashay Krishan shortly before the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919. It was voluntarily shut down in the 1990s; Pratap’s readership had dwindled in later years as Urdu is not widely read in the Indian Punjab.

The reader gets a ringside view of events that unfolded when India fought for Independence, and right up to the 1980s and 1990s when Punjab was in the throes of terrorism. Since I myself was inducted into the nation’s battle against the terrorist menace in the mid-1980s, my initial interest centred on what the book had to say about my contribution to that fight.

Though they were not unkind to me, the authors observed that my successor as the chief of the Punjab Police, KPS Gill, was the real hero who put paid to the Khalistani attempt to secede from the Indian Union through a low-cost war, as terrorism has been defined in textbooks on the subject.

After reading the book, I concluded that Pratap’s owners-cum-editors were men of high principles who stuck scrupulously to the truth, whatever the circumstances. Since it was their finding (and that of many others), I concede that Gill had succeeded where I had failed!

Gill had taken the liberty of telling my wife when I was out of earshot that my methods and philosophy of policing were not going to work in Punjab. “I am a Jat Sikh,” he told Melba. “Only a Jat Sikh knows how to deal with his own people. Your husband is incapable of wielding a stick. It is only the stick that works here in my part of the country.”

Gill wanted Melba to relay his thoughts to me. That she did promptly, adding for good measure her own view that he was not a person that she would include in her list of friends. Gill’s methods were what led Jat Sikh farmers to finally confide in the Punjab Police and turn against “the boys”, as they used to call the terrorists.

It is an established fact that no terrorist movement can survive without the support of the community. The classical method of ending terrorism is to win the hearts and minds of the community to which the terrorists belong. In Punjab, this could only happen after the community was boxed into a corner by the methods adopted by Gill.

The authors have also mentioned that their family built its reputation for speaking truth to power, no matter who wielded that power. The reference to the capitulation of the media, both electronic and print, and the overt and the not-so-overt threats and temptations that those in power had put in their path only confirms what the country already knew — the news that we are fed round the clock is to be taken with more than a pinch of salt.

Speaking truth to power, which was the principle followed by editors and journalists alike in Jawaharlal Nehru’s time, is no longer the norm. What is even more worrying is that newspapers and TV channels are being bought over by business magnates whose commercial interests lie in toeing the government’s line. The authors are all praise for an ex-Editor of Outlook magazine, Ruben Banerjee, who lost his job but remained true to his profession. Not many individuals like Banerjee can be found today in the profession of journalism as in most other professions. As their numbers diminish, the country loses its spine!

Chander Mohan’s father Virendra was jailed nine times by the British. He was a freedom fighter of the revolutionary kind, ideologically opposed to the non-violence advocated by Mahatma Gandhi. The activities of the revolutionary club led by Bhagat Singh and Chandrashekhar Azad, are recounted in greater detail in this book than what I had read earlier.

Since Virendra was himself privy to the plans to target British officers and even Governors, this book provides the reader with another takeaway. Virendra was in the Lahore jail where Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev were hanged on March 23, 1931. They had been accused of shooting an English police officer outside his office.

Bhagat Singh is adored in every village of Punjab, the state from which he hailed. But it was 22-year-old Shivaram Hari Rajguru, born in Khed in Maharashtra’s Poona district, who was said to be the first to put the noose around his neck. For the past 25 years, I have been the chairman of an NGO called the Bombay Mothers and Children Society, run by an intrepid Mumbai-based doctor, Madhav Sathe. The society runs a hospital in Rajgurunagar — the name given to Khed as a tribute to the martyr’s sacrifice.

The Director of the Intelligence Bureau (IB) at the time of the hanging was Horace Williamson. Writing about Bhagat Singh, he noted, “For a time, his popularity rivalled that of Mr Gandhi.” Bhagat Singh was opposed to communalism and casteism, two evils which our popular leaders today in the government and the Opposition use for electoral gains. I doubt if our Prime Minister’s rising popularity at home and abroad can propel India to the main table of the comity of nations when these two evils, added to the pernicious evil of corruption, are allowed to grow and flourish.