Memoirs of an upright cop

MS Bains

THE Governor of Punjab, VP Singh Badnore, recently released Rajendra Shekhar’s autographical account Memories Are Made of This, which follows upon a long line of autobiographical works by police officers such as SK Datta (Top Cop Recalls), Joginder Singh (Without Fear or Favour), KPS Gill (The Punjab Story) and Kiran Bedi (I Dare). Long back, Nari Rustomjee of the ICS wrote about India’s enchanted far-flung frontiers.

This book is an endearing account, written with tremendous honesty, about the life and times of an officer of great integrity. There are nuggets aplenty. Did we know that there was a Collector of Chittor, with the unexpected name of Alauddin Khalji? Or that even in Independent India, Lord Dalhousie’s infamous Doctrine of Lapse continued to operate: when the last Nawab of Tonk died without leaving a legitimate heir, the payments from the Privy Purse were discontinued.

There are the striking encounters with the public figures of the time, such as Mahatma Gandhi during a prayer meeting at Birla House. The day happened to be, unfortunately for the author as a teenage boy, the great man’s day of silence.

There is an engaging description of Bharatpur state, where Shekhar’s dad was the Huzoor Secretary, an appellation coined and conjured by the ruler himself. In these pages, there is much to learn about the nuances of the services, the relations between the Collector and the SP in a district, the perils and pleasures of administration and how the times are changing.

From his days in the CBI, the author writes of the LN Mishra case of 1975, the Nirankari Baba murder in 1980 and General Vaidya’s killing in 1986, where the vital clue which cracked the case was the hand-written registration number of a car on the last page of a Ken Follet novel called Triple.

The author recalls the twist that the life of Dinesh MN, a one-time SP of Udaipur, imprisoned for seven years on the charge of a false encounter in the Sohrabuddin case. In an interview, Dinesh talked about how he found the inspiration to endure those years in a book called Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl, an Auschwitz survivor.

In his presidential remarks, the Governor recalled his days at Mayo College which was also Shekhar’s alma mater, and narrated how as an MLA in 1977 he wanted Shekhar, then the state DGP, to transfer an unpopular SHO. MLA Badnore put forward his request to the DGP with trepidation who assured him of the errant SHO’s transfer but made it clear that the choice of his replacement would have to be left to him.

After superannuation, Shekhar suffered a horrific accident in Muscat. I feel it was the author’s good deeds, those little unremembered acts of kindness and of love, that may have stood him in good stead at that near fatal moment when a vehicle plunged into him on a quiet street as he was photographing the imposing colonnaded facade of the Bank of Oman.