Raghav Verma - An Examined Life Essays and Reflections by Karan Singh

To My two gurus: Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru,
Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, and
Plato: The unexamined life
is not worth living.

Contents

There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.

Plato

I AM DELIGHTED TO present the new collection of Karan Singhs writings. Suitably titled An Examined Life , it offers a look inside the rich mind of the politician and the scholar.

Karan Singh has been a good friend and a guiding light to the Indian National Congress movement. It is a rare occasion in the history of a nation to encounter a personality like him, someone who was born into a royal family but has lead his entire life for the cause of strengthening democracy.

A man of letters, he carries deep knowledge of the Upanishads and has given immense importance to the cultural and constitutional values of India throughout his long personal and political life. His poems and essays make for a thoughtful read, and his farewell speech in the Rajya Sabha is progressive and carries ideas worthy of being espoused. An inspiring statesman and a cultural icon, he is the last of the legion from the great Nehruvian era.

A man of ineffable grace and dignity, Karan Singh and his writings have a lot to teach the young readers about the importance of culture and learning to live in harmony with each other. I congratulate the editor of this volume, Raghav Verma, for the insightful conversation with him and HarperCollins India for bringing this intelligent edition as we celebrate seventy years of his public life.

I hope the readers will find this book as fascinating as I did.

Manmohan Singh

New Delhi

15 April 2019

ON 20 JUNE 2019, I complete seventy years in public life, having been appointed regent of Jammu and Kashmir by my father way back in 1949. These seventy years have been a fascinating journey that has taken me literally across the world. I also started writing soon thereafter and my first series of articles on a visit to Amarnath was published by the Hindustan Times in 1953. So, for sixty-seven years I have been writing on diverse topics: politics (having been in the Indian parliament for forty yearsten of them as cabinet minister); political science (my PhD in Delhi University was on the political thought of Sri Aurobindo); wildlife conservation (as chairman of the Indian Board for Wildlife for several years during which I was responsible for getting the national animal of India changed from lion to tiger); environment (having been on the Indian delegation to the first UN conference on human environment in Stockholm in 1972); Hinduism (based on the universal principles of Vedanta as articulated in the Upanishads, and not on narrow, exclusivist thinking); the interfaith movement (as chairman of the Temple of Understanding for forty years); a novel set in Kashmir; a book of poems; meetings with remarkable women and so on.

There are also travelogues from when my wife and I travelled to the ends of the earth: from the heights of Machu Picchu to the great Ayers Rock in the heart of the Australian continent; from the Norwegian fjords down to lake Nahuel Huapi in Bariloche, Argentina; from the islands of Kauai in Hawaii all the way across the ocean to Fiji; from the magnificent Hindu temple of Angkor Vat in Cambodia to the great Buddhist Borobudur in Indonesia; not to speak of extensive travel within India itself, from the splendid Himalayas in the north to Kanyakumari in the south where three great oceans meet at the feet of Mother India.

While in public life, I never stopped reading or writing. I have always had a fascination for books; even as a young boy my greatest joy was when my father gave me ten rupees to visit Rainas Book Depot near the Polo Ground in Srinagar. I have been buying books for many decades now and have also been given many, including a valuable tranche of rare books inherited from my father. Numbering almost 25,000, these books are now housed in the Amar Mahal Museum and Library that my wife and I set up in Jammu in 1974.

These experiences and writings constitute a vast archive, and it was suggested by family and close friends that a good selection from all the genres could usefully be chosen for publishing. Over numerous meetings, this anthology has been compiled and edited by Raghav Verma and published by HarperCollins. I take pleasure in presenting this book to the general public in the hope that readers will find in it something of interest and perhaps even inspiration.

I must thank my good friend Shashi Tharoor for his perceptive introduction to this volume, as also former prime minister Manmohan Singh for kindly writing the foreword. Thanks are due to my editor Raghav Verma for his long and painstaking scholarly work on this book.

Karan Singh

New Delhi 9 March 2019

KARAN SINGH IS A legend of our contemporary political history. Ive heard of him since I was old enough to take an interest in politics. From following his work as a minister when I was a college student and now to have known him and worked with him as a close colleague and friend, and to chair the Parliamentary External Affairs Committee with him as its senior member, has been a rare privilege. And to my delight, we share our day and month of birth, which adds to the sense of affinity I have for this remarkable man.

When India was transforming itself on its way to independence from the perils of British Raj, Karan Singh was born on 9 March 1931 in Cannes, France to Maharaja Hari Singh and Maharani Tara Devi of Jammu and Kashmir. When his son was six, Maharaja Hari Singh decided to send him to live in a separate establishment under the care of a British guardian, with two companions, to groom him into various princely talents for the next five years, whereupon at age eleven he went to study at the Doon School.

India was still burning in the horrific flames of Partition, when in October 1947 Maharaja Hari Singh had to sign the Instrument of Accession of Jammu and Kashmir to India in return for aid to secure its borders from a violent invasion by tribals who would be ancestors of present-day Taliban. As a result of contestations with the popular Kashmiri leader Sheikh Abdullah and in hope of a successful plebiscite, Maharaja Hari Singh went on to live in Bombay, appointing his son as regent of the state of Jammu and Kashmir in 1949.

At the age of eighteen, Karan Singh embarked on an exceptional political life among the populace of Jammu and Kashmir as the youngest head of the state that India would ever see. It also makes him the only person from the historic Nehruvian age to have worked closely with all the prime ministers of independent India, as he mentions in his farewell speech to Parliament in 2018.

Emerging from the colonial ghosts and mired in the aftermath of Partition, Indias long and difficult transition from a motley collection of princely states to a free republic has also been a political and personal transition for Karan Singh. His political ascent did not stop him from evolving personally. His keen interest in academic scholarship in political philosophy continued to pursue its course along with making critical decisions of state policy at a young age. When a life is lived amidst constant rigorous philosophical and spiritual inquiry, with faith and not apostasy, a path to enlightenment is inevitable.

Seventy years on, Karan Singh is a living, breathing history of India and a cultural icon. He added a unique character to decades of parliamentary discourse by moving away from the conventional outlook of the typical Indian politician, by standing up for issues and leading by example in speaking out for core constitutional values. Even if that involved public disagreements with his own party presidentnot as a renegade but with an unmatched professional ethics of constructive politics.

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