Gupta - Anticipating India: the best of national interest

ANTICIPATING
INDIA

THE BEST OF NATIONAL INTEREST

Shekhar Gupta

For

Viveck Goenka,

nineteen years, 900 columns and not one call to ask why.

If you find more newspaper owners like him,

please do exchange notes with me.

&

Mandakini, Rudraneil, Abhimanyu and Swati,

the four points of my compass.

CONTENTS

This book would never have happened if I had not met Surendra Pratap Singh (SP), a brilliant Hindi editor who made his mark across genres, the daily Nav Bharat Times, weekly Ravivar and then as my editorial adviser for the Hindi edition of India Today, and finally as a key founder of Aaj Tak. He mentored an entire army of political journalists in English and Hindi. I am happy to be counted among them. SP and I met and became friends a bit late in my working life. I had built a track record of sorts for covering troubles within India and around the world. But SP told me emphatically that I would remain a fair-weather, parachute journalist living from story to story unless I graduated to writing about politics. Over the following years, therefore, he became my teacher in Indian politics, particularly in the complexities of caste and class in the heartland, and helped me understand what lay beneath what many saw as the excesses of the Mandal Commission. It didnt stop there. It was at his urging that I gathered the nerve to leave my very secure and comfortable perch at India Today to move in as the editor of the Indian Express, our most political paper by far. And yet, again, even when interrupted by calls from the Aaj Tak newsroom on the mobile phone that mystified him (199596, when the first mobiles came to India), he nagged me to start a weekly column if I wanted to be taken seriously as an editor. The world of journalism and a family lost SP too early, to a stroke. I have missed him all these years and owe not just the column, but also my evolution as a political writer to him.

This book is dedicated to Viveck Goenka, publisher of the Express Group, and that must sound unusual. Because sure enough, there was competition, not just from immediate family but, as those who know my wife and me, children and children-in-law well, from the so many dogs and cats who enrich our lives. My choice of Viveck is very well thought out. I dedicate this collection to him because through nearly nineteen years as editor of the Indian Express, one of our greatest institutions, and through the publication of more than 900 National Interest articles that rubbed people across the political, bureaucratic and corporate spectrum the wrong way, I never, ever, got a phone call from him even to ask why. Even when people called him to complain, he usually responded with the equivalent of switching off his phone. No editor can ask for a better gift from his publisher. Its such a pity that so few today are cast in this mould.

We spent several frustrating days thinking of a name for the column. Many were tossed around but were not convincingalso because I wanted the freedom to write on anything, from politics to defence, security and foreign policy to cricket. The answer came from S. Prasannarajan, he of the quaintly complex and charming prose and intriguingly refreshing turn of phrase. Call it National Interest, he said, and you can write on cricket, Bollywood, anything. So, thank you Prasanna, for giving me such intellectual space and licence.

Raj Kamal Jha and Unni Rajen Shanker, currently editor and managing editor, respectively, at the Indian Express have been my friends, colleagues and partners in much for more than twenty years. I have rarely felt sure of the drift without brainstorming with them before starting to write every stressful Friday afternoon. In much of Indian journalism you have never seen anybody who can write a headline as Raj can. National Interest has benefited greatly from his brilliant headlines, as I from picking his phenomenal bank of knowledge and ideas even when he was on long sabbaticals in totally hopeless time zones. Unni has the finest sense of political nuance, as also of what is non-kosher even for a writer as reckless as me. Raj brings a refreshingly globalised intellectual view to all issues, helps you cut through the clutter as no other. To him, I also owe a lesson every journalist should engrave on his sleeve: never switch off your bullshit detector.

Raj and Unni lead a formidable reporting team at the Indian Express whose brilliant work served as primary research for my pieces. Investigations Editor Ritu Sarin, Delhi Editor Rakesh Sinha and Express News Service Editor Pranab Dhal Samanta, thank you for doing that fact-check a minute before deadline.

Swapan Dasgupta headed our editorial page when the column began. From him on to A.J. Philip, Pamela Philipose, Saubhik Chakrabarti, Mini Kapoor and Vandita Mishra, truly wonderful editors headed the Indian Express opinion pages with a small, stellar and uncomplaining team of talented young women and men. I thank them all, and apologise to them for holding them up late Friday evenings when they deserved to go home or party. Amulya Gopalakrishnan, Sudeep Paul, Ipsita Chakravarty, Yamini Lohia and Parth Mehrotra in the current team, and many talented ones who have now grown so wonderfully well in the professionNational Interest belongs to you as much as to me.

One of them, however, deserves a very, very special mention. Mini Kapoor has selected these columns and spent months editing, fact-checking, putting in references and citations. It is only her perseverance and patience that has made this book a reality. Thank you Mini, friend and colleague. And remember, we arent done yet.

Usha Uppal, without whom, I sincerely believe, not even a word would have been written. She makes the impossible so easy, she runs my back-office blending art with magic I have still not figured out. Many of these columns were written on scraps of paper faxed from hotel counters, my handwriting legible only to her; sometimes in chunks of garbled paras texted from my BlackBerry. Only Usha could translate all thiswhich she did with a smile. And another ally who can teach you to deal with any calamityincluding a self-perpetuating one like mewith a smile. If you need a can-do tutorial, call Ambreen Khan.

Another unusual thank-you note to two extraordinary friends and comrades. Libel, contempt of court and some laws nastier than these are hazards journalists live with. I have spent half a lifetime squabbling with overly cautious lawyers who threaten you with nothing less than the possibility of jail if you dare to step out of the line they, of course, draw for you. In Vaidehi Thakar and Poorvi Kamani, the Indian Express has much more than a brilliant legal team. It could not have asked for a finer set of guardians of its unmatched and uncontested editorial freedoms. It does no harm that both also happen to be my most regular readers, fair if unforgiving critics, and never forget to chide me on the odd Friday that I get too lazy to write. But if anything ever brings legal trouble, they are wonderful allies, particularly along with Nachiket Joshi, quicksilver in the courtroom. And, of course, the guru of them all: so thank you also Goolam Vahanvati. Can I ever forget and be not grateful to you for being such a calm lifesaver in Chandigarh's high court in 1996 for what was indeed a criminal lack of judgement on my very first day as editor of the