In a career spanning over six decades, India’s veteran
journalist, Kuldip Nayar has covered a host of events; he has met,
interviewed and written about major figures in India’s, as well as the
world's, political life: Indira Gandhi, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Jai Prakash
Narayan, Mujibur Rahman, Ziaul Haq, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Dr Abdul
Qadeer Khan.
The list is endless. His first major assignment as a cub reporter working for Delhi-based Urdu newspaper Anjaam
was to write on Gandhi’s assassination in 1948. The poignancy of that
moment left a deep impact on his psyche. Only three months into working
as a journalist, he could “see” history explode before his eyes; he
admits he wept unashamedly. He is still haunted by Gandhi’s words,
delivered at a public prayer service a few days before his death where
Nayar was present: Hindus and Muslims are like my two eyes, he had said.
In a previous book, Tales of Two Cities
(co-authored with senior Pakistani journalist Asif Noorani), Nayar has
written with empathy and clarity about Partition, which changed
countless lives, including his own, forever.Was it inevitable, I ask?
Could its thirst for blood have been slaked by some means other than
India’s division? Holding Jinnah and Nehru equally “responsible”, Nayar
explains the Partition was not inevitable to begin with. The Cabinet
Mission Plan held promise of resolution but as events panned out and
Nehru and Jinnah remained implacable, it became inevitable.
"One day, all of South Asia will be a union – one visa, one currency … everyone will be free to work, travel, think."
Having witnessed first-hand the blood and gore, the
massacres and the communal carnage, how, then, did he not go the “other”
way? After all, many did. In fact, right-wing organisations on both
sides of the border fed on precisely the trauma that the first
generation of migrants had experienced to swell their ranks and obtain
sympathisers, if not members? Nayar explains that it is precisely
because he witnessed the trauma and the madness that his belief in
pluralism was strengthened. He learnt to judge a person by his beliefs
and commitments, not his religion.
Nayar’s great love for the Urdu language is well known.
In fact, in his youth, he even wrote poetry until Hasrat Mohani, the
maverick poet-politician, told him he was wasting his time “writing
verses that made no sense”. Yet Urdu has remained Nayar’s “first love”
and he is one of its most vocal champions. But what does he make of the
neglect of Urdu in India? Why is it that any Urdu-related soiree sees
only a grey-haired audience? What does he make of the Indian Muslim's
oft repeated lament that Urdu has languished due to official apathy?
Holding Urdu to be the worst casualty of Partition, Nayar blames
political parties, including Congress which held sway in post-Partition
India, as responsible. in his characteristically blunt manner he says,
"Such deliberate neglect is understandable on the part of the BJP
[right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party], but why the
Congress?"
In
1992, Nayar started the practice of a candlelight vigil at the
India-Pakistan border on the night between August 14 and 15. Scores of
peaceniks join him as he marches up to the border at Attari, candle in
hand; an equal number of activists, writers, poets and performers surges
from the other side. This annual event is viewed with some bemusement
by hard-nosed political commentators and dismissed as dewey-eyed
idealism by hawks on both sides, especially in times when bilateral
relations suffer from frostbite. But what compels a man of 88 years to
undertake this long journey – by rail from Delhi, by car from Amritsar
and eventually on foot, that too at the perilous hour of midnight – year
after year to raise the cry of "Hindustan-Pakistan Dosti Zindabad" in the face of continuing cynicism? "I am an optimist," he tells the Herald.
"One day, all of South Asia will be a union — one visa, one currency...
everyone will be free to work, travel, think." As we wind up our
conversation he recites a verse by Faiz Ahmad Faiz.
Jis dhaj se koi maqtal mein gaya, woh shaan salamat rahti hai
Yeh jaan tou aani jaani hai, iss jaan ki koi baat nahi
[Immortal is the way people go to the gallows; life is not important since it has to end anyways]
And this unshakable belief is the heart of the matter. Herein lies Nayar's real eminence.
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