A HALF-OPEN WINDOW
An honest critique of former vice-president Mohammad Hamid Ansari’s autobiography, By Many a Happy Accident, is difficult.
There is, in our society, no tradition for clinical criticism. Instead, we have a culture of literary appreciation—polite and deferential. In this culture, my personal equation with Hamid bhai, one of warmth, cannot but intervene. Even so, reading the book, a question formed itself in my mind quite spontaneously: where are the sharp insights on events in this otherwise compelling narrative? It is not that insights are absent. Sometimes they are embedded in the narrative itself. But where is Hamid bhai, in full form, when he had the universe in his ken, analytical and penetrating, in his ample drawing rooms in Kabul, Tehran or New York.
Take this anecdote picked randomly from the book: former president of Afghanistan, Mohammed Najibullah’s rival for power, Asadullah Sarwari, was sent to pasture in Mongolia and Yemen. From Aden in Yemen, Sarwari escaped to New Delhi where he was detected by the Afghan security personnel. A scuffle followed. Sarwari, among others, was arrested. Najibullah contacted the cabinet secretarial in New Delhi seeking Sarwari’s repatriation for which he even sent a special plane. “The Home Ministry insisted on legal processes being followed,” writes Ansari. In other words, repatriation was being delayed.
“At a reception in the palace, the President (Najibullah) asked me to stay back until others had departed,” he writes. He then walked up to Ansari and said in chaste Urdu: “Do you know that if I were not here, the flag of Pakistan would be flying over this building?” Only when Ansari touched all bases in New Delhi did the issue get resolved. An ambassador less resourceful than Ansari may well have failed.
An incident like this would form a nugget in Essence of Decision, Graham T. Allison’s masterly analysis of the decision-making process in US president Kennedy’s Washington during the Cuban missile crisis—a seminal book. Hamid bhai has in him several such studies which he could have farmed out to research scholars, but are such studies even possible in an atmosphere of intellectual suffocation?
Let me turn to an example from journalism to make a slightly different point. For a long spell, particularly during prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao’s years, Nikhil Chakravarty was the most well-informed journalist in New Delhi. It is difficult to imagine such a colleague during the current bleak phase. Never has India’s capital city been so short on information. Sources of information now shrink even from each other.
Nikhil da would set out early in the morning. After touching every possible information base, including P.V. himself, he would turn up at the India International Centre where a bevy of pundits would accost him. Nikhil da
kept the authorities’ confidence for the simple reason that he needed them for replenishment of his information diet in an ever-continuing system. It was all cleverly consumed and without annoying the sources of information.
Hamid bhai has no such constraints now that he is out of office. Years of wisdom can no longer be prisoner to the Official Secrets Act. His career following his years in the foreign office was even more spectacular. Vice-chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University, vice-president of the Republic and, particularly, his role as chairman of Rajya Sabha— these are all replete with events that make history. Each event deserves his reflection: where, when, why, how?
Now is the time for Hamid bhai to shake himself out of a lifetime of bureaucratic habits. He must now inform us not only about what happened, but provide diagnostics on when the rot began to set in. We need collaborators exposed from the inside. Hamid bhai, pay heed to Iqbal.
“Achha hai dil ke paas rahey pasban-e-aql, Lekin kabhi kabhi isey tanha bhi chhod de
(Mind must guide the heart, But, occasionally, let the heart have its way).” ■
Saeed Naqvi is a journalist and author of Being the Other: The Muslim in India (2016)