Standing By Family
India is Sri Lanka’s only neighbour. It follows that what happens in Sri Lanka, especially if it involves the suffering of Sri Lankans, concerns India. The numerous ties that bind the two countries are too myriad to enumerate in this column. Suffice it to say that Sri Lankans, whether Sinhalese or Tamil, are our first cousins removed only by the Palk Strait. In geopolitical terms, Sri Lanka’s location is the pivot—literally that cockpit guarding prime navigation routes, that key neighbourhood watch—over the vast expanse of the southern Indian Ocean.
Conversely, from Sri Lanka, the southern Indian peninsula is within touching distance, which is why any talk of Chinese infrastructure projects in the northern part of the island is strategic anathema to India. India has reached out to Sri Lanka in response to Colombo’s distress signals and our help has been timely and provided some relief to a beleaguered people. The political situation in the island is however not amenable to such first-aid solutions.
Sri Lankan democracy has been weakened in recent years by political corruption operating at the highest levels of government, a miasma of autocracy coupled with misguided and error-prone governance and gross financial mismanagement. The people are hurting and the pain is widespread in a manner unseen since independence in 1948. Even the dreadful civil war years never saw such a collapse of the body functions of the state.
As first responder through Sri Lanka’s recent history, India cannot obviously abandon family. Sri Lanka is family. The Chinese, who have no ability to crisis manage or provide solutions to ease the pain of Sri Lankans, are twiddling thumbs, waiting for the next opening for their unique brand of extractive diplomacy. Whether the ruling Rajapaksas, known for their panda-hugging ways in the past, have learnt lessons from their policy and governance failures coupled with China-wooing to bait India, is the question. Their unpopularity is manifest. India must guard against being identified in the eyes of ordinary Sri Lankans as propping up an unpopular regime whose legitimacy is increasingly being questioned on the streets. Opposition unity is the need
India will have to continue helping Sri Lankans now. Ours must be a drive to win people’s hearts
of the hour but remains illusory. Ultimately, solutions to Sri Lanka’s current existential crisis have to be found within that island nation. The aftermath of a deadly civil war did not provide the requisite healing to unite a divided polity and nation. Majoritarian politics has played the proverbial serpent in Sri Lanka’s Eden for several years now. That, coupled with flawed governance and leadership, has inflicted grave damage to what was once a country of great potential.
Too much of our neighbourhood situations today are defined by the scarcely camouflaged rivalry between India and China. It is exploited mostly by our neighbours, who have done little homework about the fallout on their own countries of such wanton abetting of power politics. The Rajapaksas were masters of the game, but their hubris and incompetence have combined to melt their wings. Their fall is an object lesson that ultimately what people want is freedom from want, economic stability and a government that assures security in their daily lives.
The Sri Lankans are paying a heavy price for the grave shortcomings of their elected leaders. Their troubles will not be mitigated in the short term. Any IMF bailout will come with strict conditionalities and stringent spending restrictions. India will have to continue to lend a helping hand. Ours must be a concerted drive to win people’s hearts. India alienated itself from the people of Sri Lanka on both sides of the ethnic divide during the bitter years of the civil war. There is now an opportunity to redress those grievances through a carefully calibrated and sensitively deployed people’s diplomacy. Any impression, however misplaced, in Sri Lankan minds that India is propping up a deeply unpopular leadership has to be scrupulously avoided. India’s Sri Lanka policy faces an acid test. There is no margin for error because Sri Lanka, though a small country, is too big in terms of our strategic interest to fail.
Ultimately, family is family. The Sri Lankans are family. ■
News consumers in the digital age may chiefly remember Arun Shourie for his corpus of books on subjects ranging from political ideology, religion and law to personal memoir and his tenure as a forward-thinking disinvestment minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government. But a few still recall his trail-blazing innings as editor-activist of The Indian Express that made him a household name in the 1970s and 1980s. Relocating to India from his World Bank job due to his son’s illness, Shourie’s passionate critique of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency regime coincided with the fierce opposition mounted by press baron Ramnath Goenka, owner of the Express.
Together, they forged a partnership that ineluctably changed the tenor of journalism in that turbulent time. An implacable defender of press freedoms, Goenka had doting epithets for Shourie—“my racehorse” was a favourite. He also wanted to put up a sign reading “The Commissioner for Lost Causes” outside his cabin—that is the source of this book’s clunky title.
A series of searing, relentless exposés made the paper’s name. Among them were the plight of 85,000 undertrials, including women and children, rotting for years in jails and, even more horrifyingly, suspects in Bihar who had acid poured into their eyes by the police. Scoops such as the “Bhagalpur blindings” shook the nation and became bywords of New Journalism. As sensational was the case of Kamla, an abandoned young woman who an enterprising Express reporter “purchased” for Rs 2,300 in 1981 as evidence of the slave trade in Madhya Pradesh. The public outrage and legal fallout were enormous—playwright Vijay Tendulkar wrote a play about the case, and a film called Kamla was made.
Shourie describes at copious length how he demolished newsroom hierarchies, backing rookie reporters and outstation correspondents to zealously pursue stories and sustain lengthy follow-ups in courts. “There is no Opposition. There is just one newspaper,” said Rajiv Gandhi at the height of the Bofors scandal, and the Express pressed on, perilously, resisting government and trade union pressure to fall in line.
Some of the opposition came from within. Shourie’s peers often took a dim view of the goings-on. B.G. Verghese called him “a stormy petrel, a maverick… and ever so long-winded”. S. Nihal Singh said he “assumed the airs of a prima donna” and “exploited his proximity to Goenka to terrorise reporters and sub-editors”. Shourie gave as good as he got, dubbing old-school editors as members of the “Indian Journalists Service”.
Brevity is not Shourie’s strong suit. This 600-page volume, with exhaustive—often exhausting—footnotes, English translation of Hindi conversations and labyrinthine court proceedings, is a record of Shourie-led campaigns against political corruption and skulduggery. Some were remarkable, such as the crusade against Maharashtra chief minister A.R. Antulay’s money-making trusts that effectively finished off this Congress leader’s political career; or the challenge to the draconian antipress defamation bills floated by the Bihar, and later the Rajiv Gandhi, governments. Others, such as the convoluted progression of the Bofors investigation, or the story of the government being bilked of nearly $200 million by a Hong Kong company in the Kuo oil contract, petered out inconclusively. However, their retelling takes 65 and 30 pages, respectively.
And when the paper failed to publish his story (for the canny Goenka was not going to risk his paper’s survival and dismissed him), Shourie lived up to the derogatory label of “pamphleteer” by distributing cyclostyled sheets to MPs.
There are plenty of juicy anecdotes and first-hand encounters here of the many figures who fashioned India’s late 20th century political landscape but none as compelling as the portrait of the largerthan-life Goenka—complex, mercurial and colourful—who “could abuse fluently in thirteen languages”. He dominates the book, a manytentacled leviathan of networking energy. There are also some revealing missives, for instance, a grovelling letter from Justice P.N. Bhagwati to Indira Gandhi, comparing her return to power as “the reddish glow of the rising sun”.
Of Shourie’s writing, the political philosopher Martha Nussbaum said that it “all has the same mocking, superior tone”. His didactic prescription for journalists, headlined ‘Rules of Thumb’, is a 39-point, eight-page advisory. But it omits one essential commandment—even the best editors need a thorough edit. ■