I was surprised when the Congress party
gave me a Padma Shri – I am the only foreign journalist to ever get it. For, in
my forty years of political reporting in India, I have always been a vocal
critic of the Nehru dynasty. Someone even called me recently: “a vitriolic
British journalist, who in his old age chose to live back in the land he never
approved”.
It started with Operation Blue Star. I was
one of the few western correspondents who criticized Indira. As I have said
since then numerous times, the attack on the Golden Temple and the atrocities
that followed the army operations, produced in all sections of the Sikhs a
sense of outrage that is hard today to alleviate. I believed then that the
large majority of Hindu India, even if politically hostile to Indira Gandhi,
openly identified with – and exulted in – her will to overwhelmingly humble a
recalcitrant minority.
As everybody knows, Indira Gandhi helped
my fame grow even more, by wanting to imprison me during the Emergency she
clamped and finally throwing me out of India for a short while. But the result
was that the whole of India tuned in, then and thereafter, to my radio’s
broadcasts, ‘The Voice of India’, to hear what they thought was ‘accurate’
coverage of events.
When Rajiv Gandhi came to power, I first
believed that he was sincerely trying to change the political system, but he
quickly gave-up when the old guard would not budge. I criticized him for his
foolish adventure in Sri Lanka, although I felt sorry for him when he was blown
to pieces by Dhanu, the Tamil Tiger. It is in Kashmir, though that I fought
most viciously against his Govt and subsequent Congress ones for its human
right abuses on the Kashmiri Muslims of the Valley. The Congress Governments
tried indeed several times to censor me and the army even took prisoner my
Kashmiri stringer, whom I had to rescue by the skin of his teeth. I am also
proud that I was the first one to point out then, that the Indian Government
had at that time no proof of the Pakistani involvement in the freedom movement
in Kashmir. Thus I always made it a point to start my broadcasts by proclaiming
that « the Indian Government accuses Pakistan of fostering terrorism»,
or that “elections are being held in Indian-controlled Kashmir”…
As I was so popular, all the other foreign
journalists used the same parlance to cover Kashmir and they always spoke of
the plight of the Muslims, never of the 400.000 Hindus, who after all were
chased out of their ancestral land by sheer terror (I also kept mum about it).
As for Sonia Gandhi, I did not mind her,
when she was Rajiv Gandhi’s wife, but after his death, I watched with dismay as
she started stamping her authority on the Congress, which made me say in a
series of broadcasts on the Nehru Dynasty: “It’s sad that the Indian National
Congress should be completely dependent on one family; the total surrender of a
national party to one person is deplorable. You have to ask the question: what
claims does Sonia Gandhi have to justify her candidature for
prime-ministership? Running a country is far more complicated than running a
company. Apprenticeship is required in any profession — more so in politics”. I
heard that Sonia Gandhi was unhappy about this broadcast.
Then, after President APJ Abdul Kalam
called her to the Raj Bhavan and told her what some of us already knew, namely
that for a long time, she had kept both her Italian and Indian passports, which
disqualified her to become the Prime Minister of India, she nevertheless became
the Supreme leader of India behind the scenes. It is then that I exclaimed:
“the moribund and leaderless Congress party has latched onto Sonia Gandhi, who
is Italian by birth and Roman Catholic by baptism”. She never forgave me for
that. Yet, today I can say without the shadow of a doubt that when history will
be written, the period over which she presided, both over the Congress and
India, will be seen as an era of darkness, of immense corruption and of a
democracy verging towards autocracy, if not disguised dictatorship, in the
hands of a single person, a non Indian and a Christian like me. Truth will also
come out about her being the main recipient for kickbacks from Bofors to 2G,
which she uses to buy votes, as the Wikileaks have just shown.
Finally, I am sometimes flabbergasted at
the fact that Indians –Hindus, sorry, as most of this country’s intelligentsia
is Hindu – seem to love me so much, considering the fact that in my heydays, I
considerably ran down the 850 million Hindus of this country, one billion
worldwide. I have repented today: I do profoundly believe that India needs to
be able to say with pride, “Yes, our civilization has a Hindu base to it.”
The genius of Hinduism, the very reason it
has survived so long, is that it does not stand up and fight. It changes and
adapts and modernizes and absorbs–that is the scientific and proper way of
going about it. I believe that Hinduism may actually prove to be the religion
of this millennium, because it can adapt itself to change.
Courtesy & Credits:
P N Benjamin
Mark Tully
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