One Life is not Enough by K. Natwar Singh; Rupa Publications; Price: Rs.500; 396 pp
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The media hype about former Indian Foreign Service (IFS) officer and external affairs minister Natwar Singh’s reportedly tell-all autobiography, is wholly unwarranted. All it contains is some innocuous gossip about the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty which comes as no surprise. The best that can be said about One Life is Not Enough is that it’s a much-ado-about-nothing story of a grey bureaucrat who served himself more than the country for over half a century, and that it’s been cleverly marketed.
If at all this self-exculpatory autobiography reveals anything, it’s the ease with which the old elites of pre-independence India were able to maintain their pampered existence and unearned privileges. They smartly clambered aboard the bandwagon of the independent Indian state without paying any price for shameless collaboration with the lal shaitans for over two centuries, during which the growth rate of the Indian economy averaged 1 percent per year. By his own account, the author’s family — “feudal, conservative, stubborn and a touch wild” — which had “served the founders of the Bharatpur dynasty for centuries”, prospered under the British Raj with his father serving as one of the three nazims and district magistrates of the protectorate. Inevitably, the young Natwar was enrolled in the then princes-only Mayo College, Ajmer, and later in St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, and Cambridge University. In 1953, he was effortlessly admitted into the IFS.
Reading about this undistinguished babu, enjoying the good life abroad at public expense at a time when Indians travelling were allowed to purchase $8 in hard currency because “precious foreign exchange” was in short supply right until the 1990s, leaves an unpleasant taste. The country has not benefitted at all from this worthy’s long service in the IFS culminating in his appointment as Union minister of external affairs (2004-06). There’s no visible improvement in our foreign relations with neighbouring countries — all of whom hate India — or in our interaction with the West.
Just how little importance Singh attaches to outcomes as opposed to routine inputs, is evidenced by the almost complete lack of insights or analyses in this self-serving memoir. What’s the way out of India’s Kashmir imbroglio, or the way forward in the Indo-China border dispute? What’s his opinion of the Emergency declared by Mrs. Indira Gandhi in 1975, or the attack on the Golden Temple in 1984? Or Rajiv Gandhi’s intervention in the LTTE-government conflict in Sri Lanka in the mid-1980s? Apart from a bald recitation of facts, this ultimate insider and foreign affairs expert has little to offer by way of satisfactory explanation or analyses.
Indeed, the major takeaway from this mediocre and self-absorbed life story, is an inadvertently revealing account of the tenacity with which the old elites wormed their way into the post-independence establishment, to continue to derive offices of profit under the state. It’s hardly surprising therefore, that as his age of retirement from the IFS drew near, Natwar experienced the pull of politics which offered the opportunity to continue to enjoy offices of profit under the state.
In 1984, he resigned from the IFS and in the following year when third generation Nehruvian, Rajiv Gandhi led the Congress party to its greatest ever electoral victory on a wave of sympathy following the assassination of his mother Indira Gandhi, Natwar was elected as the MP from his hometown of Bharatpur, and appointed minister of state for steel. For the next decade until the period 1996-2004 when the Congress party was out of power, Natwar Singh enjoyed the lavish perks and privileges that ministers and MPs awarded themselves, and from 2004-06, served as minister of external affairs.
Eventually, Singh’s continuous partying at public expense was spoilt by a bolt-from-the-blue report of the Paul Volcker Committee which was appointed in 2004 by the United Nations to investigate allegations of corruption and fraud by Iraq’s late, unlamented dictator Saddam Hussein, against whom trade sanctions had been imposed by the UN for his invasion of Kuwait in 1990. In the mid-90s, the sanctions were relaxed under a humanitarian oil-for-food programme under UN supervision.
Inevitably, Saddam began fudging the programme by allocating millions of barrels of crude oil to supporters in the UN and other international forums. The committee found that the Congress party and an Indian firm, Hamdaan Exports, received several million barrels of crude in exchange for unspecified goods and services. The company was run by Aditya Khanna and Andleeb Sehgal (close friends of Natwar’s son Jagat). When a row broke out in Parliament following this sensational disclosure, the Congress-led UPA-I government constituted the Justice R.S. Pathak Committee to enquire into the allegations.
Unsurprisingly, the Pathak Committee absolved the Congress party but held that Khanna, Sehgal and Hamdaan Exports were beneficiaries and although “there was no material to show that Shri Natwar Singh had derived any financial or other personal benefit”, he was a beneficiary to the extent that he had enabled the deal between the Saddam regime and Hamdaan Exports. But so great was Singh’s love of office, that even after he was forced to resign from the external affairs ministry in 2006, he continued to serve in the Union cabinet as minister without portfolio until the end of the UPA-I government’s term in 2009.
According to the publishers, the great revelation of One Life is that it was Rahul Gandhi who vetoed his mother Sonia’s assumption of the office of prime minister when the Congress was unexpectedly voted into power in 2004. Surely that was only to be expected of a protective son who had witnessed the twin assassinations of his grandmother and father?
The other sensational disclosure is that Sonia is shallow, cold, calculative and dictatorial. If so it doesn’t show the author in very good light, given that he was a close confidante for several decades. And as for his protestations of innocence in the oil-for-food scandal, why doesn’t he sue Paul Volcker in the US? After all, the American courts are very generous to defamed plaintiffs. Or could it be because in defamation cases, truth of the alleged defamation is a good defence?
The danger of writing autobiographies is that authors may reveal more about themselves than they intend. In One Life, the author reveals himself as a beneficiary of continuous unearned privilege, who despite being given every opportunity to serve the national interest, has little to show by way of achievement, and who must live out his autumnal years tainted with scandal.
dilip Thakore
Interfaith essays
Dialogue in a Pluralistic World; ISPCK; Price: Rs.250; 190 pp
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With the election of a BJP government at the Centre and in several states, affirmation of religious identities and faiths has become fashionable again. Therefore this compilation is timely. A rising number of nation states have become religiously plural in the new age of instant transnational communications. Today, people of different faiths are interacting with each other on a scale never witnessed before. This means inter-religious dialogue has become, quite literally, a life-and-death issue for humanity and can no longer remain the preserve of theologians. How societies learn to handle religious differences in a highly interlinked world, has become a major challenge.
This volume, a collection of essays written by scholars of various faith traditions, is a plea for people of diverse faiths to understand each other through dialogue, and learn tolerance, compassion and endurance — the key values of all religions.
According to Rita Bagchi, a Delhi-based academic, inter-religious dialogue not only enables people of varied faiths to learn and benefit from each other, it also disciplines and enriches them spiritually. But she stresses that such dialogue should not be limited to theological exchanges. Modern religious leaders must also encourage social engagement by people of different faiths to address pressing social issues. She cites examples of numerous figures from Indian history who stressed the universality of religion beyond name and form in an expansive way to embrace people of other faiths.
In another enlightening paper, Thomas Kunnunkal, an Indian Jesuit, calls for people of various faiths to study each other’s scriptures to expand their own spiritual experience and vision, and help them understand and appreciate the abundant goodness that’s to be found in traditions other than their own. This can also help create a place for people of other faiths in our hearts.
Delhi-based Islamic scholar Farida Khanum debunks the polemical approach to interfaith relations, marked by heated debates aiming to prove the other wrong. This approach, she rightly points out, can in no way create a climate for mutual understanding and acceptance. Interfaith dialogue, she explains, is based on the principle of live-and-let-live and mutual respect.
Thomas Michel’s essay on a Muslim scholar and advocate of peace and dialogue is an excellent example of how someone from one religion (in this case, a Catholic priest) can study, appreciate and benefit from the insights of a votary of another religious persuasion. Michel’s reflections are on the life of the remarkable Turkish Islamic scholar Said Nursi (1877-1960), in particular, on Nursi’s commentary on the Quran, the Risala-e-Nur. He appreciates Nursi’s appeal for unity between Muslims and pious Christians, urging them to shun acrimonious polemics to provide a united witness of faith to a world suffering from aggressive atheism. Michel approvingly notes Nursi’s advocacy of personal transformation and inner purification, and his belief that the days of “jihad with the sword” are over. He also endorses Nursi’s balanced approach to Western civilization — neither wholly condemning it, nor uncritically embracing it. His advocacy of love, forgiveness, reconciliation, introspection and self-critique, provide reason to acknowledge Nursi as one of the greatest exponents of non-violent activism in the 20th century.
Although media headlines proclaim an imminent clash of civilisations between resurgent Islam whose holy warriors are on the march in the Middle East, and reactionary Christianity in Europe and the West, it’s heartening to learn that in 2007, a group of 140 noted Muslim scholars and leaders from different countries sent a joint letter, titled A Common Word Between Us and You, to top Christian leaders, calling for genial relations between Muslims and Christians based on their common monotheism.
Packiam Samuel, director of the Henry Martyn Institute, an interfaith dialogue centre in Hyderabad, accepts that polemical debates between Islamic and Christian scholars have failed to yield positive results. Citing a compelling Quranic verse “And do not argue with the People of the Scripture except in a way that is best (…) And our God and your God is one” (29:46), he proffers it as a basis for dialogue between Christians and Muslims.
Given that in the newly emergent world of continuous mass migration, people of different religions have no choice but to live in closer interdependence than ever before, interfaith or inter-community initiatives for harmony have become imperative. This, essentially, is the message of this uplifting book. It’s a message we cannot afford to ignore.
Roshan Shah