Inked in vain?

Disappointing” is the first verdict that comes to mind as you go through most of S. Nihal Singh's Ink in my Veins: A life in journalism (Hay House India). You start reading the book hoping for rare insights and memorable anecdotes from one of India's senior editors. So, naturally, you're not thrilled when told how he was a “handsome boy” who was called ‘the Rose' by the school's ice-cream vendor, and was “buggered outside the school confines”!

You go through nearly half the book looking for an insight into the politics and politicians of the 1960s-70s, but what you get instead is a rather insipid account, through loosely-strung incidents from his postings in South East Asia, Russia and the like. Any reader, particularly a journalist, would pick up Singh's biography not to find out about how he got his furniture in Moscow or France, or how he experienced his first snowfall in Switzerland.

But the book redeems itself in the latter half as Singh moves to the Emergency, when he was working at The Statesman , which along with Ramnath Goenka's Indian Express , put up a feisty fight against Indira Gandhi's press managers such as Vidya Charan Shukla.

Another readable bit pertains to the splitting of the Congress in 1969, with Indira Gandhi springing a surprise on the party elders. Singh had recently returned from Moscow and was “struck by the communist methods Indira used to win a majority”. A “new battery of slogans, laced with populism” were coined, foreign policy acquired a pronounced anti-American tinge, banks were nationalised, privy purses abolished, and “the party bosses were shell-shocked”.

Indira and Morarji

The author says that his dealings with Indira, as The Statesman's political correspondent and later resident editor in Delhi, were frequent and “often rewarding”. Recounting a “stormy meeting” with her a few months prior to the Emergency in June 1975, he says, “She professed contempt for the Indian press, pretended that she hardly read the major English language newspapers and said she was concerned with what they wrote only because foreign visitors who came to India formed their impressions of the country on the basis of the press and that was bad for India's image.” She added that the foreigners she recently met were all praise for India's progress. When he said they could “hardly say anything else in her presence, she became angry”.

On Morarji Desai, who as Prime Minister offered him the director general's post for both Doordarshan and AIR, the author says: “Even in his own time, Morarji was a man who belonged to another age. Today, he would be a total misfit in the kind of politics that is being played at the regional and national levels. Despite his eccentric traits I had developed empathy for him. He lived life on his own terms and bore it with fortitude.”

The Emergency

After Indira's landslide victory in 1971 following the Bangladesh liberation war, problems began to mount. The huge cost of the war, crude prices shooting up in 1973, drop in industrial output and labour unrest came in quick succession and “the sheen of her victory wore off remarkably quickly”.

Singh then fast-forwards to the morning of June 26, 1975, when he got a call from a colleague, Ajit Bhattacharjea, at The Statesman telling him that Jayaprakash Narayan, along with other Opposition leaders, had been arrested and a state of internal emergency declared by the Indira government. His first move was to get together his staff and bring out a supplement for the afternoon. But by the time it was ready, censorship had been imposed and the supplement returned from the censor's office with “large slobs of white space” and hence had to be aborted.

The author was then the newspaper's Delhi Editor. I.K. Gujral, the then Information and Broadcasting Minister, was unceremoniously replaced with V.C. Shukla, “a shrewd politician who knew which side his bread was buttered. He soon called a meeting of editors in Delhi to show them “the mailed fist” and crack the whip. Many Delhi papers had appeared that morning with blank spaces to denote the censor's scissors. The Statesman's Delhi edition stated that it had been censored and “Shukla made it clear that such forms of protest were impermissible. Shukla played his part admirably. He was rude, boorish and full of a barely concealed contempt for dissent of any kind.”

Later, Singh was asked by the chief press officer to display prominently Indira Gandhi and Congress president D.K. Barua of the ‘Indira is India and India is Indira' fame.

In January 1976, Shukla summoned him, pulled out a copy of the newspaper, and asked why it had front-paged foreign stories while ignoring Rajya Sabha's passing of the Emergency legislation. Singh replied that thitherto the movement had only made laws to tell the press what not to publish. “If you want to tell us what to print, and how to print it, you will have to devise new laws.” Immediately after this meeting, a wayside cigarette shop was set up outside Singh's house and two men kept a constant vigil on his movements and visitors.

Meanwhile, C.R. Irani of The Statesman , who along with Ramnath Goenka of The Indian Express had formed a duo to play cat-and-mouse games with the censors and defy the Emergency rules, moved Singh to Calcutta and made him Editor. At 47, he was one of the youngest editors of that newspaper.

The rest of the book is rather unremarkable; we get Singh's viewpoint on the troubled times and disintegration of The Statesman , followed by an account of his stint as the editor of the Khaleej Times , and the sob story of how Vijaypath Singhania did not put in adequate financial infusion to make a success of The Indian Post , which he had invited Singh to edit.