Constant Congressman

Arjun Singh, Rajiv Gandhi’s most trusted political lieutenant, is too layered and fascinating a political figure to describe in one article. But of his more interesting personality aspects is how seriously he took the media.

A file image of the Former HRD Minister Arjun Singh launching the NIOS Online project | http://old.nios.ac.in

The first time I met Arjun Singh, he was not dealing with a real crisis. It was in Bhopal a few days after the gas tragedy in December 1984. What struck me was his composure. He was cool, unruffled and even exchanged old-fashioned banter with journalists. You could not miss the bonhomie between him and the Bhopal press corps. Arjun Singh, we all knew, had done more to improve the living standards of journalists, with government housing and other freebies, in his state than anybody before or after him

My first one-on-one conversation with him came in the following summer. It was a very short, half-hour Indian Airlines flight from Delhi to Chandigarh. He wouldn’t stop smiling as all kinds of people lined up to congratulate him. He was on his way to take over as the new governor of Punjab, at a very young age of 55. The Punjab governorship was not a job for retired people. The terror-hit state was constantly under president’s rule. Rajiv Gandhi had just signed a peace accord with the respected Sikh leader, Sant Harchand Singh Longowal. Arjun Singh, as Rajiv’s most trusted political lieutenant, had played a stellar role behind the scenes. No surprise then, that Rajiv trusted him to oversee its implementation. Hence that governorship at such a young age. In fact as I shook his hand while stepping out of that plane, I, somewhat naively, wished him a brilliant five years of governorship.

Arrey bhai, young man, I do not know you very well. But do you want me to remember you as my friend or my enemy?” he asked me. He wanted to finish the job quickly, and get back to the political mainstream.

His stint in Chandigarh, though, was longer and patchier than he would have wished. Within months of his arrival, separatists assassinated Sant Longowal, exposing the limitations of the accord and the tenuous peace it had brought. Of course, Arjun Singh did not lose his cool. He asked his trusted aide, IAS officer Sudeep Banerji who he had brought along from Bhopal, to get the pending applications of five of the senior-most journalists in Chandigarh for upgrading their government houses. His first executive act within minutes of that assassination was to upgrade them all, not by one but two levels. Sure enough, many of the following morning’s stories talked not so much of his failure to protect his most valuable ward, but of how anguished he was that Longowal never listened to his entreaties to take his personal security more seriously.

Arjun Singh was too layered and fascinating a political figure to describe in one newspaper article. But one of the more interesting aspects of his personality was how seriously he took the media. Friend or foe, he never refused a journalist a favour. But, at the same time, he was never shy of raising that dreaded question: are you my friend or my enemy?

During his full stint as HRD minister in UPA 1, this newspaper, and this editor, were usually at odds with him. While we generally support the idea of caste-based reservations (though with some important qualifications), we saw his move to spring OBC reservations on the entire higher education system without any preparation as some kind of a too-clever-by-half ploy to unsettle the prime minister, where it would be politically unwise for him to oppose that policy and impossible to implement in a hurry. It was in the course of that argument, run on these editorial pages with our usual bluntness, that I received an early morning phone call from him.

I do not want to engage you in any long conversation, he said, sort of deadpan, in clipped English. I only called to tell you one thing.”

And what is it Arjun Singhji? I asked.

It is just that had the man in whose name your paper is published (referring to our redoubtable founder Ramnath Goenka), had he been alive

today, you would not have lasted in your job for even one more week. I had that kind of relationship with him, he said.

I was starting to tell him we were all so sorry that Ramnathji was no longer with us and that we all missed him greatly. But that he had left a formidable legacy and equally a successor, and that our freedoms were actually very secure with them. But he had no patience.

I told you I do not want to enter into an argument with you, ” he said and gently put the phone down. Gently, he did not bang it.

It was a tribute to our old-fashioned political tradition that in spite of so many differences, he was always willing to give me time. My last long conversation with him was when he was recovering from a sudden attack of painful herpes on his face. He talked to me in half-recline, his face unshaven for days because of the herpes lesions. Of course he told me in detail where I had got my reading of politics, particularly politics of caste and poverty, all wrong. But then, maybe because he was distracted by pain, or just generous with me because I had come to look him up in this awfully distracting sickness, he began to speak expansively about himself, almost letting his guard down. Which, those who knew him better would tell you, was extremely rare.

Why did I return to politics? he asked, Only because I discovered that within the Congress, even at senior-most levels, there were people who were in such a hurry to junk Rajiv Gandhi’s ideals.”

You mean, Arjun Singhji, I asked, you are saving Rajiv Gandhi’s ideals from a party led by his own wife and son?”

No, not that. It is just that none of the others was close enough to Rajiv to know what he really dreamed for India, he said. Then he went on to describe the days when he, as chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, accompanied Rajiv deep into the countryside, where we lay on cots in small inspection bungalows under star-filled skies and exchanged our ideas for the future of India.”

It was at this point that I saw his eyes moist a bit. One thing I will say about Rajiv, ” he said. His sense of patriotism was always palpable.”

Through exactly 25 years of knowing him, and both disagreeing and arguing with him intellectually, one thing I would never doubt was his loyalty to the Gandhi family. But that is what also made him so angry, even bitter: he thought that his loyalty was not adequately rewarded, as the ultimate prize, the prime ministership, was denied to him not once but twice, by Narasimha Rao and then Manmohan Singh, both of whom he considered lesser leaders than himself. Then, inside their respective cabinets, he tried to run circles around them, on his and he presumed the Gandhi family’s favourite issues, secularism and social justice. In both cases he was out-manoeuvred. And that too by politicians he did not consider half as sharp as himself. This, more than his many chronic health problems, angered him in his last years. But his political mind remained razor-sharp to his last day. His party, his friends as well as detractors will all miss him. So will we journalists for whom he was a fine example of the traditional Congress politician so accessible, even if you mostly disagreed with him.