A Gandhian to the core, an uncompromising anti-liquor campaigner, a spellbinding orator and Principal of Mahatma Gandhi College, Thiruvananthapuram, Manmathan was a contemporary of Mannath Padmanabhan, the visionary founder of the Nair Service Society which went on to build an empire of educational and medical institutions.

I had the privilege of hearing him once at my alma mater, St. Thomas College, Kozhencherry. He was invited to speak on a subject that was electrifying campuses across the world at that time: students’ unrest. American universities were convulsed by protests against the Vietnam War.

From Berkeley to Columbia, students were questioning imperialism, racism and militarism. Europe, too, was aflame with agitation—Paris 1968 had already entered history as a revolt of ideas as much as of streets.

Prof Manmathan began by extolling the courage and moral seriousness of students in the West.

Then, with his trademark mix of irony and sting, he turned to Kerala. “There, students earn their living to fund their education. They have skin in the game. Here, parents pay the fees, feed the children, clothe them and even buy their bus passes. What stake do they have in the education system? Nothing,” he said.

Then came the coup de grâce: “They enjoy strikes because colleges close and they can sit at home.” For many students, strikes were less about revolution and more about recreation.

Many years later, that long-ago speech came back to me while watching a video clip of S. Gurumurthy, a chartered accountant-turned-ideologue of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Ideologically, Gurumurthy stands at the opposite pole from Prof Manmathan’s Gandhism. Yet, in an odd way, they converged on the same sociological truth.

Gurumurthy narrated an anecdote from a lecture he delivered at a prestigious American university. Listening to him, I was reminded of my own long-held view that institutions there recognise talent more readily than we do in India, where caste and community considerations often intrude.

The much-publicised case of Harvard inviting Lalu Prasad Yadav to speak on how his unconventional ideas rescued Indian Railways from financial free-fall comes to mind in this context.

Then came Gurumurthy’s experiment. He asked all the students in the audience to raise their hands if their education was fully funded by their parents.

Without exception, every Indian student raised a hand.

Then he asked who among them had taken bank loans to finance their education. Every American hand went up—black and white, men and women alike. That, he said, revealed who had real stakes in their education.

Listening to Gurumurthy, I was reminded instantly of Prof Manmathan’s cutting question: what real right did Indian students have to speak of “students’ unrest” when so many of them had no financial stake in their education or in the system that sustained it?

When Neighbouring Nations Rise — and India Doesn’t

Recently, The Economist carried an article that asked a troubling question: why are young men and women in India so curiously unmoved by political and social upheavals that would have set generations elsewhere on fire? The magazine contrasted India’s political quietism with the turbulence in its immediate neighbourhood.

Take Nepal. For years, the country had suffered under a political class steeped in corruption and cynicism. Public institutions withered while politicians bickered and bargained. When students took to the streets against corruption and misgovernance, it was not mere tokenism. Campuses became nerve centres of resistance. The agitations were sustained, creative and relentless.

The protests snowballed into a wider public movement. The government, cornered by the moral authority of the youth and the pressure of the streets, was finally forced to step down.

Young Nepalis discovered something transformative—that protest could actually produce political change. They were not merely shouting into the void.

Sri Lanka offers another powerful example. For decades, an oligarchy ruled the island nation, entrenching itself through corruption, nepotism and economic mismanagement. By 2022, the economy had collapsed, fuel and food were scarce, and ordinary citizens were pushed to the brink.

It was the youth who lit the spark. Students, professionals and ordinary citizens poured into the streets.

They occupied public buildings, camped outside official residences and refused to budge. The protests were largely peaceful but unwavering.

The President Gotabaya Rajapaksha was forced to flee the country. Power slipped from the hands of a seemingly invincible ruling elite. Today, Colombo has a new leadership, born out of the anger and aspirations of a mobilised citizenry.

In Bangladesh too—whether one approves of the outcome or not—the youth uprising changed the course of politics.

Students and young citizens protested against what they saw as high-handed governance and shrinking democratic space. The unrest grew in intensity and scale.

The Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was eventually forced to flee the country and seek asylum in India. That this happened at all is testimony to the disruptive power of youth-driven politics in our neighbourhood.

Crises Without Rebellion: India’s Strange Silence

India, meanwhile, has witnessed convulsions far more severe—yet without comparable mass upheaval.

Consider demonetisation. In one stroke, Prime Minister Narendra Modi invalidated high-value currency notes.

The stated objective was to strike at black money and counterfeit currency.

What followed was chaos. The informal economy collapsed overnight. Millions of workers lost their jobs. Small businesses shut shop. Daily-wage earners were reduced to penury.

People stood in serpentine queues outside banks and ATMs to withdraw their own money, only to be told that the cash had run out. Deaths occurred in queues from exhaustion, anxiety and despair.

And yet, there was no nationwide uprising. There was anger, yes; private misery, certainly; public rebellion, hardly.

Then came the pandemic. Without warning, Modi announced an all-India lockdown. The decision may have been justified as a public health emergency, but its execution was brutal in its insensitivity.

Tens of millions of migrant workers lost their jobs overnight.

With no income, no food and no certainty about when the lockdown would end, workers from Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh—dismissed casually as “laggard states”—began walking home from cities like Delhi, Mumbai and Nagpur.

They walked hundreds of kilometres under the scorching sun, with children on their shoulders and belongings on their heads. Many were lathi-charged for violating Covid norms.

Some died on the roads. The images were heart-rending. The suffering was biblical in scale. Yet again, there was no nationwide revolt. No sustained student movement. No paralysing civil disobedience.

At that time, someone remarked to me with chilling resignation: “We are like that. We won’t rebel. We won’t protest.”

There is a crude joke often made about Indians and sex—that they are obsessed with it in private but prudish in public. Perhaps something similar can be said about protest: we complain endlessly in private but submit meekly in public.

The Weight of Fatalism on a Nation’s Conscience

We are, at bottom, a deeply fatalistic people. Fatalism is the belief that everything is preordained, that human will counts for little, that destiny rules supreme. It is a worldview that teaches acceptance rather than resistance, endurance rather than struggle.

The great poet Ulloor S. Parameswara Iyer captured this worldview in his celebrated poem Premasangeetham. In one stanza, he surrenders completely to divine choreography:

“Salutations to You, the Giver of my life, Lord of Dance, Supreme Soul!

In this world-stage of humanity, I am but a small part of Your dance troupe.

What role I am to play is Yours to decide, O Lord;

My duty is to dance as You will, with devotion and grace.

Be it as a servant or a player upon the stage.

To portray joy or sorrow, I am here to fulfil Your purpose.

You, the unseen Director, guide my every step like the wind.”

This is fatalism at its most lyrical—and its most paralysing. Man becomes a puppet, God the unseen puppeteer. Responsibility dissolves into resignation.

This worldview is profoundly at odds with the doctrine I believe in. According to the Biblical vision, God created man in His own image.

Man is not a puppet but a moral agent. He is sovereign in the limited sphere granted to him. He can choose the right path or the wrong one. Even Adam and Eve had that choice. History is not just enacted upon humanity; it is shaped by human decisions.

Man has the power to transform his life. Let me illustrate with two small stories from my own life. My wife and I were fond of a boy who used to visit our home to play with our grandson. His father pressed clothes for a living.

My wife offered to support the boy’s education. But the father had other ideas. He wanted his son to fetch clothes, return the ironed garments and collect money. Education was seen as a distraction.

The boy was not encouraged to study. He inherited his father’s trade. Today he earns Rs 5 per piece of clothing he irons. Fate did not destroy his prospects; choices did.

In contrast, when I admitted my elder son to a school in Kayamkulam, one of my neighbours—a barber by profession—admitted his son to the same school. Our children travelled in the same school bus. That boy studied diligently, became an engineer, went to the Gulf and today is far richer than my son. Education transformed his life, just as its denial froze the other boy’s.

Last week, while delivering the Justice P. Subramonian Poti Memorial Lecture at the Kerala Club in New Delhi, Prof S. Sivakumar narrated another telling story.

A rich man was extremely liberal in helping his servants with money for festivals, marriages and childbirths. But he steadfastly refused to support the education of their children. His logic was chilling in its candour: if they got educated, they would no longer work as servants.

Is it any wonder, then, that a small shipload of Portuguese soldiers could capture power in Goa, then ruled by Muslims over a predominantly Hindu population? They were the first Europeans to establish a lasting presence in India. They ruled for over 500 years without facing sustained mass resistance.

How many Mughals came to India initially? A few hundred at most.

Yet they ruled India for nearly 700 years. Under Aurangzeb, the Mughal Empire reached its territorial zenith—larger than present-day India. In 1700, India accounted for 25 percent of the world’s GDP. Aurangzeb died peacefully of old age, not at the hands of a revolutionary mob.

Today, Modi’s supporters take pride in the fact that he has ruled for 11 years. In contrast, the British ruled India for about 200 years. The British population in India never exceeded one lakh. Yet they governed a subcontinent of hundreds of millions with astonishing ease.

When Mrs Indira Gandhi imposed the Emergency, I was in Delhi. There was not even a whimper of protest initially.

Her police rounded up Opposition leaders with ruthless efficiency—Morarji Desai, Jayaprakash Narayan and countless others disappeared into jails.

Civil liberties were suspended. The press was muzzled. And the people accepted it, contrary to later claims of universal resistance.

Today, we encourage poor youth to indulge in rituals rather than reflection. They walk hundreds of kilometres to fetch holy water. Along the way they are fed with food, beverages, fruits and sweets. They also receive intoxicants. Meanwhile, the children of their leaders go abroad for higher studies.

From Opium to Algorithms: A New Age of Distraction

The colonial rulers used opium to keep the Chinese subdued. In India today, there is a new intoxicant: the mobile phone.

Nowhere in the world is the Internet so cheap. Tens of millions are addicted to their screens.

Yesterday, I saw an autorickshaw driver watching video clips on his mobile, neatly fixed at the centre of his steering handle. He seemed almost pleased when the traffic signal turned red—it gave him uninterrupted viewing time.

Algorithms work with perverse efficiency: if you watch nonsense, you are rewarded with an endless torrent of more nonsense.

Hands chained to mobile phones, symbolising digital addiction and how smartphones control modern life.

Smartphones have become the new chains—an addiction more potent than opium.

Grandparents, parents, children, grandchildren, servants, drivers, cleaners, workers—each is sealed inside a personalised digital cocoon, scrolling in splendid isolation.

How can people hypnotised by viral trivia be bothered about price rise, unemployment or the cynical manipulation of public sentiment?

The colonial rulers had opium; we have the smartphone—and it is far more lethal because we swallow it willingly.

Courtesy: The Aidem

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The old-timers, from the chief sub-editors to the linotype operators in the printing section, spoke of him with a reverence usually reserved for mythical heroes. They would lower their voices, as if sharing a sacred secret, and recount tales of a man whose courage and conviction had not only defined the paper’s finest hour but had also reshaped the very landscape of Indian journalism.

I was only 27 then, younger than he had been when he took the helm. For the first forty-five days of my tenure, I found myself shouldering the responsibilities of the editor, R.K. Mukker, who was away in Punjab for his daughter’s wedding.

The weight of the chair felt immense, not just because of the responsibility, but because I was acutely aware of the giant who had occupied it before me. As a Malayali and, like him, a chain-smoker, my colleagues were quick to draw comparisons. “You remind us of George Saheb,” they would say, a compliment that was both flattering and daunting. It was an impossible standard to live up to, for I knew him only as a legend, a byline from a storied past.

This burgeoning curiosity compelled me to seek him out. During a leave trip to Kerala, I made a pilgrimage to the Indian Express office in Kochi. The office, perched near the coast, carried the distinct, briny scent of the sea and drying fish—a sensory detail that has remained etched in my memory.

I was nervous, expecting perhaps a brush-off from a journalist of his stature. Instead, I was met with immense warmth. He greeted me not as a stranger, but as a colleague from a shared alma mater. His memory was sharp; he inquired about old comrades from The Searchlight. We spoke of Thampy Kakanadan, the writer he had brought to Patna as an assistant editor, tracing his subsequent journey to Indian Airlines.

In that small, fish-smelling office, the legend began to transform into a person—approachable, articulate, and genuinely interested.

Inspired, I returned to Patna and wrote a long, reflective piece about him, which I promptly sent his way. He acknowledged it with a gracious thank you. Years later, when a brief biographical note appeared on Wikipedia, I felt a quiet pride seeing my article listed among the write-ups on him. It was a small, invisible thread connecting my journalistic journey to his.

Our paths crossed again many years later in Chandigarh. My editor, H.K. Dua, called me to his room to introduce a fellow Malayali. It was George. By then, we had been both part of the Indian Express family, he in the South and I in the capital, so the recognition was mutual. Our conversation turned personal.

I mentioned that my younger sister was married to a man from Thumpamon, and that the family had immediately pointed out a connection to him. I stumbled, trying to articulate the exact familial link. With a characteristic wave of his hand and a voice loud enough for Mr. Dua to hear, he clarified, “We are relatives, as are all Syrian Christians. If any two of them talk for two minutes, they will find they are relatives.”

It was a typical George remark—dismissive of trivialities, yet profoundly affirming of a shared cultural identity. He was returning from Himachal Pradesh and had dropped in on Mr. Dua, another link in the intricate chain of Indian journalism. That was to be our last meeting.

Yet, our intellectual engagement continued. Once, deeply troubled by his stance on a particular issue, I felt compelled to respond. Under the pseudonym ‘Bharat Putra,’ I penned an open letter to him, critiquing his position. I sent it off, half-expecting, half-dreading a fiery rebuttal. But silence was his reply. Perhaps he saw through the pseudonym; perhaps he believed the argument did not merit one. I never knew.

The stories of his time at The Searchlight, however, were his true monument. My colleagues would recount, with undimmed fervour, how under George’s leadership, the paper became the unflinching voice of the people. When students across Bihar rose in protest against fee hikes and soaring prices, The Searchlight stood with them, its coverage bold and uncompromising.

The defining moment came during a violent Patna bandh. Instead of retreating, George devoted the entire newspaper to a saturation coverage of the agitation. The presses ran overtime, and the print order soared past one lakh copies—a staggering, unprecedented figure for that era.

The establishment, led by Chief Minister K.B. Sahay, could not let this defiance stand. George was arrested under the draconian Defence of India Rules. What followed was a spectacle that entered the annals of journalistic folklore.

The eminent V.K. Krishna Menon, a national figure, air-dashed to Patna to personally argue for George’s bail before the High Court. The court premises swelled with a crowd never seen before, a sea of silent supporters bearing witness. George’s release was a triumph, marking him as the first editor to be arrested—and vindicated—in independent India. Even from his prison cell in Hazaribagh, the journalist in him could not be silenced; he authored a penetrating booklet on the student unrest.

The political cost for Sahay was severe; he was trounced in the subsequent elections in 1967 from both Patna and Hazaribagh. Overnight, TJS George was a national hero. Yet, his principled stand also spelled the end of his Patna chapter. The management, fearing further reprisals, had overruled his instruction to keep the editorial column blank until his release. For George, compromise was a language he did not speak, and he moved on.

His was a restless, visionary spirit. After his foundational years in India, which began under the tutelage of another remarkable Malayali, S. Sadanand of the Free Press Journal in Bombay, he looked east. In Hong Kong, he conceived and founded Asiaweek, a magazine modelled on TIME and Newsweek but with a crucial difference: an Asian soul.

In many ways, his magazine surpassed its American rivals in its nuanced, authoritative coverage of the continent. George’s reputation was now international. A shrewd businessman as well as an editor, he understood the economics of publishing. When he eventually sold the magazine, he secured not just his legacy but also his fortune.

His return to India saw him join the Indian Express as Editorial Advisor. When the group split and the southern editions became The New Indian Express, George was their pillar of strength. His stature was such that he was granted a unique privilege: his personal column ran on the front page, a boldface declaration of his importance.

Even more remarkably, he was permitted to take positions that sometimes diverged from the paper’s official editorial line—a testament to the immense trust and respect he commanded. From my desk on the edit page in Delhi, where we shared content with the southern editions, I would often notice this delicate dance of opinions. Readers adored him for his fearless candour, and his bosses knew better than to interfere. It was in these years that the newsroom, in a mix of affection and awe, began calling him the “Holy Cow of the Express.” He had a good command of Malayalam also.

His writing was as prolific as it was profound. His Handbook for Journalists became a Bible in journalism schools, shaping the ethics and craft of generations of reporters. As a biographer, he combined elegant prose with penetrating insight, producing acclaimed portraits of complex figures like V.K. Krishna Menon, the actress Nargis, his mentor Pothen Joseph, and the celestial vocalist M.S. Subbulakshmi. His scholarly works on Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore and the rise of Islam in the Philippines were extraordinary achievements, demonstrating a Malayali journalist’s ability to dissect foreign societies with rare authority and understanding.

TJS George, who once wrote under the simple, powerful byline “GOG,” did not just practice journalism; he was its very embodiment. The saying goes that one has ink in their blood; for George, it was printing ink that coursed through his veins. He was not merely an editor; he was an institution—a beacon of intellectual courage, clarity of thought, and unyielding conviction.

Courtesy: The AIDEM

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First of all, let me congratulate you for successfully piloting the Waqf Bill, now rechristened UMEED, which in both Hindi and Urdu means “Hope”. I am sure President Droupadi Murmu will soon give her assent to the Bill and it will become the law of the land. In this context, I remember the agricultural Acts the Modi government had to rescind following a massive protest from the farmers.

I liked your assertion in the Lok Sabha that you yourself belong to a minority community and you do not feel any discrimination against minorities. As you are the minister in charge of minority affairs, can you say with confidence that there is no such discrimination?

As you are a Buddhist, I do not have to tell you that the Buddhists have built great Peace Pagodas like the one in Delhi and elsewhere. They are all architectural marvels and I never miss them on my visits to places like Leh in Ladakh, Darjeeling in West Bengal, and Kathmandu in Nepal.

I am sure that you will not contest me when I say that the greatest pilgrim centre for Buddhists the world over is not Lumbini in Nepal, where Siddhartha Gautama was born. Instead, it is the Mahabodhi Temple in Bodh Gaya where Lord Buddha attained enlightenment under a Bodhi tree. I have visited the place several times.

In the eighties, I did a cover story on the Mahabodhi Temple for the Sunday Magazine of the Hindustan Times. One of the highlights of the article was the demand the Buddhists were making for control of the temple. They resent Hindu Brahmins doing Puja there and the Hindus controlling the administrative affairs of the temple.

The agitation for control of the temple still goes on, though it does not get traction in the media. As a Buddhist and Minister for Minority Affairs, you will do a great service to the nation if you can liberate the Mahabodhi Temple from the immoral control of non-Buddhists. Instead, you want non-Muslims to have a say, if not control, of the Waqf Boards at the Centre and in the states.

You should see this in the light of the Tirupati temple authorities’ draconian decision to terminate the services of all their non-Hindu employees. The argument is that Tirupati temple belongs to the Hindus and only Hindus can work there. I don’t think you have taken any action against the retrenchment of the few non-Hindu employees.

The greatest Hindu pilgrimage centre in Kerala, from where I come, is Sabarimala, which is controlled by the Devaswom Board. The MLAs can vote for various posts in the board but only Hindu MLAs can take part in the voting. The Vaishnodevi temple in Jammu and Kashmir is run by a Trust. The Lieutenant-Governor holds the post of Chairman of the Trust.

If a non-Hindu is appointed governor, a Hindu has to be appointed chairman of the Trust. Once, when General S.K. Sinha was governor and no ice lingam was formed in the Amarnath cave, he managed to procure tonnes of ice from as far away as Jammu to create an ice lingam. Alas, a press photographer published the pictures of the ice lingam which had dirty hand marks of the workers who made it. Sinha escaped unscathed.

Early this week, the details of the will of Ratan Tata, worth Rs 10,000 crore, appeared in the media. Most of the wealth has gone to philanthropic organisations. What attracted me is a clause under which his favourite dog, Tito, and other pets will benefit from a Rs 12 lakh fund, which will be used to care for his pets, ensuring that each of them will receive Rs 30,000 per quarter for their care. He also mentioned that his cook, Rajan Shaw, will take care of Tito after his demise.

The executors of the will have a duty to ensure that the money is distributed as mandated by Tata.

In the seventh century, Umar ibn al-Khattab, also spelled Omar, who later became the Caliph, owned land on the shores of the Khyber. He approached the Prophet on what he should do with the land. He was advised to give it to Allah, which will, of course, deprive him of all his authority over the land. The land could be used only for religious or charitable purposes and the person responsible for it was known as Mutawalli. I owe this information to an article by Advocate T. Asaf Ali in the Madhyamam daily.

A Jew who fought unsuccessfully against the Prophet bequeathed all his property for similar purposes. All the rules and regulations governing Waqf follow from this precedent. This reaffirms the point that Waqf properties cannot be sold for profit; they can only be used for religious or charitable purposes.

Under UMEED, only a person who has been a practising Muslim for at least five years can will away his property as Waqf. Since you studied the Bill, let me ask you how will you determine whether a person remained a Muslim for five years or not?

A person becomes a Muslim when he dedicates his prayer solely to Allah and considers Mohammed as the final prophet and messenger of God. Of course, his religious practices are enumerated in the Five Pillars of Islam: the declaration of faith (shahadah), daily prayers (salah), almsgiving (zakat), fasting during the month of Ramadan (sawm), and the pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj) at least once in a lifetime.

Anybody can become a Christian and the longevity of his faith does not matter to God. That is why the thief on the cross attained salvation because he believed in Jesus as the Son of God. He did not live even for a day after his conversion. This being the case, on what basis do you say that to be a Muslim one must practice the religion for five years?

Last Sunday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the RSS headquarters at Nagpur. He also visited the Deekshabhoomi, the ground where people led by Dr B.R. Ambedkar got ordained as Buddhists. This religious mass conversion at one place was the first ever of its kind in history. The day they took Deeksha, they became Buddhists.

You may like to know why Ambedkar chose Nagpur for his conversion to your religion. Nagpur is where the Nags lived on the banks of the Nag river. They were the ones who fought vigorously against the invading Aryans. And they were the ones who propagated Buddhism in far corners of the land, including Arunachal Pradesh, to which you belong.

When the British wanted to build a house for the Viceroy in Delhi, they did not go to a temple for a model. Instead, they looked at a Buddhist vihara to draw ideas. When you take UMEED to the Rashtrapati Bhavan for the President’s signature, please check whether the building resembles a temple or a Buddhist vihara.

On the day Parliament was debating the Waqf Bill, UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath claimed that the Waqf authorities had declared the area where the Mahakumbh was held as Waqf property. Even if it is true, did it prevent Yogi from driving away every Muslim selling even Bisleri water bottles from the banks of the Ganga?

Home Minister Amit Shah even claimed that the Waqf authorities could have declared Parliament House as Waqf property. You and your party have perfected the art of scare-mongering. You don’t even leave Aurangzeb, who died 318 years ago.

The whole world knows that Mukesh Ambani’s grotesque house, Antilia, in Mumbai—consuming power worth Rs 70 lakh every month—is situated on Waqf land. Has Ambani suffered on this account? But you portrayed the Waqf Boards as more powerful than even the Supreme Court.

And some persons, like Baselios Cleemis, the current Major Archbishop-Catholicos of the Syro-Malankara Catholic Church, fell for it. He saw the issue from the perspective of the residents of Munambam, numbering 600 families, mostly Catholic. If Ambani could not be evicted from his Antilia, how could they be evicted?

The broader issue was that the Muslims were not consulted on the drafting of the Bill. You mentioned that it was vetted by a parliamentary committee. Was even one suggestion of an Opposition member accepted? During the debate in the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha, was even one amendment suggested by an Opposition MP accepted? It was a Bill of the government, by the government, and for the government.

With non-Muslims allowed to decide Waqf-related issues, the Muslims will lose control of their Waqf properties. The Waqf Boards will be deprived of assets to run madrasas, orphanages, and hospitals. The Bill’s agenda is clear to the discerning.

Small wonder that the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC), which controls Sri Harmandir Sahib or Darbār Sahib, also called the Golden Temple, has opposed the Bill, for it knows that tomorrow, the government can amend the Sikh Gurdwara Act to their disadvantage. Alas, the Catholic Church leadership can’t see the woods for the trees.

The Catholic and other churches own thousands of acres of land and properties worth billions of rupees. Using the same argument, the government can easily take them over. In fact, many Church-run schools and colleges are situated on government land given by the British on lease for 100 years. The government has already started putting pressure on the church to vacate such properties, as in the Army Cantonment in New Delhi.

While Parliament was discussing the Waqf Bill, some Opposition members drew Parliament’s attention to the attack on two Catholic priests in Jabalpur. As Minister in charge of Minority Affairs, who prevented you from opening your mouth on the action you have taken on the matter?

Nonetheless, I was glad to hear you quoting the Sachar Committee report. Justice Rajinder Sachar appeared for me in a case the Punjab and Haryana High Court instituted, suo motu, against me and some of my colleagues at The Tribune. Have you ever thumbed the pages of his report except to find out what it said about Waqf properties? You say that if the Waqf properties are put to commercial use, Muslims will earn a lot.

That is exactly what is happening under crony capitalism. Government properties are handed over to the likes of Ambani and Adani so that they can become the world’s richest, pushing the poor down the ladder further and further. True, if they are handed over the Waqf properties, they will surely earn billions—so that they can have their swimming pools on their rooftops while the women in Mumbai stand for hours to get a pitcher of water.

By the way, the Sachar Committee made many suggestions, including a mechanism to monitor whether the government’s minority welfare measures benefit the communities concerned.

What amused me the most was your assertion that Muslim welfare was your government’s prime concern. You don’t have a single Muslim colleague in the ministry of which you are a member. Muslims constitute about 200 million in this country. It is unbelievable that the Prime Minister cannot find a single Muslim from among them to represent the community. Forget the Centre—mention one name of a Muslim minister in any of the BJP governments, from Gujarat to Manipur and Delhi to Uttarakhand.

Modi demonstrated his concern for Muslims by introducing the law banning triple talaq during his second term. Divorce frees a woman from marital bondage, especially when the husband no longer wishes to live with her. In many ways, it is better than abandonment of wives.

It has been over five years since the triple talaq law was enacted. Can you name even one conviction under it? The law was designed to appease Hindutvawadis rather than genuinely help Muslims. Unfortunately, the Waqf Bill follows the same pattern, aimed at depriving Muslims of their limited rights. I only wish Christians had realised— to borrow poet John Donne’s words—that the bell tolls not just for Muslims, but for them as well.

Yours etc.

Courtesy: Indian Currents

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It was over two and a half decades ago that Fr. Xavier Vadakkekara of the Indian Currents invited me to take part in a seminar on secularism and represent Christianity. I accepted it more in deference to his wish than for any love for public speaking. With learned Imams and Pandits representing other religions and faiths, I found myself inadequately qualified to represent a 2000-year-old tradition and nearly 40 million Indians who profess the Christian faith.

I do not remember much about the seminar held at St. Columba’s School in New Delhi, but I vividly remember the brilliant speech Nariman delivered as the chief guest on the occasion. Unlike others who blabbered, he came prepared with a written text and spoke eloquently about how proud he was to be an Indian in secular India. Suddenly, he found himself paperless and speechless with the pedestal fan blowing them away from his open folder on the lectern. As one of us gathered the papers together and put them back in sequence, he went extempore and delineated on a case the Supreme Court had heard and decided.

A schoolboy in Kerala, who belonged to Jehovah’s Witness, refused to sing the National Anthem as his religion forbade him from singing in praise of anyone other than his Creator. The authorities concerned went by the rule book, and he was expelled from the school. Finally, the case reached the apex court, which considered the fact that whenever the national anthem was sung, he always stood like any other student and did not show any disrespect to either the song or the singing. In its abundant wisdom, the court upheld the boy’s plea that he be allowed to study in the school.

The effect the anecdote had on the audience, mostly from the minority communities, had to be seen to be believed. They knew that Nariman spoke from the heart, for he too belonged “to a minority community, a microscopic, wholly insignificant minority.” He was as concerned as the organisers of the seminar were about the threat fundamentalists were posing to the secular character of the country. As John Dayal commented, “Nariman could have earned a couple of lakhs of rupees if, instead of spending his precious time preparing the speech, he had devoted it to taking up a new case.” Nariman knew that nothing was more important to him than secularism.That is why he spent the whole of that afternoon with us thinking aloud about the “fearsome pace” at which the “population of the dinosaurs” in various religions was increasing.

As he puts it colourfully, “Dinosaurs in one religious camp give impetus to breeding them in another. Scientists tell us that it was a great meteorite that finally destroyed all the dinosaurs on this Earth. If so, I like to think that the meteor was the symbolic wrath of God.” Given this backdrop, it was not at all surprising that Nariman concludes his autobiography Before Memory Fades with these lines: “I have never felt that I lived in this country at the sufferance of the majority. I have been brought up to think and feel that the minorities, together with the majority community, are integral parts of India. I have lived and flourished in a secular India. In the fullness of time if God wills, I would also like to die in a secular India.”

Death should have been far from his mind as the country still needed his services. Even the street dogs in the area where he stays would love him to be around forever. This I learnt when I spent a whole afternoon at his house. I had gone there with our Chandigarh lawyer to consult him on a case the Punjab and Haryana High Court had suo motu registered against me and a reporter of The Tribune.

As he was not at home when we reached there, I spent the free time trying to count the cats and the large brood of kittens for which there were separate “residential quarters” inside his compound. I realised that counting the kittens was an impossible task for they were too many and they did not remain static to enable an enumeration. When it was time for supper, I found a servant feeding them minced meat.

As the cats were being fed, a large number of stray dogs began lining up in front of his gate. They did not bark, nor quarrel among themselves. Then the same servant placed plates in front of each of them. From a huge pot, he served some “kichri”-type food which the dogs partook of and left as silently and orderly as they assembled. I was told that the dogs in the area were assured of one wholesome meal a day.

It is jokingly said that if you have a few millions of rupees to hire the services of Nariman, you can murder anyone and get away with it. No, money is not the only determinant for him. As my memory goes, he did not charge a single penny, though he pored over my case and suggested many changes in the affidavit I and the reporter concerned had to file in the High Court. What mattered to him was that The Tribune Trust was headed by Justice R.S. Pathak, a former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of India.

Even so, I did not know how much Nariman respected Pathak until I read his autobiography. I will come to that in an instant. Both of them are reviled for a case in which they played a major role. The reference is to the Bhopal gas tragedy case in which Nariman represented Union Carbide and Justice Pathak who took the initiative to broker a deal under which the multinational paid $470 million (Rs 615 crore) in one go.

He devotes a whole chapter to discuss the case, which, as he told Karan Thapar on CNN-IBN’s “Devil’s Advocate,” he would not have accepted, “If I had to live my life all over again, as a lawyer, and the brief came to me, and I had foreknowledge of everything that later came in, I would certainly not have accepted the civil liability case which I did.” Read together, the interview and the book disprove many who believe that Justice Pathak and Nariman had let the country and the victims down.

There is a lot of showy, chest-beating on Bhopal these days. Even those who did nothing to mitigate the hardship of the Bhopal victims all these years had suddenly woken up to the need to bring the late Warren Anderson to India, get billions of dollars from Union Carbide, and give every citizen of Bhopal millions of rupees. They also knew that all this is to hoodwink the public.

Nariman makes the valid point that the $470 million settlement was upheld by the Supreme Court, not once but thrice under different chief justices. He quotes the court, “the voluminous documentary evidence placed on the record of the present proceedings does not make a case of inadequacy of the amount necessitating a review of the settlement.” Allowance has to be made for the fact that Rs 615 crore was a big amount in 1989 (Those who drew a salary those days should compare it with their present salary to know how big the amount was 30 years ago.)

Many would have forgotten that the quick settlement did not, however, reach the victims as quickly as Justice Pathak wanted. When the amount remained in the bank account of the Supreme Court, it grew by Rs 1 lakh every day by way of interest. In the discussions on Bhopal, people are reluctant to admit the fact that there are a large number of bogus claimants. I know some people living in TT Nagar, which is far away from Union Carbide, who initially made claims of damage in the hope they, too, would get some money.

Nariman hits the nail on the head when he says why the amount was inadequate: “The inadequacy arises because there was a very large sum of money which was sought to be distributed amongst people living in certain areas not by reason of what they suffered but their living in those areas.” I know that local politicians encouraged their constituents to file claims with the result that what the real victims should have got was distributed among a large number of people.

In other words, the amount shrank. To drive home the point, it would be worth pondering why no one dies of old age in the affected area. Every death even now is attributed to the poisonous gas that leaked from the Union Carbide factory. Even today what is cited as Union Carbide’s fault are quotations from newspaper articles and books written by journalists like Dan Kurzman of A Killing Wind fame (Indian Express, July 3, 2010).

Do we have a foolproof case for revisiting the settlement of 1989? The answer is, alas, no, but our leaders, including the then Law Minister Veerappa Moily, whom the Chief Justice of India described as one of the most enlightened leaders, while releasing his book on the Ramayana, is not ready to admit the truth. They want the Bhopal victims to have eternal hope. Nariman brings out in a few lines the greatness of Justice Pathak, who as Chief Justice took the job of finding judges for the Supreme Court so seriously that he tried to judge the calibre of High Court judges whenever he visited states. It was he who found the potential in M.N. Venkatachaliah, who was not even the senior-most in the Karnataka High Court at that time.

As I read this, I remembered Justice Pathak inviting me to his house so that he could know me better. He came to Chandigarh and personally introduced me to the staff when I joined the Tribune. After handing over the appointment letter, he asked me, “Do you know the meaning of the word Tribune?” Instead of answering, “Sorry, I do not know,” I asked him foolishly, “Does it originate from the word ‘Tribunal?” “No, the Tribune was an official in the Roman Empire, and it was his job to protect the interests of the common man,” answered Justice Pathak. It was his way of telling me that my primary job was to take care of the interest of the readers of The Tribune.

How could such a noble person ever acquiesce in a settlement if it was not in the interest of the people? And how could Nariman, who promptly resigned as additional solicitor general of India when the Emergency was clamped on the country, ever be a party to it? I found his autobiography as enjoyable as a beautiful novel, and he went up in my esteem as one of India’s greatest sons.

A few years later, I had an occasion to meet him and his wife Bapsi when I interviewed him for Darshana TV. It was my first such interview. When his wife passed away four years ago, I wrote an obituary that elicited a warm response from him. In his death, the country has lost a great lawyer who believed that the future of the country is not in the glorification of any one community but in the glorification of We, the People of India that is Bharat.

Courtesy: The AIDEM

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