From Partition To Operation Bluestar: Tales Of A Journalist,Bureaucrat, Spy

By Som Nath Dhar

An engrossing, personal view of the public events that have shaped India's recent history  From Partition to Operation Bluestar provides an engrossing, personal view of the public events that have shaped India's recent history, written by a man who had a ringside view of these. As we follow Som Nath Dhar's career in journalism, government and the world of covert intelligence, the book transports us from pre-Partition Punjab to Delhi and Kashmir, with side trips to East Africa and Europe. Dhar writes in a compelling, journalistic style about the turbulence of Partition; the heady experience of working closely with India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru; the dramatic events leading up to the 1947 invasion and accession of Kashmir; and later developments such as Indira Gandhi's accession to power, her fall from grace and eventual return to power, and much else. Full of charming anecdotes, the book deepens our understanding of recent Indian history and provides insights into the character of many of the personalities who shaped it. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Dec 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9789350298862

Som Nath Dhar

Som Nath Dhar started his career as a journalist in Lahore in 1946. He moved to Delhi in 1947 and was part of Jawaharlal Nehru's staff for a few months, after which he returned to journalism, this time as a radio reporter. He went on to work in the government's Central Information Service (now called the Indian Information Service), and later as a diplomat and as an intelligence officer. He ended his career in government as director of news, All India Radio. After retirement, he taught for five years as head of department at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication.

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PREFACE

This book is a memoir and, like all memoirs, it is one person’s view of events. It is not so much the story of my life as my view of the story of independent India. It focuses on events that took place from 1946 to 1984, starting with Partition and ending with Indira Gandhi’s assassination.

In 1984, I was teaching at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC), heading the department that trains government probationers. After a long career as a journalist, government servant and intelligence officer, I found myself enjoying the opportunity to share ideas and my experience with these young people on the threshold of their own promising careers.

I taught at IIMC until 1988, after which I worked for a while in corporate communications in the private sector. In 1992, when my wife was diagnosed with cancer, I decided to retire and spend more time with her. She took the cancer and its treatment in her stride, practical as ever, and I am happy to say we have been together for a further twenty years. Since 2010, we have lived in Singapore with my daughter Pamposh and her husband Raju.

Why did I decide to write this book?

I think it was partly the experience of teaching, at IIMC, and partly my knack for telling stories. I am known in my family as quite a raconteur. Over the years, I have regaled my friends with my stories about the early years of independence. So many people told me they had not known this or that fact, and urged me to write a book, that I decided I should. By 2010, when I moved in with Pamposh, I had all the material together. She helped me organize it into a book, edited the entire text and found me a publisher.

I am an ordinary citizen of India, who had the good fortune to live through the exhilarating birth of independent India in 1947 as a personal assistant to its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. At other times, I saw the seminal events that shaped modern India – both good and bad – as a journalist. One way or another, I had a ringside view of Partition, and the related riots in Lahore, Multan and Delhi; of the complex and delicate business of creating a cohesive and stable nation; of the invasion of Kashmir in 1947 and Kashmir’s accession to India.

Nehru’s death signalled the end of an era. Indian politics changed along with everything else. Lal Bahadur Shastri’s short stint was followed by the drama of Indira Gandhi’s selection as prime minister by Congress party elders and then her consolidation of power. Working by then in the government, I watched this fascinating drama unfold act by act.

I spent some years as an intelligence officer based in Nairobi (Kenya) and Vienna (Austria) before returning to India to work in a government run by the Janata Party, which soon belied the hopes of the Indian citizens who had voted them in.

My last assignment in the government was as director of news, All India Radio (AIR), which brought me a sense of personal satisfaction because I was returning once more to journalism, my first love. Interestingly, I had worked at AIR much earlier, joining it as a sub-editor back in 1947.

As head of news at AIR, I once again had a clear view of history in the making, this time in Punjab. By the time that drama came to an end with the assassination of Indira Gandhi, I was already teaching at IIMC.

Those who have encouraged me to write my memoirs include some of my own contemporaries and others born around independence. But when I told my stories around the dinner table, the most avid listeners were young people in their twenties and thirties. Old men, like me, tend to look back at their lives; young people prefer to look forward. This is as it should be, but sometimes it is good for the young to understand what lies behind as well. So I have written this book most of all for India’s young men and women.

1

EARLY YEARS

A Wandering Life

I was born in Srinagar, Kashmir, in the summer of 1924. My father had recently moved out of Kashmir to join the postal service in Punjab, but my mother had stayed behind with her in-laws for the delivery. I was her third surviving child, but there had been six other boys who had died either in childbirth or in infancy. So I had a brother and a sister who were several years older than me.

My mother, my sister and I joined my father soon after my birth. My brother stayed behind in Srinagar with our grandparents to complete his schooling. My father told us a rather funny story about that move to Punjab. I have to guess that he used his imagination to fill in details that he could not have known. In any case, it made for a good story and raised many a laugh in our home when he told it.

In Srinagar, my mother had lived with her parents-in-law, as was usual then for a married woman. My grandfather was unwilling to let his daughter-in-law and grandchildren move to the unknown border towns of Punjab, but my parents did not want to live apart. My father asked my mother to join him even against the wishes of his own parents. He asked his brother-in-law to help.

Early one morning, before the household was up, my mother’s brother arrived at the house in a tonga to take us to the bus station. After depositing us in the right bus, he went back to tell my grandparents that, at their son’s request, he had put his sister in a bus bound for Punjab. My grandfather, apparently, was livid. He marched off to the nearest police station to report that his daughter-in-law had run away from home with his two grandchildren. Back in the 1920s, this was a serious allegation indeed. The policeman taking down his report was suitably impressed. With pen in hand (as my father told the story), he asked if my grandfather had any idea where his bahu might have gone. My grandfather was forced to say she had gone to join her husband. The policeman, less grave now, asked how she had gone.

‘Well,’ said my grandfather, ‘her brother put her in a bus going to Punjab.’

At this point, one can imagine the cop laying down his pen and saying something like this: ‘Let me get this straight, Dhar Sahib. Are you saying your bahu left home with her brother and kids in order to join her husband?’ Needless to say, no missing persons’ report was actually filed!

Since my father’s job was a transferable one, we moved around a lot within what was back then a large province, including not just east and west Punjab (now in India and Pakistan), but also present-day Chandigarh, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh. So my childhood memories are spread across several towns, including Chakwal, Hissar, Mardan, Campbellpore (now called Attock), Jalandhar, Dharamsala and Rawalpindi. Mardan was located in what was then the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), now called Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, but I am not quite sure how my father came to be posted there.

In Chakwal, my father sent me with one of his chaprasis (peon) to be admitted to a school in the nursery class (the equivalent of today’s kindergarten). At the time of registration, the chaprasi was asked for my date of birth. Having no idea what it was, he guessed my age and made up a date – this became my official date of birth and from then on we just followed this date in subsequent schools. So, quite casually, I became – officially – a year-and-a-half younger than I really was. At home, we continued to celebrate my birthday on 1 June, but according to my school papers, I was born on 15 December 1925.

It was a bit difficult being a Kashmiri and, therefore, an outsider, in the rough schools of Punjabi towns. Parents and teachers tended to leave us boys to fight our own battles, so I learnt early to fend for myself. While still in the nursery class in Chakwal, I got into a fight with a classmate who threatened to bring his brother, who was in the fifth grade, to beat me up. It was during our lunch break and we were in the school compound. My other classmates advised me to run away as the older boy was known to be a bully. While I was still trying to decide what to do, the brother arrived, wielding a knife! My self-preservation instincts kicked in and I hit him on his shoulder with the only ‘weapon’ I had to hand – my takhti, a wooden board we students used as a hard surface to put writing paper on. As he fell, he yelled in Punjabi, ‘Mar sutiya!’, which means ‘he’s hit me!’, or ‘he’s killed me!’

Well, I hadn’t killed him, but I had certainly stopped him in his tracks. I became an instant hero to my classmates. I had found respect and acceptance – and I was no longer teased as a ‘Kashmiri’.

I can’t say if this was a good lesson or bad, but it certainly helped me hold my own in my constantly changing environment. As we moved towns and cities so often, I had to change school every three years or so. Each time I was ragged as the newcomer – and each time I would find the class bully and beat him up. After that, no one ragged me or tried to bully me.

A Time of Innocence

Though I fancied myself as a tough boy in school, at home I was rather spoilt. My father swamped me with gifts and my mother with my favourite food. My sister, fifteen years older than me, was like a second mother to me. Chaandaji, as I called her, pampered me quite as much as my mother did. She was gentle and loving. If I sulked over an argument with her or one of my parents, she would patiently bring me round with her own good humour and caring manner.

When I was about six years old, I saw Lahore for the first time. I travelled there by train from Chakwal with my parents and Chaandaji. Chakwal was a sleepy town tucked away in the heartland of west Punjab. Lahore, on the other hand, was the bustling capital of Punjab. Even though I was so young, I remember the journey vividly.

We travelled in comfort in a large compartment that Father had booked for the family. However, security was a concern in the rather ‘Wild West’ kind of atmosphere in the area around Chakwal. Although trains were not, of course, air-conditioned then, we kept the doors and windows shut at night. After an overnight journey, I woke up at the station in Lahore to the sounds of vendors shouting ‘Hindu daal-roti’ and ‘Muslim gosht-roti.’ I looked out of the window to see signs announcing: ‘Hindu pani’ and ‘Muslim pani’. I was intrigued to learn that there was a specifically Hindu roti and special Muslim water! In my innocence, I wondered what Muslim water tasted like and how Muslim ‘gosht’ might be different from the meat we ate at home.

In the city, we visited the bustling Anarkali market, the Mughal gardens where we saw the Mughal emperor Jahangir’s mausoleum, and a temple somewhere in the old city that my mother was keen to pray at. My father made a point of showing me around Punjab University, to which all the colleges of Punjab, the NWFP and Jammu and Kashmir were affiliated. On our last evening, we went to a concert by the famous singer, K.L. Saigal. The hall was packed, with the citizens of Lahore out in full force to hear this popular singer, who lent his voice to many Hindi films over the years. The visit to this wonderful cultural and political capital of Punjab was one of the highlights of my childhood and memories of it are still etched in my mind.

A Dark Cloud

Other memories of my childhood are not pleasant. My brother, who was fourteen years older than me, lived with our grandparents in Srinagar, where he was studying. His death after a very brief illness at the age of twenty cast a pall of gloom on the family. My mother was shattered by the death of her first-born child at such a young age.

Soon afterwards, Mother developed diabetes. A few years later, in 1935, when she was only thirty-five years old, she died from complications of this disease. I was eleven at the time. The enormity of my mother’s loss did not hit me immediately. The house was full of mourners and we were busy with the last rites, which in our Kashmiri Pandit community last for several days.

Three months later, my forty-year-old father took a young woman as his bride. Like my own mother, Father’s new bride was also from Akora, a village on the banks of the Lidder river in Kashmir. She had just turned sixteen and was understandably unhappy at being married off to a person who was twenty-four years older than her. With this marriage, she became an instant grandmother, as my older sister already had a child.

My stepmother was never able to reconcile herself to this marriage, which was more or less forced upon her by her older brother. Consequently, she bore a permanent grudge against the relationship and Father’s side of the family. With my sister already married, I bore the brunt of her resentment.

The love and affection that my own mother had showered on me only made it harder for me then. Even relatively small deprivations became hard to bear because I was so unused to such treatment. One morning, the cook served me plain roti and daal for breakfast before I left for school. When I asked him for my usual parathas, he said my stepmother had told him to give me only roti as the ghee used in parathas was expensive. This incident was a shock to me and I went into my room and cried. There were many such incidents, which intensified my feeling of being unwanted. I realized soon enough that my father was not going to back me up, so I kept my misery to myself.

Much later in life, I was able to see the situation from my stepmother’s point of view. I understood then that she had been a strong and ambitious woman stuck in a marriage that she had never wanted, and her frustration had turned to anger and hurtful behaviour. But it took almost thirty years for us to bury the past and the first move was made by my stepmother.

Father was undoubtedly aware of the tension between my stepmother and me. That was perhaps why he sent me back to Kashmir during my school holidays in 1936, to spend time with my own mother’s relatives. My nani (grandmother) still lived in the village of Akora, but my masi (my mother’s sister) was in Srinagar. It was comforting to be with either of them, to feel again the unconditional love of a mother-figure, but I did get bored with Akora after a few days. Srinagar was much more interesting.

Akora was like a village out of a storybook, situated in a green valley with a river flowing at the bottom. The maharaja of Kashmir had a fishing lodge by the river, built of deodar wood. It was an idyllic spot in the Lidder valley, with the river ringing the slopes covered in chinar (Kashmiri maple) and deodar trees. The river had plenty of trout and the maharaja came down for weekend holidays in the summer to fish.

Nani lived in a three-storeyed house in a hamlet just off the village of Akora. The house was made of mud-baked bricks and a small kitchen garden gave her all the vegetables she needed. The hamlet itself was set in a grove of massive chinar trees about 500 yards from the Lidder river. Nani’s relatives lived in similar houses in the same hamlet. She owned a sizeable piece of land, which gave her enough income to live in comfort. Others in the village looked up to her. She also owned the only store in the village and all the villagers met their basic requirements, for salt, cooking oil, toiletries and kerosene from this shop.

People in the village lived in a very simple but relaxed way. For most of them the day began with green tea, a small kulcha, fetched from the district headquarters of Anantnag, about eight miles away, on the other bank of the river, or home-made parathas. By about 11 a.m., the young men of the village gathered in a square shaded by chinar trees to share news relating to the village, like the flow of water in the river, the movement of the maharaja and his staff, the number of ‘yatris’ (pilgrims) visiting the nearby Hindu pilgrimage town of Mattan (also known as Martand and located about three miles from Akora). Often, someone would produce a pack of cards and the rest of the morning would be given over to playing cards.

After a lunch of rice, haak (Kashmiri spinach), dum aloo (potatoes), khatte baigan (sweet and sour brinjal) or paneer (cottage cheese), and mutton when available, everyone rested for some time. Mutton was bought in Anantnag and so was not always available in the village. At about 4 p.m. the company re-gathered in the chinar-shaded square. This time someone would bring a samovar filled with ‘sheer chai’ (tea with milk and salt, also called ‘nun-chai’) to accompany the hookah-smoking and gossiping.

The gathering would disperse by about 6 p.m. so that everyone could be home while there was still some daylight. There was no electricity and petrol lamps were expensive, so lanterns were preferred. These gave out a weak glow that provided just enough light to eat