‘Nehru’s socialism was not a mistake… Socialism may be in crisis, but capitalism is too’

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to All Indians Matter, I'm Ashraf Enjid here. The media were an active participant in the freedom movement. As India gained independence and then went on its way, the media made for a strong institutional pillar. Even during crises like the emergency, they found ways to hold their own. That's a far cry from today.

[00:00:17] When I think of the evolution of Indian news media, I divide it into phases. Post-independence, a nation finding its feet, the age of despair where the promises of freedom seem distant, the emergency, the political churn that follow, the economic reforms, the digital revolution and so on. Many of these I have seen first-hand in newsrooms and many I have only read about. There would have been very few who would have seen it all themselves.

[00:00:40] So I'm truly privileged to have one such person on the show and I'm hoping to talk about how various inflection points for the country were viewed and reported from newsrooms. All Indians Matter We have on the show Rami Chhabra who has almost 7 decades of experience in the media. She was born in 1938 and started journalism at the age of 18 when there would have been very few women in mainstream media.

[00:01:07] Ms. Chhabra's expertise in public service communication, population, women and development has been utilized by the government, national and international NGOs and agencies such as the World Bank, the World Health Organization and the United Nations Population Fund. She's among the handful of women who broke into all-male newspaper bastions in the late 1950s, anchored regularly on Doordarshan since its inception and has been a columnist for media houses such as the Hindustan Times, the Statesman and the Indian Express.

[00:01:33] She created space in the media for women's issues and her entry into Vietnam after Saigon's collapse and the subsequent 2,000-kilometer road odyssey became an internationally published scoop. Ms. Chhabra, welcome. Hello. Good to be on your show. Ms. Chhabra, I wanted to start with the novel you've written. It's your debut novel, Becoming the Storm. How did you think of it? What is it about and where can listeners find it?

[00:01:59] Well, I've had a lifetime in journalism, but I've wanted to break into fiction for a long, long time. In fact, when the National Book Trust published my memoirs, Breaking Ground, Journey Into the Media and Out, which was way back in 2012, and they did a Hindi translation a few years later,

[00:02:31] I ended the book by expressing my disillusionment with the media and saying, well, I hope I can now retreat to build the house of my dreams in the hills and perhaps write a book of fiction, because the world has become stranger than fiction. It took me some years to get around to achieving that dream. I built the house, but then my husband was ill for some years,

[00:02:59] and I didn't have the peace and tranquility in which to sit down and write. And then during COVID, suddenly, when the world got even stranger, there it was, the time to do nothing else but to sit and brood and think and write. And so I wrote Becoming the Storm. And I may tell you a little bit about the book. It's just come out last month. It's set in the Delhi of the 1950s and 60s.

[00:03:29] And it goes across several generations dealing with a Punjabi family and then how a young woman finds her own feet and her own material in the midst of all this changing scenarios around her. And I'm hoping that it's a book that will make its mark in present times,

[00:03:55] because it also deals with many of the issues that I have dealt with over my life. Span with policy documents, statistical presentations, and now finally fiction, early marriage, domestic violence, dowry, all that figure in the book. So I'm hoping that it is as relevant today and will trigger a national conversation once again

[00:04:23] on subjects that seem to have gone into the background. That's absolutely true. And incidentally, I think COVID was a time when many of us discovered our creative urges. Those of us who are polluted enough to get through the pandemic unscathed. In fact, this podcast itself is a product of the COVID lockdown. But more of that offline. But just another point on about what you said about the topic of your book.

[00:04:50] I mean, I'm glad you wrote it because I don't think enough is written about the impact on women of great global events, whether it's the financial meltdown or the COVID-19 pandemic, and whether that's done through non-fiction or fiction. I think it's important to write about it. And I don't think enough of that happens. But Ms. Chabra, this is a good time to talk about your childhood. You were born in pre-partition India in Terai Smile Khan, which is now in Pakistan. What was Undivided India like and what was your childhood like?

[00:05:20] Well, I was not quite eight when the partition took place. So my memory really is very, very childlike of that era. But what do I do remember? And it was my childhood was spent entirely in the northwest frontier. That's where my father was posted. Different places from Deras Smile Khan to Banu to Kala to Peshawar to Rawalpindi to Karachi to Kvetta, finally.

[00:05:48] So that's the area that I know and remember as a very open, very green, very tranquil society, full of flowers and fragrance, bird song, and the Pathan's loving. You know the Kabliwala thing of the Tagore play? Well, that was the reality around us at that time.

[00:06:15] And there was free intercourse between people of different religions and nationalities. And I remember someone called Sabra, auntie, in my childhood, someone called Majeed, uncle. The Britishers, of course, came and went because we were in the contoonments. So altogether, I have a very fragrant memory of childhood.

[00:06:44] And also because I was privileged to be in a family where my parents were very happily adjusted to each other. So I had a childhood that gave me a great deal of stability, I think, with which to cope with life as it came eventually. So I really look back at my childhood with great nostalgia and wish more children could have had such a childhood. And did you move to what is today India when partition happened?

[00:07:14] Yeah, it was in Quetta when the partition took place. And while Quetta was tranquil till the 15th of August, but the inevitable basket of bangles arrived there from Jalander, I think. And you know that the basket of bangles always signified to the men, where are your bangles because you become women and are not able to fight?

[00:07:39] And our women are being raped and murdered and you're doing nothing. And it became a signal. Wherever those basket of bangles came, this side or that side, the riots broke out. And so the riots broke out in Quetta in the 19th of August, eventually. And it was bad. We children were flown out because evacuation took place. And we came to India in the end of August itself. But my parents came later.

[00:08:09] And then it's been different schools throughout India itself. Speaking of schools, you were not only an English honours graduate from Miranda House, Delhi University, but also studied law and sociology, which would not have been as common for girls then as it is now. No, not at all. Well, when I finished graduation and applied for law, believe it or not, my professors actually, who were interviewing me,

[00:08:39] begged me not to apply for LLB, but to do so for LLM, which was a year-longer course at that time and became a master's in law. And I said to them, please, for God's sake, just take me in LLB. I come from a Punjabi family. And if I complete this, it's more than enough. And sure enough, that's how it was. I didn't complete law. I dropped out after doing half a year because I got married and then pregnant.

[00:09:08] And it was difficult. Sociology, I came to much later because I felt this lack of post-graduation education in my life and was very frustrated that I had not been able to have it. By then, my children were grown up. But I joined Juala Nehru University in sociology. And it was wonderful that I got a place. But then came the first semester exams. And the choice was to do the exams or to accept an invitation to go off to Sweden

[00:09:37] to make a film on Indian children adopted in Sweden because I was already writing extensively. And this opportunity came. And I said to myself, well, what will I do with this sociology degree? I'm already doing the things that people do after they get their sociology. I dropped out again. So I've only done some courses, but not quite, cannot claim to be either a lawyer or a sociologist. Which brings me to journalism.

[00:10:06] You started as a journalist at age 18, which too would have been unusual for a woman at that time. And even today, in fact, we are struggling to have gender diversity in newsrooms, at least at the top. But at that time, a woman journalist, and especially someone so young, would have been quite rare. Well, I broke into journalism serendiputitiously. I was still in college.

[00:10:32] And I happened to get selected for an interview with BBC on television, which was not here, but which was there in the UK at that point of time, to talk about Asian youth and our dreams and ambitions. And I found that I was talking to someone who was a world-renowned sportsman, Chris Chataway, who at that time was very famous because he had run the mile under four minutes, the second man in the world to do that.

[00:11:00] And when I heard that, I was not a games enthusiast, but people around me were gaga that I was talking to Chris Chataway. And so when I heard that, I said to him, may I interview you? And he was tickled pink and said, you know, I have already given time to... And he said, for what? And I said, I mentioned the leading newspaper. And he said, well, I've already given time to the editor for a reporter. But I will tell him that if your interview doesn't match up, I will spare time again.

[00:11:29] And of course, my interview matched up. And they not only ran it, they gave me a byline, which was absolutely unthinkable in those days and in the statesman of those days. And they ran it with a huge photograph of Chris Chataway and me. So I broke into journalism with a bang.

[00:11:50] But I have to tell you that I used that initiative to walk around to different newspaper offices. And you could do that in those days. You could walk into editor's rooms quite easily. And people, I think, were tickled pink to see a young girl wanting to write and having ideas. And within a year, I built quite a profile, whether it was Times of India or Hindustan Times as a statesman.

[00:12:16] You know, but then a year later, when I finished graduation and I thought, law or should I start working in journalism? And heard that there was a vacancy in the reporter's room in the statesman. I went to see the news editor who was taking in my articles as soon as I wrote one. He published it. But he went and asked for a job.

[00:12:40] He said to me, ah, Miss Aluwalya, because that was my name then, you can keep writing for us. But as far as the job is concerned, we had a woman once and it didn't work out. So we are not going to be taking any women on to our staff. And of course, we didn't have the gumption in those days to fight back, as we do now. So one just beat a history retreat.

[00:13:05] And it was many years later that the statesman ate his words eventually when I had been writing for other newspapers and asked me to start a column, which I wrote then for 15 years, Woman About Town. And not only that column, I wrote a very prestigious column for the Indian Express called The Feminist Viewpoint, which was in the late 70s, which brought the women's issues into the political space.

[00:13:36] So it was a break into journalism. It took a long time. And by the time, very few years later, a number of women were breaking in and they were getting space. But they were wanting to beat the men at their jobs. They were talking about getting to do the crime beat or, you know, the things that the boys were interested in.

[00:14:04] And I, by that time, had decided I didn't want. I also had got children by then. And I decided I didn't want a full time job in a newspaper. So I never worked in a newsroom. But I also wanted to not only write independently, but I focused on women's issues and thought they were as political and as important as any of these other beats that people were fighting for.

[00:14:29] And so I think my kind of, what should I say, USP in journalism was that perhaps I became the first woman to really concentrate on women's issues and bring them to the fore. And that's how that eventually the Indian Express column that I just talked about also came about. Was it a challenge working with people who were significantly older than you? You started very early, like you said, and you already mentioned how men reacted to you in the newsroom.

[00:14:59] Well, you know, in many ways, I would say it was easier. They didn't want you full time. As I said, they didn't want a woman around. But they went and also they didn't really give the kind of space and attention that women's issues needed and are now supposedly getting. And I have views on that also.

[00:15:25] But when you pushed it to them, you know, they were apologetic. They were almost, you know, almost all the editors had this attitude of, oh, how could we have overlooked this? And then wanted to, you know, make amends and gave you the space.

[00:15:42] And, you know, so in many ways, it became easier to break in once you had broken in than perhaps it is today when there is so much competition. On the other hand, it was very difficult to make them realize how important the issues were. I had this column in the Statesman and the editor of the Statesman,

[00:16:09] who eventually became a very well-known human rights activist, would call me from time to time and say, Rami, but there is more to women than all this, you know, heartbreak and this kind of constant battle that you are fighting about this issue not right and that issue not right. Sometimes you write in fashion, sometimes you write in beauty. Sometimes you write in such things, which is the same thing.

[00:16:38] So, you know, it was a, you did a treadmill act trying to, you know, please them on those points as well as raising issues that mattered. And I have to tell you that when I got invited to Mexico City for the first UN Women's Conference in 1975, it was amazing. Two things happened out of that, which really built up my career.

[00:17:07] But this invitation came to me, maybe because I was the only one who was really writing on women, as I said at that time. And when I looked at that invitation, one thing I did, I went to the Statesman editor and I said, can I report for you from Mexico City on this conference? And his reaction was conference, UN conference, which conference? What has UN got to do with women?

[00:17:34] And I said, well, it's the first UN conference on women because people like you are not realizing what, what has to be done for women. And I said, okay, okay, you can send us an opening piece. I said, there's a three-week conference. Okay, important people are coming. Okay, you can do us one at the end. And before all this dialogue took place,

[00:18:02] the first thing was we don't have the foreign exchange to give you to telex us the copy. And I said, well, I get a per diem and I will do it from my own per diem. And you can reimburse me. We'll only reimburse you for what we've published. Please don't flood us. You can give us one for the opening. Then I argued for one in the end. And then it's a three-week conference. If something happens in between, okay, at the most three pieces, but no more please.

[00:18:31] They eventually published a daily dispatch because it was a highly political conference. And except for the day after the emergency, because the emergency was declared while I was in Mexico City. And I sent a dispatch saying Mrs. G's reputation stands tarnished in this August gathering, which had been looking forward to her as the apostle of women's rights.

[00:18:59] And, of course, that column was spiked as soon as it came over the telex, because they had already got blank pages going on newspapers at that time. So, I mean, that was one experience. And before I move away from this area, I want to tell you that it also led to what was my world scoop. You mentioned it, how I went to Vietnam and Saigon straight after the war.

[00:19:26] So, when I got this invitation to go to Mexico City, I pulled out my children's atlas and saw that Mexico City was the other side of the world. And I said to myself, whether I go by the west or the east, the ticket is valid. And that was the time when you had these scenes of the newspapers, front pages covered with the helicopters that were taking off with people clinging to the wheels because there was no way to get out of Saigon and they were desperate.

[00:19:56] And so I went to the foreign secretary and I said, I'm going to Mexico City and I would like to stop in Vietnam en route. And he said to me, how can you want to do that? I haven't got my diplomatic bag for the last three months and I don't know if people are dead or alive. So what is a young woman like you doing wanting to get to Vietnam? And I said, I don't have to argue with you, sir. I've come as a journalist to ask you to simply write a request for a visa.

[00:20:26] And he said, OK, if that's your wish, I'll do it. And he did. And then the visa came to me in Mexico City and I went helter skelter, which is yet another story, which I've written about all this in my memoirs, which the National Book Trust has brought out. So I won't go into it anymore. But I got to Vietnam. It became a world scoop. And because it became a world scoop and I came back, the editor of the NINX Press, Mr. Mulgongar,

[00:20:56] who was the editor of editors, you know, not so well known now, but really one of the most illustrious editors this country has known, who had always asked me to write right from the time I was 22. He gave me a women's page to edit. He somehow felt that I had the talent and he was wanting me to write a consumer column. And he had gone out from the Express during the emergency.

[00:21:22] But when he came back in 77, he called me and said, please come and start your column again. And I said to him, Mr. Mulgongar, all this time I've been writing what you want me to write. Now I want to write what I want to write. And he said, what? And I said, I want to create a column called a feminist viewpoint. And that's how on the edit page, when NINX Press had 12 editions across the country, that the feminist viewpoint got born and got that political space that was very precious

[00:21:50] and which pushed the envelope on many things at that time, alongside with the women's movement, which was very vibrant too in the 70s and 80s. Shabra, I also want to go back in time a little bit from there and to freedom, essentially. While freedom brought with it euphoria, there was also a sense of stagnancy, of lost hope that followed at some stage many years later. Why was that and how did you react to it?

[00:22:18] No, I don't think that there was stagnancy. I don't know why you say that. There was this tremendous euphoria after the independence, of course. And then we came into difficult times because we had the 62 difficult with the Chinese, which caused a lot of anguish because before that it had been Hindi, Chini, Chai, and Bai Bai. And it really broke Nehru. And Nehru was the idol of our times, the icon that we looked up to.

[00:22:48] So we were disheartened when Nehru was dejected and what happened. He was betrayed and the country felt betrayed. But very quickly thereafter, Lal Bahadur Shastri came in, brought a new spirit into the country. And then each time that Shastri died, there was never stagnation. It was up, down, up, down.

[00:23:13] There was, you know, it's kind of, oh, here's somebody wonderful who will do something. And then, you know, the tragedy. And then you look to where, what now? And then Indira Gandhi came. And then, you know, despite the wars, 65, 75, when Indira Gandhi wrote, as they said, like the Durga. And, you know, it was great. There was a woman prime minister.

[00:23:37] The world had Golda Meir, all right, and Sri Mavo Bandhanayika in Sri Lanka. But Indira Gandhi was Indira Gandhi. And she really, you know, became a very tremendous figure on the global scene. And so, you know, the excitement in India till the emergency kept going and with great hope. And then, of course, the emergency occurred.

[00:24:03] And that was a terrible time for the media. Because as Advani famously said that, you know, we were asked to, the media was asked to bend and it crawled instead, you know. So, but while a large part of media just went under, we had a number of friends who were right there in Tihar.

[00:24:29] My husband happened to be sitting with Kuldeep Nair, having dinner with him the night they came to take him. And they waited because they were chatting late into the night. And so they waited for him to go. And in the morning, early morning, he waited to ring up Bharti, Kuldeep's wife, to say, I saw some suspicious looking people in a car outside your house. Just be careful. She said, but, you know, they've already taken him. They were waiting for you to go away.

[00:24:59] So, you know, we had these experiences. But then I myself had an experience, which was very interesting. I came back from Vietnam. And, of course, you know, the Indian Express had three Sundays of its front page of the Sunday Standard full pages of my travel from Hanoi to Saigon. There were articles that I did on the political edit pages of Hindustan Times, Indian Express.

[00:25:28] The Dhu Darshan ran a whole series of photographs with an interview with me. And so the NCC asked me to be guest editor for their special edition for the International Women's Year that was being brought out and asked me to interview Mrs. Gandhi. And I had to send her a series of questions before the interview was granted, which I did. I walked in.

[00:25:56] And interestingly, this lady that was terrifying the whole of the country stood up to greet me, wished me and said, I watched your program. I thought that was very spunky of you to get into the Vietnam. And you have to tell me about it before we begin the interview. And we had a nice long chat, very friendly, very lovely. And then we did the interview. And then as the interview ended, which I also asked her about how she balanced her personal life.

[00:26:26] And I said, finally, I said, Mrs. Gandhi, the interview has come to an end. But if I have your permission, I want to ask you something else. And she said, sure, go ahead. Because she thought something more personal was coming. And I said, Mrs. Gandhi, you're known as a Democrat, Nehru's daughter, and you put everybody into prison. And those of us in media cannot believe that this is happening from you.

[00:26:57] And the minute I said this, this person who had been so charming and gracious and, you know, chatting with me in a friendly way like you and I are doing today, suddenly her face scowled and she went into a spiel of saying, which media? What media? Which journalists are you talking about? What are they doing? And my tape recorder was running.

[00:27:27] And it was running. And it recorded. And I just wondered when somebody will notice that it is running and that I have this outburst on tape and get taken to Tihar alongside the others. But suddenly she came back to herself, said, oh, but let that be. We have other things to talk about. And very nice meeting you.

[00:27:56] And I quietly picked up my tape recorder, point the buttons, put it into my bag and went out. Rang up a gonker and said, I have this tape. And he listened to it. And he listened to it. But he said, look, there's nothing new. She has said this many times before. We are all aware of it. There's nothing to be gained by your, you know, talking about it too openly. Just keep it as a record that happened.

[00:28:23] But I wrote about it in the Indian Express thereafter when the emergency had gone. And Mrs. Gandhi came back in 1980 and I interviewed her again. So, you know, it's been an interesting. You mentioned Nehru. You know, and there's a lot of debate about Nehru today. And so while Nehru built great institutions, there was also the socialist route that he chose. In hindsight, do you think that was a mistake? Not at all.

[00:28:53] Not at all. I am a Nehru enthusiast, I will have to say right out front. He was the icon of our times. We didn't want to, didn't worship Raj Kapoor or Dalip Kumar or Ashok Kumar or any of those people for us. Nehru was the person to look up to. And I remain an admirer of him.

[00:29:18] And I'm anguished to find that there is so much criticism of him today. It is Nehru's vision and his ability, first of all, to cede all the scientific temper in the country, to build the dams. And, well, you know, later on, yes, we found Bhakra Dam had its problems. But they were, at that time, the new temples. And they brought a different direction. And they brought a different direction.

[00:29:48] I mean, that is what helped to bring agriculture forward. He's, whether you look at which institution you look at, whether it is in science, nuclear, or it is literature and the arts. I mean, he seeded everything, the IITs. He created the base, the foundation on which this country could grow.

[00:30:16] And if today we are talking about our talent and being able to get somewhere, it's because Nehru had that vision and created that foundation for this edifice to come up in subsequent years. So I don't think we should be denigrating Nehru. Rather, we should be very grateful that he laid the foundations for us.

[00:30:39] And as far as socialism is concerned, which country can prosper if all its people don't prosper? So what is this? Socialism has been in crisis, but so is capitalism in crisis. And I think we still have, Nehru was trying to find a third way. Non-alignment on the foreign side was his third way. We're coming back to it with strategic autonomy. It's different labels.

[00:31:08] But, you know, there has to be a third way where it's not the very rich. It's not the, what should I say, the totally personality negating features of communism. But it has to be a third way that ensures people decent livelihoods, a way of life. And you can call it Fabian socialism by another name now.

[00:31:37] Absolutely. And I'm glad you said all these things because I think, to be honest, I agree with all of these views that you've said. And I think, especially when it comes to institution building, I don't think there's been anybody better, at least in India, but probably at a global level, because let's not forget the context of the time.

[00:32:02] You know, he's taken charge of a new country, which is obviously not very economically prosperous. There's a large number of very, very poor people. And he's had the vision to build all these institutions today that we are so proud of. And as you said, on which the edifice of this country rests. Somebody said it is the most unique experiment in the world that was ever tried. To bring our democracy with non-violence.

[00:32:26] I mean, it's not just Gandhi in the independence movement, which was non-violent, but the whole implementation of that dream, subsequently post-independence, was also democracy with non-violence. And we are still democratic. That, again, is a tribute to that early vision. Yeah. And however much it may be under threat today, I think the fact that we are still, by and large, democratic is a tribute to his vision. But let me just move, change gears a bit. We fought wars with Pakistan and China.

[00:32:57] And what was war coverage like in those days? Obviously, you didn't have the resources that we do today. So how tough was it and what kind of coverage existed? See, of course, you didn't have people that got embedded into the places as was happening now or had the freedom to video from the spot. In fact, what the terrible thing that's happening today is that we've all become spectators.

[00:33:21] We are viewing war as yet another film on camera and watching it as we have our meals and have our drinks. And so, oh, terrible, terrible, terrible. And then we go on with our lives as it is. No, I think in the old days, all this was not there. The coverage of war was very patriotic. In fact, people were very angry with what was happening.

[00:33:47] They built up the army and the air force for what they were able to do. But it was not without criticism either. There were people who brought in little leads that said, did Nehru go astray? There is Neville Maxwell who is talking about another version of how the Indochina war came into being.

[00:34:11] So the media did foray into criticisms also to show that there were other areas to explore. But by and large, the coverage of the wars was front paged, patriotic idea being to build support and to fight the battle in a way that we could come out of it victorious.

[00:34:36] Mr. Shapra, you've already spoken a lot about what it was like during the emergency and Mrs. Gandhi was voted out afterwards. But there was a political turn that the country took towards her again and she was voted back in, perhaps stronger than before. As an observer, how did you perceive that change and the switch back to her?

[00:34:57] Yeah, we were euphoric when she was voted out because the scenes in Ramlila grounds when Nathal Bihari spoke and Jay Prakash Narayan and, you know, all the leaders, Jay Prakash Narayan, the crowds poured out and I was there in the newspaper building when the results came in of Nehru, of Indra Gandhi being defeated and of Sanjay Gandhi being defeated.

[00:35:27] And the crowds went hysteric in the roads. But the Chanta government just blundered and blundered and blundered. They kept fighting amongst themselves, a bit like what you see today with the YARP and the Congress and all the others. So they are not able to put up a decent opposition voice, despite the fact that there is a problem with the BJP being,

[00:35:53] as many people even say, fascist in its ideas and communal. And yet we are not able to come up with any kind of an alternative to them. So, you know, the Chanta government was a classic example of that. You had absolute lions there. And yet these big figures were not able to pull together to give us a coherent government. And by the end of three years, everybody was quite fed up and Mrs. Gandhi was on the way back.

[00:36:22] And it was interesting when I, at that point of time, you know, I had done a series of articles in my feminist viewpoint saying that what had happened with family planning, which was the most politically explosive issue during the emergency, was bad because even one case was one case too many.

[00:36:45] But if it came to that, the Shah Commission that was sitting at that point listening to the sins that Mrs. Gandhi had committed was not able to get more than a, you know, few score people testifying that they had been coerced. And the numbers were really not measuring up to what the talk had been. And I did a back of the envelope investigation in my own home and said with the maternal mortality and infant mortality that was taking place,

[00:37:13] with family planning not becoming available, what was happening to the women and children of this country was decimation. And I wrote these strong articles, including going in to Turkman Gate and talking with women there and reporting that they say what happened to us was bad. But that doesn't mean that you throw family planning out, do it in the proper way. We need it still.

[00:37:35] So I had gone into, you know, at that point, JRD Tata had invited me to come into the foundation that he chaired, a non-governmental organization to help re-legitimize family planning with the political leadership. And I interviewed Jay Prakash Narayan. And this was shown in every cinema hall in the country with Jay Prakash Narayan also saying that, you know,

[00:38:01] he was anguished with what was happening to women and children and giving his support to the family planning program, which had become a phrase that nobody dared to utter in that period. So then when Mrs. Gandhi came back, she called me and gave me an interview to talk about her support to family planning, despite what had happened and saying she wanted it done in the proper way.

[00:38:25] Not only did I interview her, but I met her many times thereafter in a private capacity, having quiet dinners because she suddenly felt the need to have conversations with someone who could talk back to power, but also had the pulse of the field by going around the country. So, you know, in fact, she made a perfect comeback.

[00:38:52] And I lost my column in the Indian Express because I wrote that Mrs. Gandhi coming back, now the women of the country are relying on her to do this, this, this. And of course, the Indian Express being as anti Mrs. G, as we called her, as many in the media are today against Modi, certainly didn't want a columnist who was writing that sort of a spirit.

[00:39:17] So my column went, but it led me later to be invited by Rajiv Gandhi to come into the government to help to relegitivise family planning across the board. And I was able to do certain things in communication. But I bring these personal stories in to tell you that my disillusionment with the media

[00:39:42] is not today when people are talking about the Godi media, as they say, and then the other side is so-called free and liberal. I found, it's a pot calling the kettle black on all sides, because in the 90s, when we had what is called the opening up,

[00:40:10] and I for one have great reservations with the way we opened up, not that we shouldn't have opened up, but the non-calibration of our opening is another story by itself that could be discussed. But we were so desperate at that time, because there was no gold in India's coffers, that the HIV AIDS program that had just been forged, and that's something that I know a great deal about, because I was in government just before that, dealing with those issues of family planning, reproductive health, etc.

[00:40:41] And against the best advice of all the medical experts of the country, and I was in part of those councils where we sat and talked, the government had pushed down its throat programs that eventually worked to normalize the casualization and commercialization of sex,

[00:41:06] which has broken both societal norms, and has, the media of course jumped on it, because sexualization of the media was great commercial returns. And so, under the pretext of being able to educate the public and protect them from a disease, they rent bananas, doing all kinds of things that they should not have done. And you have a media that really doesn't enjoy

[00:41:36] the same respectability starting from the 90s that the media enjoyed when, post-independence, it was a mission, because now it was an openly commercial thing. And the opening up coincided with the opening up of the skies too. And so you had the single Doodarshan channel multiplying many fold with people being stolen from the Doodarshan

[00:42:06] to moonlight for these channels, including its secretary of the government being given a million dollars to fight the lawyers in court, because he was coming in before the time period that was the cooling off period for a senior official. So many things happened that I think broke the media in the 90s. And what we're seeing today, and where the media is now openly itself bellyaching

[00:42:36] that things have gone bad, actually began at that stage. And it's taken us 30 years to really fall down the hill. I'll come back to the media. Of course. I'll come back to the media in just one second. But you mentioned the economic reforms introduced by Narsimha Rava and Manmohan Singh. Did that take you by surprise? I'm asking because while the situation was grim, no doubt, no one expected the very entrenched Laisen Raj to be dismantled

[00:43:06] and that India would open up in the way that it did to the world. Yeah, but then they were more caging their gold in London at that stage. And that's why I say that the HIV AIDS program, which was offering nothing more than a million dollars, which at that point was still a million dollars, but still chicken feed for a country. They were able to push what they wanted as a conditionality just to give that foreign exchange. The country was so desperate.

[00:43:35] So Narsimha Rava, I worked with Narsimha Rava, and he was the health minister and the HRD minister when I was in the government at Rajiv Gandhi's invitations. And Narsimha Rava was a master, what should I say, tactician. And, you know, he is the one who slept while Babri Masjid was broken. And he is the one who allowed, you know, allowed this,

[00:44:06] you know, economic reforms that are being held to happen without thinking through what are the regulatory mechanisms that need to be adopted to not let this become, let loose in the country. You know, we don't like to be compared to China, but we have to hand it that China also opened, but it was able to calibrate its opening in a way that it was, you may not agree with their system,

[00:44:36] but they opened in a way that suited their system. We did no such thing. We've been hands up. Right. And so just coming back to the media, and you mentioned that many of the ailments that we are seeing today in the media actually have their roots in the 90s. How do you view the media's performance in today's political and social scenario? And there's been a lot of debate about its capriculation to the Modi dispensation. Some believe it has, some believe it hasn't.

[00:45:05] Are you among those who feel that the news media have failed us in this time? Or do you think they're doing fine? I, you know, my book says it all because when I say journey into the media and out, you know, it says my disillusionment, not as of today, but published in 2012. Well, so, you know, I really don't know how else to answer that question to you. I think so much is wrong with the media. They're good people. They're good people. They're good people.

[00:45:33] They're good people. in place so that, you know, it was not as if there were no battles between the commercial interests and what was the editorial independence in earlier years. You had George Varghese

[00:46:02] being shooed out of Hindustan times given his marching orders on the staircase, as they said. You know, you had things like that happening. But you, A, you had men of gumption who were able to stand, and men only, no women were there. But men of gumption who were able to stand up and say, to hell with it. You know, I work on my terms. And secondly, it was, the media

[00:46:32] had mechanisms. There was a Journalistic Wage Act. There were institutions, there was a press council with more teeth than it has now. that you could go to, that you could, that you could appeal for regulation if injustice was happening. There's no longer anything there. You have, and, and journalists were not on, on, on annual contracts. You got a job,

[00:47:02] you got a job into an organization. So, I mean, there is a lot that has gone wrong with the media. And so, even the few and far between people who want to work in it as a mission are unable to do so. And the commercial interests have now dominated. If government interference is bad, corporate interference is as bad. And the role of the media really was to keep equidistance. It has not happened. What's your view of the digital revolution

[00:47:32] that has transformed the media landscape? Again, the digital divide has accentuated the other divides in the country for one thing because you have the have-nots becoming more of have-nots because the digital instruments are not easily in their reach. But my biggest growth, and I come back to myself all the time because I'm fighting these battles still at the age of 86, I continue to

[00:48:03] say what I can, where I can on some of these issues. But for the last 30 years now, I have been saying to the government at all levels and in the last few years written letters to the prime minister, to the information broadcasting minister, to the IT minister saying, you're going from 2G to 3G to 4G and please watch again, calibrate because when you get images into this country and you do not do something about regulating pornography,

[00:48:34] what you are going to get is the worst kind of material unleashed on the most unsuspecting audiences who have never been exposed to this kind of thing and there's going to be mayhem in the country, which it is. I think the women and children of this country are paying the price for this digital openness that we're talking about without it having been

[00:49:04] regulated. for blocking off what is totally objectionable. Now, I have to make the point that I am a person who fights for freedom of expression for political purposes. So, my whole argument on this has been that you cannot conflate pornography with freedom of thought and expression and that it is most important to realize that the internet which is governed

[00:49:33] by the First Amendment of the USA cannot be the ruling force in this country where the Constitution has Article 19 Clause 3 which says reasonable restrictions including public decency and morality. So, we are, as I say, being colonized in a different way altogether. And I sort of go back to Amitabh Ghosh's books which have

[00:50:03] documented so dramatically and so eloquently that whole opium opiumization as I would say of the Chinese society which took them two centuries to come back from and it happened with trade wars when opium was pushed onto that country and I call the pornography that's coming to us on the internet which I'm told now is almost like 66% of the traffic of the internet

[00:50:33] is another opium. Before I go on to other non-media related topics I know you said that you don't want to talk too much about your time in Vietnam but do you want to tell us very briefly about what happened there that there was a 2,000 kilometer road journey before we proceed? Well, as I told you, I went from Vietnam and I got the visa information there and went helter skelter and of course first thing was that I was supposed to arrive

[00:51:03] in Vientan on a certain date and I arrived in Hong Kong en route the previous night and everybody looks at my ticket and tells me to come in at a certain time and I arrived there an hour before and they tell me the plane has taken off and it was a once a week flight to Vientan and there was I without any money in my pocket actually and stranded and I stood in the Hong Kong airport shouting stop that plane I had to get on to it so from

[00:51:32] that kind of a drama where they thought I was a mad woman and eventually caved in because I threatened to sue the airline for a million dollars and showed them my permission to come into Vietnam and they realized that that was something they managed to fly me to Bangkok and then fly me back to Vientan and I got there so to cut a long story short I arrived in on Hanoi to find myself being welcomed by a group of women

[00:52:02] in our eyes and lotus flowers in their hands who said you're a state guest Mrs. Shabra and this happened because the foreign secretary had sent off a letter and India you know because being the chairman of the Indochina Commission had played a sterling role in Vietnam in being very neutral and guiding its political destiny very effectively during the years so they thought if the foreign secretary is writing she

[00:52:32] must be somebody politically connected and so they made me a state guest and our ambassador and acting ambassador in Hanoi who came across to meet me and tell me briefed me that you know they are allowing some communist journalists from Russia and from Cuba Czechoslovakia to travel so there are teams that are now going but they are strictly

[00:53:01] from their communist world so the next day I had a meeting scheduled with the foreign minister of Vietnam and when he asked me and he said what can I do for you what else would you like to do they had of course laid out an elaborate program and I said sir the only thing I want to do is to go to Ho Chi Minh the city and his jaw dropped and he said and you know I was 104 pounds at that time fragile

[00:53:31] looking as fragile could be and his jaw dropped and he said I cannot see you going because there are no roads it's very tough we're just coming out of the war and it was the wrong thing for him to say because I said to him I'm just coming from Vietnam sir we've given a standing ovation to the women of Vietnam and for their role in the war and you're saying that I can't take a journey so he stood up and said four o'clock tomorrow

[00:54:00] morning and so I was on and I had for my companions two Rubens each of them weighing under 200 kilos and a Czech who was six feet four and a half inches and they looked at me and said I could see the thoughts running in their mind this pain in the neck this is going to be terrible and it was terrible we were in jeeps that were you know I've

[00:54:30] described as bronco ride always because the roads were very hardly there and we you know bumped up and down up and down on those bridges that were not there and ferried had to be ferried and stayed at war camps en route and but you know the communist journalists would obediently go off to their tents at night and I would sort of quickly have a bath and come out and start wandering around to the great

[00:54:59] consternation of the Vietnamese who were not used to this kind of disobedience and I had people following me and holding on to me and I was very irritated but then I later realized heard not realized but later came to know that they were as horrified that I was wandering around because there were mines all over the place and they thought that the state guests could be blown off if I wandered too far anywhere but I was desperate

[00:55:29] to just look to see what I could do to write and somehow to be able to do it so anyway I mean I did that 2,000 kilometers in very difficult circumstances and in fact eventually from Ho Chi Minh City brought India's diplomatic bag back to India so that people had information that their people were all right and things were you know front page for three weeks

[00:55:59] so you know I've already talked to you about the response I got and then the world New York Times Guardian Duggan Niheter Der Spiegel the Australian I mean you know you name it nobody had gone in the country I want to talk about your non-journalistic work too and now you've been advisor and additional secretary in the union health and family welfare ministry during the Rajiv years you already mentioned

[00:56:28] that you've also been a UN fellow at the international women's year conference in Mexico city you mentioned that Ministry of Health and Family Welfare not UN Ministry of Health and Family Welfare Government of India that was I think as a additional secretary right additional secretary yeah no I'm also saying you've also been a UN fellow at the international women's year conference in Mexico city and then I was a delegate at the Nairobi Women's College the UN mid-decade women and media meeting also in New York and so on how did you get into that tell us

[00:56:58] a little bit about the work no I mean all that is see the women's issues I've talked about I've been writing and so it was natural that from Mexico city one would get to the New York conference the Nairobi delegation but the Ministry of Health was because as I told you I got invited by JRD Tata to come in to work with this foundation to help

[00:57:28] re-legitivize family planning with the political leadership then I interviewed Jeffrey Kushner and I interviewed Mrs. Gandhi I was very much in what was supposed to be a two-year project went into eight years of my working on family planning and in fact I started writing less and less because it was so time consuming and I was trying to develop projects across the country rather than writing any longer and then Rajiv Gandhi invited me because I was

[00:58:13] the people were there but they squeezed the complete funding to those people so that they were there but they had nothing to do and they wanted to bring the advertising agencies to work on family planning and I had been called in on an expert group I

[00:58:43] that looked at this family planning communication that the advertising agencies were proposing and I was amazed to find that there were astronomical sums being asked for and the kind of programs they were putting across was ludicrous to say the least and I said this and I said it's a ripoff as an expert in the committee in

[00:59:13] at a function that the foundation for which I was working had organized came to me and said so you think the advertising agencies are doing a ripoff overnight he had heard about this outburst that I had had in

[00:59:44] I said send it to you tomorrow morning from the office I reached the office and there was Mrs. Garewal several times on the phone wanting the CV and I said it's being typed in those days you didn't have the computer I had no idea that I for him to say

[01:00:15] and you know she had asked me the previous day that we want you I said I really don't know what I can minister you had me on

[01:00:44] and he said yes I know they'll make chicken out of you the bureaucrats but don't worry I'm here and if you have a problem you can always come of course famous last words once I became an additional secretary the protocol shutters came down I laid to the media

[01:01:15] I took a stand that the advertising agency's work had nothing to do with me and they had brought me in hoping that I would clear up the mess for them the bureaucrats that had created the mess and I said sorry it's your mess you do it and absolutely resolutely refused to deal with that subject I brought them in instead on a completely voluntary basis and in fact I turned the whole family planning communication from being a

[01:01:45] patronizing adventure and to a propaganda tool to being a beggar's bowl which said come this is your problem as much as it's mine see what you can do for it at a no profit no cost basis and secondly broadened its horizon on communication to include all kinds of issues of women's interests and when I failed to get the

[01:02:15] ministry to work with the advertising agencies give them time to work on a voluntary basis I set up a studio across the corridor in my office commandeered a producer from the Doodarshan and we brought out a series of one minute spots that actually created a communication revolution because you now have social messages coming which date from that time and I got that one minute of time given to me

[01:02:44] me meaning meaning ministry of health and family welfare without payment to the ministry of information and broadcasting Doodarshan arguing that Doodarshan was there to pursue such national interests and not for any other reason and the public accounts committee not only backed me eventually on this but called the then DG Doodarshan to task for not being even more cooperative so it was a wonderful what should I say

[01:03:13] breakthrough in communication that occurred that time but unfortunately it never got the mileage that it should have got because we managed to make a dent the surveys showed that my spots were reaching on dot but after I left the whole commercial 90s the commercialization wave came in and actually what I had set out was to show that the government itself could do for a fraction what you

[01:03:43] were asking outside and that it could be done well was really not wanted it was then quietly put aside and the whole commercial interest prevailed all over again it's a familiar story actually in many aspects of government I want to talk about one very important issue too and we have a very serious problem when it comes to political representation of women even today the women's reservation bill is not a reality

[01:04:13] you have been active in the space of women's causes as you so eloquently detailed today do you have any hope at all that the bill will eventually be enacted and how do you strategy to enable women's political

[01:04:43] representation before parliamentary standing committees and it was in fact at one point of time when the bill was in a crisis because you know the women's representation bill went into parliament on many many occasions and was the first time when standards broke in parliament and you had free for all going on it occurred over the women's representation bill I call it representation it was called the reservation bill

[01:05:12] but I have been because of my background with population I was arguing from 2000 that the delimitation is going to take place and while you are having people arguing that there is a lack of democracy because the constitutes have become so large that there is no parity of vote now in the constituencies and on the other hand you have the north south divide because the southern states were anguished

[01:05:42] that they were going to lose out because they were doing good work that the delimitation exercise offered an opportunity to create a thrust for women's representation alongside and solve the dilemma but the women's movement didn't understand delimitation they thought I was going bananas and the political forces were actually not interested in the women's issues in any case so and then eventually when I did manage to get

[01:06:12] to speak to the standing committee and Nachi who was the chairman at that point of time actually came back on a second occasion and asked me to present the strategy to them because what I talked about was building double member constituencies then because the delimitation had gone but I said if you can now because your constituencies have become absolutely elphantine million and a half and I've done tables that showed two and a half million

[01:06:42] three million how are going to ever get out of money muscle power if you have the size so double member constituencies which really went back to what we had when we were newly independent and which we had lost only because of again another political issue that had us do way with double member constituencies because V.V. Guri was then not the president at that point of

[01:07:12] time but had lost elections in a double member constituency fought to get that happened so there was a precedence for it my last attempt was a monograph that even now brought out that what could be done with the same strategy which I actually presented to the vice president two days before this bill came into parliament but he was very what should I say I should not use any

[01:07:41] wrong word nowadays the media gets blown but the vice president was very careful and he did not let out on what was happening took 100 copies of my monograph to say that he would distribute it and then they went into parliament to bring this bill so now to come back to your question I don't see it happening because it is when the census takes place and when the census takes place when the delimitation takes place

[01:08:11] thereafter the committee is constituted which will say which constituencies go to women we drama was very dramatic and it's already started it will be even more so this time and the south will be even more fearful because the north has become even more populous

[01:08:41] and the numbers are even more astronomical now of what the winners and the losers will think so I have been saying that this is non sequitur the bill and the government and unfortunately I mean I sent my monograph to many leaders of the opposition before whether it was Kapil Sibyl or it was Jairam Rabesh or it

[01:09:26] happening and so sad very very sad I mean it's ironic that in India we don't have it but you know when Afghanistan first threw off the Taliban rule and you had democracy there they started off with the 25% reservation in parliament so imagine Afghanistan in those days did it of course now they've lost democracy but we still don't have a women's reservation my whole point was that if you

[01:09:56] brought in double member constituencies you needed to recreate the Gandhian ethic in these constituencies with what I call the feminine political perspective so that you know just as Satyagre was a non violent tool that became a powerful political tool but was based in the psyche the feminine psyche non violence and so the way Gandhi was able to politicize and also energize all the women in the

[01:10:25] process it was a second opportunity to do this with double member constituencies which would kill many birds with one stone but we didn't buy it so let me change gears again now you've written books you've held so many positions in government you've done so much in the media what's next for you oh no I mean I don't think there's anything next every time I've done it and I don't want to do anything more and then

[01:10:55] something happens and I joined the foray once more fiction I did want to write I've written it I hope people will read becoming the storm and as I tell delhi that I described in the 50s and

[01:11:25] 60s is a delhi that very few people today will know and so I thought that was worth recording the kind of exchanges the kind of relationships that existed within the Punjabi family at that point of time but I also wove into it all these issues that I have been deeply involved with because early marriage again I was one of the paper which I sent to the planning commission telling them that

[01:11:54] their analysis on demographics was going astray because they were talking of only births and deaths but they're forgetting the napshle factor and that if we could only delay marriages and delay them in the way that China had done and Southeast Asia had done with not unwed pregnancies and free-for-all going on but with social restraints

[01:12:24] and sexual restraints in place for the young we would be able to do much more to build a generational gap than it could be with a contraceptive revolution so I have written these papers in 1978 and 1880 and so I return to that team not to the planning commission but now to the people with easy prose and a storytelling art to say early marriage is not good for a woman it puts her into a lot of

[01:12:54] troubles and she has to have a lot to fight it through and then she's exposed to all the dowry claims and the you know the domestic violence that occurs when she wants to speak out on her own so in a

[01:13:28] that brings me to the last question this is a question I ask all my guests at the end of the show why do you do this work I don't think it's work I don't look at it as work it's life I have written always because I for the

[01:13:58] thoughts that I believed in so you know I mean when earlier years one worked for a pittance one worked because one wanted to work now when money has also

[01:14:27] all Indians matter