Deca Log

There is yet a third question to ask: Does history matter much in an age of instant everything and a hyperbolic present?

Eric Hobsbawm, described as history’s greatest star, lamented in an interview on these pages last December that the discipline was increasingly becoming unnecessary: "The speed of change is such that the traditional links between the past and the present have disappeared. In the 20th century, modern technology has operated in a problem-solving mode to which history is irrelevant."

Presuming ‘history’ is problematic, let’s assume a neutral, inventory term of ‘chronicle’. Here, then, is ten years of the nation as seen through ten years of Outlook, chronicled in ten-and-a-half chapters. A title borrowed from an eponymous book by Julian Barnes, who has assured us "another ten years of luck".

Chapter One Insiders And An Outsider

The Outsider first. Sometime in 1999, a journalist asked Sonia Gandhi if he could tell her a joke. "Is it about me?" she asked. When told it was about the UP chief minister, she smiled in relief and said, "These days all the jokes are about me." From being seen as a joke, a reluctant politician and an unsure arbiter of Congress destiny, to being the key person behind the UPA government in 2005, Sonia is the decade’s success story. Outlook put her on the cover as early as December 1996, when with her blessings Sitaram Kesri became party president. We then called her the ‘Hand That Rocks The Congress’.

Those were the days when ‘Piano Man’ P.V. Narasimha Rao (the title of a prognostic polscape we published before the Paris character was found in 2005), bruised by the poll results and battered by court cases, had reluctantly stepped down. Down he was, but not out. In August 1996, he told Kuldip Nayar he wanted to exit but had to hold on to his chair because he wanted to "rehabilitate" the party. Alas, that did not happen and history gave Rao the unkindest rap, his finance minister overshadowed him. The bitterness showed when in an April 1998 interview to Sagarika Ghose, he asked: "What family? I have no feelings for any family. Are Congress workers servants?" Four months before he died, in August 2004, when Outlook met him for the ‘What If?’ special issue, his whispery grunts against history hadn’t died down.

Whatever, Outlook’s stroke of luck partly began when juicy excerpts from his novel Insider became part of the first issue in October 1995. The prose pretty much qualified for the bad sex prize: "It was a process in which millions of pores, blood vessels and reflexes were involved in an all-out comprehension."

To return to Sonia, Outlook put her 19 times on the cover and seldom for a complimentary reason.On the contrary, she appeared most times as a caricature, ever since we made her look like Mona Lisa in May 1997.She was ‘Villain No.2’ in 1997, ‘Ms Clueless’ in August 1999.When the Quattrocchi factor was being discussed in February 1998, her eyes on the cover almost popped out as a Bofors boomerang approached her.A CBI report was lying before the then United Front government and breaking her silence, dared the government to put out the names.But the long life of the Bofors controversy born in the late ’80s somewhat died only in 2005.Not till ‘Saint Sonia’ had listened to her ‘inner voice’, which we said was like an "earsplitting" victory cry to the Opposition.Sonia’s innings in power has just about begun; she’s still seen as cautious "big sister".

For the record, when the rest of the nation went into an overdrive about her ‘foreign origin’, Outlook took a pragmatic stand: "Why is it that...Sonia Gandhi still strikes everyone as a question rather than an answer? Fourteen years after she became an Indian citizen, there is nothing obviously ‘foreign’ about the Congress president."

In all her years of maturing into power, Sonia never once spoke to Outlook exclusively. She was so out of bounds she virtually disappeared from Outlook’s cover for a full three years from 2000 to 2002. The magazine’s default contrarian stance and a near-anarchist take on practically every issue ensured the coteries of power kept us away. This unblemished record was only once broken by Vajpayee in May 1999, another major player in the decade, but he spoke when he was temporarily out of power. He admitted his 13-month government had become "over-confident". A phrase that came back to haunt him in April 2004 when the NDA met shocking defeat. But going by cover count, Vajpayee’s made it 21 times, marginally higher than Sonia.

One of the early verdicts Outlook passed on Vajpayee in the wake of the November 1998 onion crisis was that his government was a "flop show". His reluctance to govern was summed up with an anecdote he’d once told a friend: "Museebat hai! Kaun desh sambhalega? Isse to achha hai ki Parliament mein ek bhashan thok do aur ghar aake cinema dekho (It’s a bother. Who’ll govern the nation? Better to give a speech in Parliament and come home to a movie)." This verdict came less than six months after Pokhran II and the jingoistic halo around Vajpayee was still intact.

The magazine’s troubled engagement with Vajpayee became more intense when he came back to rule a full term. We called him a "flip-flop PM" (December 2002) when he seemed to be artfully playing to the hardline parivar gallery a few months after Gujarat riots. An infographic which traced his forked tongue on every burning issue of the day: Modi, Ayodhya, conversions, Muslims and Fernandes read ‘Atal’s Somersaults’. The copy was more strident: "Statesman or artful dodger, consummate actor or harried politician... Is Vajpayee any one or all of these?"

By this time, the magazine’s head-on collision with the Vajpayee regime had already taken place. Two covers in March 2001 by Ajith Pillai and Murali Krishnan, which exposed the PM’s blind spots—his son-in-law Ranjan Bhattacharya, bureaucrats Brajesh Mishra and N.K. Singh—and how the three were ‘rigging’ the PMO, had severely angered the establishment. The then BJP president Bangaru Laxman had confirmed Ranjan’s role in the clearance of power projects and a former secretary (economic affairs) with the government, E.A.S. Sarma, had spilled the beans that "business lobbies like Reliance, Essar and the Hindujas have begun to exert their influence on the PMO".But the magazine had to face unpleasant consequences as a result of its speaking out.

Unfortunately, in this act of courage to question the highest executive authority, Outlookwas alone.That’s when Vinod Mehta wrote the editorial Power of Silence: "The tragedy of Indian democracy is not our present rulers, the greater, much greater, tragedy is that we possess an Opposition led by Sonia Gandhi, Somnath Chatterjee and Mulayam Singh Yadav.I wonder what sins the people of this country have committed to deserve them."

From the pages of these testing times emerges an interesting fact.In the same issue as the Power of Silence editorial (March 12, 2001), there is a longish letter by Reliance, defending itself against charges of influencing the PMO and a few page flips away, in the special Down Town section, ‘Anil Dharker dines Nita Ambani’ at the magazine’s expense.So much for Outlook’s newsroom being a plotting, scheming workshop where people’s reputations are built or sullied.A couple of months before the ‘rigging’ cover, we had published Ashok Saikia’s pleasant pictures of Vajpayee’s New Year holiday in Kumarakom.

Despite all these developments, Outlook did not swallow the bitterness pill, it continued to appeal to Vajpayee’s moral conscience. Post Godhra, when the PM fumbled on Modi, we asked: ‘Mr PM, What About your Rajdharma?’ The relationship seemed to have somewhat improved over two years and in March 2003 we celebrated his completion of five years in office with a photo-essay titled ‘Portrait of a Poet-King’. Vajpayee looked invincible at that time and our poll survey in 2004 gave the advantage to the NDA, but the voters proved wiser.

After the NDA loss, Vinod Mehta wrote in his diary: "History, I believe, will not judge him (Vajpayee) kindly.... He quashed all challengers ruthlessly and never forgave those who crossed his path. Thus, this bumbling, shuffling, father-figure was a quintessential politician... who effortlessly combined low cunning with high virtue...his biggest weakness was the lack of a moral centre."

Chapter Two: Left Right, Left Right

After the main players, the list of ‘character actors’ who also made history is long. There is one common vanity noun under which they took umbrage: kingmakers. They all peeped into the hall of history over the last ten years—L.K. Advani, Narendra Modi, Jyoti Basu, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, Prakash Karat, Bal Thackeray, Praveen Togadia, H.K.S. Surjeet, Sharad Pawar, Inderjit Gupta, K.S. Sudershan, Amar Singh, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Sitaram Kesri, Mayawati, Karunanidhi, Jayalalitha, Chandrababu Naidu, Somnath Chatterjee and, of course, Laloo Yadav. The mixed-up lineup is deliberate. The shrill, extreme or at times even pointed interventions these people made at different points unsettled the calm of the day and that is the thread that binds them all.

When it came to the ultra Right, Outlook arguably had one of its boldest covers. With the hoods of Thackeray, Singhal, Modi and Togadia, we said: "India’s Loony Right—It spouts venom, sows hatred and tarnishes India’s image. It attacks constitutional authorities and hinders governance. It must be reined in." We also kept track of the growing ambition of the RSS, which as of now, in October 2005, is heartlessly ready to swallow its own child—the BJP.

For one of the bloodiest acts of organised communal killings that took place post Godhra in Gujarat in 2002, Modi appeared three times on the cover.But when he was wriggling away with his sophistry, we fixed him with an exclusive.Manu Joseph revealed that a minister in the Gujarat cabinet had blown the whistle before the Concerned Citizens’ Tribunal, which confirmed Modi’s hand in the riots.The report quoting the minister’s deposition said: "In the two-hour meeting, Modi...ordered that the police should not come in the way of ‘the Hindu backlash’." Outlook later came under immense pressure to name the minister but he’s still a protected source.

However, the prediction we made for the December 2002 Gujarat assembly polls went horribly wrong.Our survey said Modi was quite likely to be dislodged. "It would be a photo finish and Congress has the edge," we wrote.But Modi’s demagoguery swept the polls. Just a year before (November 2001) when he took over from Keshubhai Patel as CM, he had spelt out his agenda clearly to Outlook: "I’ve come here to play a one-day match.I need fast and performing batsmen...there are only 20,000 hours before the next election." Well, his batsmen did perform.

On the Left’s trajectory of dilemma over reforms, it was only evident in a cover (June 1997) we did when Jyoti Basu completed 20 years of uninterrupted rule in West Bengal.An opinion poll revealed that 60 per cent of the people in West Bengal believed the Left had moved away from Leftist ideas. Whatever that meant, but it was a prelude to the arrival of Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, whom we grossly mistook to be a hardliner. "Brought up on the heavy revolutionary diet of Mao, Castro, Che and Ho Chi Minh...it is not without reason, therefore, that the industry circles and Calcutta upper crust feel more at home with the cosmopolitan Basu...in Basu’s absence they would instinctively want to interact with Asim Dasgupta or Somnath Chatterjee who are less doctrinaire than the incoming CM," we wrote in November 2000. Contrast this with the quote Buddha gave us in August 2005: "I want investment. Money has no colour or nationality.... Look at China."

A further indication that the Indian Left has changed is this nugget from our March 1998 issue. While discussing prospective Congress prime ministers, Yubaraj Ghimire wrote that in the event of a hung Parliament, the Left Front could object to Manmohan’s candidature on the ground that "he is an IMF man".

Advani surely deserves the last word in this chapter. He was yet another key player of the decade, but had a relatively subdued presence in the magazine. He was overshadowed by Vajpayee. But his ‘unbecoming’ of a Hindutva leader in Pakistan while altering Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s place in Indian nationalist history was well covered. An excerpt from a column in June 2005: "I still cannot understand why one of India’s shrewdest, most experienced, ambitious and astute politicians should seem to write his own political obituary on a sightseeing tour of Pakistan."

Chapter Three: India, Kashmir And The World

The subcontinental focus of India and the magazine dramatically altered after 9/11. At Outlook, before 2001, we very rarely had international covers. In September 1998, Tunku Varadarajan wrote about the Yankees’ puritanical reaction to Clinton’s sexcapades and we had a couple of covers when India played an archetypal "oriental" host with marigold, Taj Mahal and all to Clinton towards the end of his presidency in mid-2000. That’s all our interest was in the world. But the moment 9/11 happened, the superstructure of all arguments came to be built on the phrase: "world community". Media appropriated the Pentagon phrase in a big way. The world had truly shrunk, terrorism was for real.

V.Sudarshan put it in perspective: "Indian policymakers see an unprecedented opportunity towards stamping out terrorism in all its forms and manifestations that has not so far been possible." That is precisely what happened, our Kashmir and Pakistan interest developed a finer focus.To engage more and more people in the crucial debate, we tried to do away with the convoluted language of diplomacy.

A testimony to the magazine’s commitment to encourage people-to-people contact was the July 28, 2001 special issue, prior to the Agra summit, which was a full Pakistan package on the people and their lives.Besides the big issues of drug, war, economy, we also wrote about the lip-smacking fish delicacy in the Sindh province called Bunda Pala: "The fish is stuffed with a variety of herbs and spices, wrapped in cloth and buried a metre deep in hot sand." Bunda Pala, we hoped, would temper the climate of hate between the two countries.These efforts continued when Indian cricketers went to Pakistan in March 2004 (Manu Joseph did a nightcrawl and found Lahore to be Delhi’s kin and Karachi Mumbai’s cousin) and later when the Pakistan team toured us a year on in March 2005.As early as January 1996 we had a copy on Pakistan’s high life.

Parallel to these ‘track two’ efforts, Outlook suggested a precocious framework of agreement (June 11, 2001) between India and Pakistan on Kashmir.The suggestions included LoC as border, J&K as a free trade zone, opening up bus routes, a soft border, reflecting Kashmiri identity in the passport, sharing of hydel power, etc.In the environment of mistrust then, this was blasphemy. Now in 2005 it is more or less mainstream talk. After all, Outlook’s inaugural cover in October 1995 put out the first-ever opinion poll from within Kashmir, which said 77 per cent thought there was no solution within the Indian Constitution. When the Agra summit failed, we wrote: "Walking the high road called friendship, India must make, whenever necessary, small unilateral concessions."

While on the Kashmir subject, we cannot forget Ghulam Hasnain’s first-hand account on the jehad factory (September 25, 2000) from Ath Maqam in Pakistan-held Kashmir. Abu Mahaz, 25, spoke in the copy: "Our target was to kill Gen Krishan Pal. But somehow, we could not get hold of him.... This time, I am going on a suicide mission. And I am happy. I will soon achieve martyrdom." Around that time, the US administration too had reluctantly admitted that terror was indeed being exported to Kashmir and here was some proof. In the last seven years, we have watched our neighbour so closely that Musharraf appeared eight times on our cover. In fact, in 2001 and ’02 he even looked like India’s Opposition leader when Sonia was lying low.

Thanks to the post-9/11 climate and growing economic interests, India took the Clinton line of "natural ally" forward and shed all Cold War inhibitions. The era of tentative and secretive engagement was over. Jaswant Singh met Strobe Talbott more than a dozen times. With the Bush administration posting an activist ambassador, Robert Blackwill, to Delhi, the Indian point of view was never missed in White House, or in Outlook. But Blackwill came in for some entertaining attack on the magazine’s pages for his garrulousness and for typifying the American arrogance. Vinod Mehta wrote in March 2002: "Post-September 11, India is forging a new relationship with the only remaining superpower. In that exercise, India must ensure its voice is, at the very least, heard before it is rejected. Until ambassador Blackwill becomes an equal-opportunity host, I will skip any further summons to his hallowed round table. Unless, of course, his chief guest is Julia Roberts."