Aftertaste | I, Witness: The mirror, the memory, the man

“I was born into an India still learning to breathe, where every sigh of freedom came mixed with the smoke of loss.”

That single sentence tells you what kind of writer Siddiqui is — a journalist with a poet’s ear, a political thinker with the soul of a chronicler. He has seen the insides of both Parliament and the pressroom, the pulpit and the protest. That makes his voice rare — because he is not merely telling the story of India; he has lived inside it.

The leaders and their light

In I, Witness, Siddiqui walks us through the corridors of power — Nehru’s optimism, Shastri’s humility, Indira’s fury, Morarji’s rigidity, Rajiv’s romance with modernity, Rao’s quiet cunning, Vajpayee’s poetry, and Modi’s populist pulse. Yet he writes not as a courtier nor as a cynic, but as a careful chronicler trying to find the fragile thread between human failing and historical fate.

Of Nehru, he writes with reverence tinged with realism: “He was a dreamer in a desert, and that was his glory and his grief.” Siddiqui acknowledges Nehru’s flaws — the romanticism that sometimes blinded him to realpolitik — but refuses to reduce him to caricature. “Without Nehru’s naivety,” he notes, “India would never have dared to dream as it did.”

His portrait of Shastri is tender, almost filial. “He was the smallest man in the room and the tallest in the moment… His silence had more strength than speeches.”

And then comes Indira — a paradox wrapped in pearls and power. Siddiqui neither spares her nor rescues her. He captures her as “a goddess forged in grief, who mistook command for communion.” He reminds us that her Emergency was “India’s darkest noon,” but also that “her return in 1980 showed the electorate’s astonishing appetite for forgiveness.”

Rajiv, for him, is the symbol of innocence betrayed by complexity. “He wanted to modernise a medieval nation overnight,” Siddiqui says, “but found that technology cannot outpace trust.”

These are not hagiographies. They are holograms — flawed, flickering, full of light and loss.

The courage to name and question

One of the book’s greatest strengths — and perhaps its greatest risk — lies in its unguarded candour. Siddiqui names names, recalls rumours, and revisits wounds that remain politically radioactive. He delves into the betrayals of 1962 and 1965, the shadows over Shastri’s death in Tashkent, the unspoken culpabilities of 1984, and the still-contested conspiracy around Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination.

Some of these passages are exhilarating in their investigative bravery; others tread close to speculation. His assertion that “the forces behind 1984 were not just mobs but mechanisms” feels intuitively true but demands corroboration. Likewise, his deep dive into the Shastri mystery leans more on conjecture than declassified evidence.

Yet even when Siddiqui may falter on fact, he never falters on feeling. His purpose is not prosecution but provocation — to remind readers that the truth of a nation is not always found in documents but in the doubts that outlive them.

The Modi moment

Narendra Modi neither sanctifies Modi nor slanders him. (Express Photo by Tashi Tobgyal)

The later chapters — covering the BJP’s rise and Narendra Modi’s dominance — are where Siddiqui walks his tightest rope. And he walks it with grace.

He neither sanctifies Modi nor slanders him. Instead, he situates him: “Modi is not an aberration; he is an evolution — the culmination of a long craving for clarity in a country fatigued by confusion.”

“If Nehru gave India its vocabulary of vision, Modi gave it a vocabulary of voice.”

It is a sentence that makes one pause — not because it flatters, but because it frames. It refuses the easy outrage that defines so much current commentary. Both men, in vastly different ways, spoke to the same longing — to belong.

Still, Siddiqui does not shy from critique. “The peril of personality,” he warns, “is that it can make policy secondary.” He laments the shrinking of the middle space, the loss of dialogue, the rise of digital dogma. “We scroll through slogans,” he writes, “mistaking them for substance.”

Between faith and freedom

What makes I, Witness deeply moving is not only its politics but its philosophy. Siddiqui writes as a Muslim in a nation still grappling with its plural soul. He does not plead for pity; he demands parity.

“I have been told I must choose between faith and freedom,” he writes, “but India, when it is true to itself, asks for neither sacrifice.”

Few Indian writers have articulated this dual belonging with such serenity and strength since Rahi Masoom Raza’s Topi Shukla. Siddiqui belongs to that lineage of lamenters who also love — men who mourn without malice.

A journalist’s elegy

At its heart, this book is a love letter to journalism — to that vanishing craft where words were weighed, not weaponised. He remembers the newsroom as “a temple of tempers and truth,” where “every headline was a heartbeat, and every edit an act of ethics.”

He mourns what has been lost — the editorials that questioned power without craving it, the reporters who stood in rain and reasoned with the storm. “Today,” he writes, “we confuse breaking news with breaking trust.”

In an era when noise drowns nuance, Siddiqui’s voice arrives like a tuning fork for our collective conscience.

Points of contention

No book that attempts to distil seventy-five years of political flux can escape flaws. Siddiqui’s breadth sometimes blurs depth. His recounting of certain alliances — between the Congress old guard and Janata reformers — is painted in broad brushstrokes where finer archival detail could illuminate motive and meaning.

At times, the prose leans toward melodrama — “the blood of 1984 still stains our sleep” — a line powerful in sentiment but weaker in substantiation. His admiration for Vajpayee occasionally slips into elegy; his disillusionment with the Congress sometimes echoes fatigue more than analysis.

But then, one remembers that this is a memoir, not a manual. A personal truth, not an academic treatise. Its purpose is to provoke reflection, not deliver verdicts.

Why it matters

Because memory matters. Because witness matters. Because we cannot scroll past our own story and still expect to understand ourselves.

Siddiqui’s voice reminds us that India’s history is not a tale of heroes and villains but of humans — bruised, brilliant, and bewildering. The Nehru who dreamed, the Shastri who starved, the Indira who dared, the Rajiv who rushed, the Vajpayee who healed, the Modi who commands — all are fragments of the same flame.

“Nations are not built by angels, but by men who remember they are not gods.”

In an era of easy outrage, I, Witness is an invitation to complexity. It demands that we hold two truths at once — that Nehru’s socialism sowed seeds of aspiration, and Modi’s nationalism harvests them differently; that both left and right have erred and endured; that democracy’s strength lies not in sameness but in its ability to survive dissent.