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Journalism of Courage
This Monday is an important Monday for Gurveen Pirzada. Her mother’s biopsy results will be in—but she can’t bear to think about it. For, her husband’s bail application will also come up for hearing the same day.
‘‘Please don’t write anything,’’ she says, almost trembling, ‘‘I don’t want to get my husband into more trouble.’’ Her anxiety has more than a reason.
Almost three weeks ago, her husband, Gurnihal Singh Pirzada, a senior IAS officer credited for plugging Punjab to the IT sector, was arrested by the state Vigilance Bureau. On charges that he deprived the state of Rs 1 crore! How? By sanctioning rent lease agreements to two companies, one of them Infosys.
Infosys and Pirzada have strongly denied these charges but the Congress government of Amarinder Singh isn’t impressed. The buzz here is that Pirzada is not seen as sufficiently deferential to the Chief Minister.
His wife can’t forget the rude awakening the morning he was arrested. ‘‘My younger daughter was home from boarding school, we were all asleep when the servant knocked at our door.’’ It was 6.30 am.
For the next three hours, Vigilance officials searched the first-floor rented apartment. The only time she lost her cool, she says, was when they began rummaging through her 14-year-old daughter’s clothes.
‘‘I just lost it,’’ she says, and then she waves a hand. ‘‘I don’t want to talk about it.’’
For, the routine is suddenly a blur, divided as it is between her lawyers in Chandigarh and her husband in the Rajindra Hospital at Patiala. He was admitted there on January 27 after his blood pressure shot up and his slipped disc rendered him immobile, forcing him to appear in the Ropar district court on a stretcher.
Alprax has become her ally. She can forget the cervix cancer she’s conquered, but there are other problems. Like her ailing mother with a tumour in the chest, the widow of her only sibling and her niece who, like her, are dependent on Gurnihal.
Her two daughters—the elder Anahat is in MBBS, first-year at Amritsar, the younger Mehazbeen is in Class IX in Dehra Dun—give her her daily dose of long-distance comfort. Some close friends are at hand too. But there hasn’t been even a scrap of sympathy from the IAS brotherhood. And that rankles. ‘‘Not a single officer has stood up for him,’’ she says.
Yes, she admits, he is assertive, a go-getter, a passionate man who enjoys being blunt with words. ‘‘But then, that’s the way he has always been,’’ she recalls.
‘‘If he was corrupt, why did he not go back to Tamil Nadu (his parent cadre — where he was transferred around for taking on the forest mafia)? Why did he go on leave,’’ she asks, words tripping over each other. And then, the writing pad silences her once again. ‘‘Please don’t write, wait till Monday.’’
