Write on!

One of the paradoxes of Indian democracy is that precious little information emerges from the backrooms of its power elite. This country does not have a tradition of good political memoirs, or indeed even great warts-and-all autobiographies. Citizens, consequently, are left in the dark about the circumstances in which crucial decisions that have impacted greatly on Indian politics were taken. Speculation and innuendo reign precisely because the protagonists neglected to tell their tales.

This, we believe, is a negative for a society claiming to be an open one. And that is why we need to welcome work like Jaswant Singh8217;s forthcoming autobiography, Call to Honour, which promises to provide a more fulsome account of the years of NDA rule. It would be smart on the part of Jaswant Singh8217;s party to see his account as an delineation of the circumstances which forced it to take the decisions it did on events like the Kandahar hijacking, rather than attempt to play censor. More discussion on that event will help the country, as a whole, to refine its response to crises of that kind. We do not know whether Jaswant Singh was inspired to write this book after his American interlocutor, Strobe Talbott, came out with his account of the Indo-US engagement in the post-Pokhran phase. But certainly it is always preferable to get a definitive account of a event significant to this country from its own actors.

Incidentally, the introspection that comes with the loss of power concentrates the autobiographer8217;s mind wonderfully. The defeat of the Conservatives by Tony Blair8217;s New Labour led to a rash of revelatory writing unprecedented in British history. Every Tory seemed to have a story: from Maggie Thatcher with her two-volumed memoir, to her successor, John Major 8212; who incidentally found her unbearably autocratic and said so in cold print 8212; to smaller players like Norman Lamont, Michael Heseltine, and Douglas Hurd. This handsome collection of words could well have provided the party with a understanding of why it lost power. As for the BJP, perhaps Atal Bihari Vajpayee should now exchange his poet8217;s quill for the memorist8217;s impress.