JYOTI MALHOTRA
The Telegraph, July 2007
There’s a couple of crew-cut policemen in regulation safari suits outside the chief minister’s suite in Himachal Sadan (why do they all look like they have a hangover in the middle of the day?) in Delhi’s upper-cut Chanakyapuri area. Another gent emerges in a minute, all wired up around his ears and skull. Mr Hamid Ansari please, I whisper, I’m not used to this cloak-and-dagger stuff. This must be life imitating Hindi movies, but how would I know since I haven’t seen a film in such a long time.
I am ushered into a room stuffy with sofas and air-conditioning, indeed, the air that I have been allowed to step into hallowed ground is all around me. This is where some of the Big Decisions to do with life and liberty, at least in Himachal Pradesh, must be taken. And this is where Hamid Ansari has been asked to sit and lobby parliamentarians from the Lok and Rajya Sabha, on the phone, for the August 10 vice-presidential poll.
That’s when Ansari walks in, dispelling the invisible presences with a breezy ``Hello!’’
He’s a slim man with a head of white hair and he favours the Fab India kurta-churidaar of the old world elite. The UPA’s candidate for Vice-President seems somewhat irritable, though, as if the idea of being in the stratospheric Up There hasn’t quite settled in.
Moreover, he’s fair game now. The fact of his being Muslim -- apart from his impeccable record as an ambassador of India, West Asia scholar-extraordinaire, vice-chancellor of the Aligarh Muslim University and lastly, chairman of the Minorities Commission – that tipped the Left parties’ balance in favour of his candidature, is clearly jarring to him.
``Najibullah (the former Afghan president who was hanged by the Taliban when they entered Kabul) once described to me Benazir Bhutto’s condition, that she lived like a parrot in a gilded cage. That’s how I feel now, as if I’m in a gilded cage,’’ says Ansari with a hollow laugh. Then he adds with a chucle, ``Except I’m no parrot!’’
For a man who loves his Tacitus, Herodotus and Thucydides, is equally at home in Hindi, Urdu, Arabic and English, and even some Persian, Ansari is unlikely to ever deliver the glib speech or unthinkingly mimic his masters. Unlike the ever-growing flood of former diplomats in the city desperately seeking political crumbs, Ansari stood up against the tide and spoke out against both the BJP and the Congress-led governments’ policies on Iraq and Iran.
Ansari tells the story of how six of them, including friend and erstwhile national security adviser J N Dixit (who died two years ago), wrote to the parliamentary committee of external affairs on why India should not send troops to Iraq. This was four years ago and senior BJP leaders, seeking to win brownie points with the Americans, had already promised Delhi would send a battalion. In the end, Vajpayee himself ruled against it, saving India the shame and ignominy of treating an old civilisational friend like an enemy.
Perhaps, the fact that as a young IFS officer, he romanced his wife on the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates in Baghdad in 1962-63, got married there in 1964 and subsequently honeymooned in Kurdistan, has something to do with his love for, and understanding of the Arab-Persian world.
Still, it was one thing for a secular-liberal person to dissent with the BJP on its Iraq policy, and quite another to vehemently disagree with the secular-liberal UPA government’s decision on Iran.
``I reflected a very widely held view within India on how the Americans were unfairly treating Saddam Hussein or destroying an ancient culture. As for Iran, as a former UN man, how could Delhi say the Security Council was the place to settle the matter? That’s the place where it gets much more serious.?’’ Ansari said.
Then, he pointed out, ``the fact that I am now a candidate of the UPA points to the depth of the system to take dissent.’’
So how does he feel about the UPA’s ritual tokenism, a woman president and a Muslim vice-president? ``Throughout my career as a civil servant I was not told even once that there were separate rules for Muslims,’’ he shrugs off the accusation.
He tells me about a letter Jinnah wrote to his father in 1947, when he held India’s top job in the insurance business, ``which he must have written to every Muslim in the senior echelons of government at the time,’’ inviting him to move to Pakistan.
His father’s reply was short : ``At my age, I don’t change my country.’’
The father’s low-key style has clearly been inherited by the son. ``All these decades I have kept myself hidden away…’ his voice trails off. His easy, soft-spoken charm also means he’s easily able to win friends from across the ideological spectrum -- and keep them.
In fact, Ansari’s impeccable career credentials (ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Iran, the UAE, India’s permanent representative at the UN) only match an impeccable lineage. His grand-uncle, Dr Ansari, was the president of the Indian National Congress in 1927, and his father worked very closely with him as his political secretary in the Non-Cooperation movement.
``My father was part of a small group of people remembered only as footnotes to Motilal Nehru,’’ he adds deprecatingly. Dr Ansari formed the Muslim Nationalist Party, perhaps or perhaps not, as a counter to the Muslim League. It never took off. His father moved to the private insurance sector.
Hamid Ansari was born in Calcutta in 1937, and since his father was in the moveable insurance business, did his schooling in Shimla. They lived in a big, Raj bungalow opposite the girls school, Auckland house, and that’s where both freedom and partition came. He remembers the family moving to a hotel for some days to tide things over.
The family stories could make up a novel. Such as elder brother Khalid, who having finished from La Martiniere, Calcutta and St. Stephen’s college in 1953 (Ansari himself schooled in Shimla, then returned to Calcutta to study in St. Xavier’s college), went to a `boxwallah’ company for an interview.
``They told him, We have a job for you. Pause. But in Pakistan. He turned them down, saying, he lived here in India,’’ Ansari said.
Then there are others in the extended family, like Mukhtar Ansari, the famous BSP MLA-gangster of eastern UP, with scores of murders to his name, more in jail than outside.
``Mukhtar is party of the family. I can’t disown him. You don’t disown family,’’ says Ansari.
As for the spirit of Nehru’s India that is gradually fading after 60 years, Ansari points out that it was understandable, after Partition, for Hindus and Muslims to be at each other’s throats. But how did one explain the riots and the pogroms over the years, from Meerut and Hashimpura, to the riots after Mrs Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, and even Gujarat in 2002.
As chairman of the Minorities Commission, he read every government inquiry report on every riot, massacre and pogrom since 1947. Every report said the same thing. ``First, trouble is created deliberately, then the state refuses to act. Everywhere you see the state has absented itself from exercising authority.’’
So what of the public accusation that Hamid Ansari, a non-political person will hardly be able to handle a raucuous Rajya Sabha?
In his defence, Ansari tells another story : After he was shortlisted for the post of vice-chancellor of AMU, then HRD minister Murli Manohar Joshi rejected his candidature, saying he would superannuate before the five-year-tenure ended. But President KR Narayanan was not convinced. He consulted two former chief justices who debunked Joshi’s view and Ansari got the job.
Once in AMU, says Ansari, he realized the students were more sinned against than sinning. They would gherao him for hours on end, but their homegrown `tehzeeb’ never allowed them to assault him.
Once, when a dharna outside the V-C’s house did not end after 48 hours, Ansari says, ``on the third morning, I went out and joined them.’’ The dharna fizzled out pretty quickly.
Moral of the story : The next Rajya Sabha better watch out for Mohammed Hamid Ansari.
ENDS
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