Amarjit Singh Dulat, a lifelong espiocrat who finished his career as the chief of India’s premier external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) and then spent two-and-a-half-years as an advisor in former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s PMO, has written his memoir Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years.
It is unlike the usual memoirs by persons formerly in government; this I know because I wrote (or co-wrote) his book based on an endless series of discussions and dictations spanning much of 2014.
So you, dear reader, need not fear: it is not a mind-numbingly “dry” and “safe” memoir. I was determined, and I told Dulat as much, that under no circumstance would I be party to a memoir like President R Venkataraman’s 1995 book, My Presidential Years, which reads like a nerd’s diary (“I went to room A. Then I went to room B. Then I visited room C”, and so on.).
Reading such a memoir is like watching paint dry during monsoon.
It makes you wonder, though, why the high-and-mighty insist on writing a book, if they’re reluctant to tell the truth for fear that they may be stepping on someone’s toes, or worse, because that someone might stop greeting them during an evening sip at the Gymkhana Club.
It isn’t for posterity, because future historians will no doubt refer to memoirs and other hagiographical material, but in the end will base their study on government files and decisions – which is how it should be, so far as political history or government policy is concerned.
And if it isn’t for posterity then it must be a vanity project.
All these retired chaps are basically killing forests just so that their similarly retired chums can slap them on the back and say “Well done old boy!”
I avoided Dulat for two years simply because I did not want to get involved in a memoir where I knew information would be limited, given the high secrecy in which RAW operates.
Fortunately, I was based in Mumbai for most of those two years. The former RAW chief tracked me down, however, when he came to Mumbai and summoned me to the Taj Hotel and told me he wanted to write a book on Kashmir.
He had apparently been provoked into this by the former CBI chief Raja Vijay Karan, and that too at a party in early 2012. Wig-wearing social chameleon Suhel Seth was lingering near the bar at the same party, and he promised to provide Dulat an introduction to Chiki Sarkar, the editor-in-chief of Penguin Books. (A good example of how Lutyens’ Delhi works.)
That hadn’t worked out because Chiki demanded a synopsis, and you can imagine what kind of synopsis the ex-chief of RAW would have written on his own: something akin to a gazette notification. Chiki was unimpressed.
I tried to stay under the radar even after I moved to Delhi in May 2013. My logic — no spy chief is going to reveal anything, so what would be the point of a book.
However, a crisis in Dulat’s family in December 2013 forced me out of the shadows. Help me write the book, he said. So in February 2014 I started visiting his home and used my smartphone’s recorder app to record our conversations.
It started with a lot of frustration. Dulat would not open up.
Take the hijacking of IC 814, now in the news — he was the RAW chief and therefore a key member of the Crisis Management Group (CMG) set up to deal with the hijacking.
It was in one of our early meetings that I tried to get him to talk about it — and about whose fault it was that the aircraft was allowed to fly off from Amritsar, thereby ruining any chance India had of overpowering the hijackers.
(KPS Gill as Punjab Police chief had, in 1993, stormed a hijacked plane at Amritsar airport and killed the main hijacker. Furthermore, Dulat says that India asked Dubai to allow an anti-hijacking operation, but Dubai refused.)
If you see my transcript, it is filled with “Why do you want to know about that?” and “Why do you get a kick out of that?” and “This is not to go in the book” and other such stone-walling.
Dulat just did not want to say that the man heading the CMG, Cabinet Secretary Prabhat Kumar, did not show leadership — “He’s a sweet guy,” Dulat kept telling me; or that Sarabjit Singh, Punjab Police chief in 1999, was simply no KPS Gill.
It got to a point where I just gave up and told Dulat to find some retired Intelligence Bureau stenographer to help him with his memoir.
I quit. He finally relented and you will notice that some of these observations have ended up – albeit in milder form – in the book.
(What has not appeared is Dulat laughing at then Home Minister LK Advani for arriving at the CMG only after the horse bolted the stable.)
Along with laying down the rules that he had to submit unquestioningly to my leadership in this project, what actually happened is that in two months Dulat began to open up.
It may have helped that we had known each other since the early 1990s but babus have an innate distrust of journalists, and it took a great heart to overcome that.
I reciprocated by keeping Dulat’s confidence about several stories which I will never reveal for a variety of reasons, including the cliched “national interest”.
For instance, you will never hear from me about Dulat’s discussions with his junior colleague Ajit Doval, the current National Security Advisor, about a risky policy.
In the end, once I had submitted the manuscript, Dulat and the publishers sat together and scrubbed clean many parts of it.
That is distressing for me because of the work I put in — taking a 74-year-old’s scattered reminiscences and putting them in order, and shaping them into a gripping narrative.
I am particularly proud of chapter three, titled Two Hostage Crises, which uses the story-within-a-story-within-a-story structure in order to relate the narratives of IC 814 incident, the Rubaiya kidnapping and the al-Faran (a Kashmiri Islamist militant organisation) chase (where five foreigners were held hostage in south Kashmir’s mountains in 1995 before being killed, one of them in a beheading).
Such artistry, however, is lost on bureaucrats and politicians, for whom a book is perhaps yet another deliberately drab government file.
Hopefully, the artistry isn’t lost on you, precious readers.