HARTOSH SINGH BAL: Experiments With Truth: MJ Akbar’s inconstant path through journalism and politics
IN DECEMBER 2002, weeks before the announcement
of state election results in Gujarat, MJ Akbar, then the editor-in-chief of the
news daily the Asian Age, published a column. That July, Gujarat’s
legislative assembly had been prematurely dissolved, and its chief minister,
Narendra Modi, had resigned, following criticism of his Bharatiya Janata Party
government for widespread anti-Muslim violence under its watch earlier in the
year.
Akbar’s column, titled ‘Congress is BJP’s B-Team in
Gujarat,’ chided the opposition party for a campaign strategy centred on
“soft-Hindutva,” a watered-down version of the BJP’s Hindu nationalist
ideology. “It is chicanery to claim outside Gujarat that you want to destroy
the evil of communalism by defeating Narendra Modi,” he wrote, “and to indulge
in a variation of his communalism inside Gujarat.” But he had sharp words for
the BJP, too. A major victory for Modi should cause the party to worry, he
said. The chief minister is an ideologue, with a difference. The difference is
hysteria. It is an edgy hysteria, which can mesmerise; and it easily melts into
the kind of megalomania that makes a politician believe that he is serving the
larger good through a destructive frenzy against a perceived enemy. In Hitler’s
case, the enemy was the Jew; in Modi’s case the enemy is the Muslim. Such a
politician is not a fool; in fact, he may have a high degree of intellect. But
it is intellect unleavened by reason, and untempered by humanism.
Akbar continued,
If Modi wins big, he will immediately seek to make the whole
of the BJP a version of his Gujarat experience. He is already visibly
contemptuous of the senior leadership of his own party. … Modi will mount a
challenge within his party, and get some support too; he will dream of becoming
Prime Minister of India after a national victory fashioned through the Gujarat
rhetoric.
With all of this, Akbar warned, “long before Modi gets
anywhere near Delhi, he will have destroyed the BJP.”
The party won 127 of the 182 seats in the Gujarat assembly,
and Modi returned as chief minister. He retained the office until May 2014,
when he stepped down to take up a new post, as the prime minister of India.
In March 2014, during the general election campaign that
delivered Modi and his party to national power, MJ Akbar was inducted into the
BJP. Draped in a scarf in the party’s colours of saffron and green, he appeared
before the media on a Delhi stage to accept a bouquet from the BJP president,
Rajnath Singh. Days later, Akbar wrote an article in the Economic Times justifying
his evident change of heart about the party and its leader. Of the 2002
violence in Gujarat, he wrote that, under the preceding ten years of national
Congress rule, “every relevant instrument of state was assigned the task of
finding something, anything that could trace guilt to Modi. They could not. …
One suspects that only some politicians have a vested interest in the past
during an election when Indians want to vote for their future.” For India, he
continued, “There is only one way forward. … You know his name as well as I
do.”
THIS WAS NOT AKBAR’S FIRST FORAY into politics.
Yet his entry into a Modi-led BJP surprised even those familiar with the many
twists in his career—and not just because he was a Muslim joining a Hindutva
organisation. Rising from a small town in West Bengal, a young Akbar roared
into public consciousness in the latter half of the 1970s as the precociously
talented editor of Sunday, a weekly magazine that broke several
important stories and pioneered a bold, iconoclastic style of journalism.
Through the 1980s, he edited The Telegraph, a landmark newspaper
that did away with the ponderousness that marked other Indian papers of this
period. Akbar’s example transformed Indian journalism, and, when still in his
mid thirties, he was recognised as one of the country’s finest editors.
But, on the eve of the 1989 general election, Akbar quit the
profession to contest a Lok Sabha seat in Bihar for the Congress. Though the
party was ousted from national rule, he won his seat, and became a Congress
spokesperson under Rajiv Gandhi. This proved to be the first of his many
political miscalculations. In 1991, after Rajiv was assassinated, the Congress
surged back, but Akbar failed in his bid for re-election and found himself on
the wrong side of the party’s new leadership. He quit the party at the end of
1992.
Akbar returned to journalism, and founded the Asian
Age. Through the 1990s, as the BJP grew in strength and came to head the
national government, he became close to one of its main leaders, LK
Advani—though his journalism remained critical of the party’s Hindutva politics.
But in the 2004 election, even as the BJP’s hold over the country seemed firm,
the Congress managed a shock victory. Once again, Akbar was shunted out of the
circles of power.
Over the next decade, Akbar was removed from his position at
the Asian Age, served a brief tenure with India Today magazine,
and launched another newspaper, the Sunday Guardian. In all of
this, he never reattained the journalistic stature he earlier enjoyed.
Meanwhile, he continued to exert himself politically. By 2014, this brought him
close to Modi, and he quit journalism once again for formal politics.
Upon joining the BJP, Akbar was appointed a party
spokesperson. This gave him the questionable distinction of having served in
that office for both of India’s oppositional national parties—that is, of
having defended, across his political career, actions and ideologies that have
often been diametrically opposed. Yet despite his many compromises—and, perhaps, because of
them—Akbar is distrusted by the bulk of the BJP and its affiliates. For now, he
is, in effect, on probation. This July, the party installed him in the Rajya
Sabha. It could have put him in any of a number of seats that opened up since
he joined that offered him a full six-year tenure. But it chose to give him one
vacated in mid term, five years in. Akbar will have to rely on the BJP for
re-nomination next year. While he waits, he has the unenviable task of
representing the party line at a time when the government faces a spate of
criticism over incidents of communalism and intolerance.
More than ever before, Akbar can least afford for his latest
political manoeuvre to backfire. He has, over the years, had and lost ties with
almost every major party. If Akbar and the BJP part ways, he will have few
political allies left. Journalistically, too, his ideological wanderings have
tainted his reputation. Among the many journalists I spoke to for this story, a
good number of whom owe Akbar a great deal, few cared to defend what they see
as the concessions he has made out of a compulsive thirst for power.
Akbar’s is a dispiriting tale, of a brilliant professional
scuttling the heady respect he once commanded. Though he is not the only
prominent editor of his generation to have been intimate with those in
power—take Shekhar Gupta, Prabhu Chawla or Vir Sanghvi—he is the only one to
have made an overt commitment to a political party, and that too, twice. Though
none of his editorial peers have come close to matching his intellectual
stature at its height, all of them have had more successful journalistic runs
over the last two decades. Somewhere along the way, Akbar the iconic journalist
was overtaken by Akbar the politician of easy virtue.
AKBAR’S 2006 NOVEL, Blood Brothers, which
he claims is largely autobiographical, describes three generations of a Muslim
family. The story goes back to how a Bihari Hindu—presumably Akbar’s grandfather—first
arrived in Telinipara, a riverside town north of Calcutta famous for its jute
mills, after losing his entire family to a famine. He was taken in by the
Muslim owner of a tea stall, and later converted to Islam and took the name
Rahmat. He made enough of a success of his adopted family’s business to
eventually build the town’s first two-storeyed house.
Like thousands of Muslim families, Rahmat’s was uprooted by
Partition in 1947. According to the book, Rahmat’s son—Akbar’s father—initially
opted to go to East Pakistan, but decided to return to Telinipara just months
later. Mobashar Jawed Akbar was born there a few years later, in 1951..
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