'Truth, Love and a Little Malice'
Khushwant Singh's autobiography

At long last, the much awaited and anticipated autobiography of Khushwant Singh, journalist and author, par excellence, is on the stands, after being embroiled in legal wrangles for six years.

The book was ready for publication in 1996, but ran into trouble with Maneka Gandhi over infringement rights. It was finally released in New Delhi on Feb 04, 2002, although the case has now gone to the Supreme Court.

His autobiography that bares it all and beats all others hollow for its compelling candour, bawdy innocence, rib-tickling mischief and piercing detail, is also unlike others in the sense that it does not seek to glorify the author, but rather relates the truth as the author witnessed it. As Outlook has reported, 'Singh spares no one, neither his friends nor himself nor the many icons he came across in the course of his long career in law, diplomacy, in the UNESCO, as a journalist and writer, during his 5-year stint in Parliament and after.'

In this 423-page memoir, the bearded, bespectacled and slightly tottering Sikh has portrayed a whole lot of Indian public figures with feet of clay. He exposes their follies and foibles to bring out their human side. The only person, he cannot bear to tear apart, although aware of his frailties, is Mahatma Gandhi.

In his inimitable style laced with humour and a tinge of sarcasm, Singh writes in his prologue, 'This autobiography is the child of tired, ageing loins ....' and then goes on 'so I reveal myself without shame and remorse'.

He begins at the beginning: Since his parents weren't exactly sure of his birthday, Singh decided 'to fix it to 15 August, 1915, and made myself a Leo'. From childhood phobias to his first taste of sex, to his hopes and aspirations of conquering everest, swimming across the English Channel and captaining the Indian tennis team, all of which came to nought,. he goes on to unravel tale after tale with taste, triumph and a strong dash of titillation. Writing as a career never occured to him, but a writer he ended up by some quirk of fate. And what a writer he is.

Editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India, the National Herald and The Hindustan Times, Singh rapidly grew to be India's best-known columnist and journalist. He believed that in the highly competitive world of creative writing, his only chance of getting noticed was to specialize in one subject and convey the impression that he knew it better than anyone else. So through trial and tribulation, and pen, paper, paranoia and pride, Singh has grown to become one of India's foremost scholars, with a special journalistic forte. He is a man people love to hate and agree that he is 'not a nice man to know', yet they love to read him day after day. When asked whether it wasn't difficult to be candid when writing about public figures, he quipped: 'I like to take up cudgels against people in power who misuse power. It's not much fun writing against people who can't hit back'.

Author of several acclaimed books including the best-known, Train to Pakistan, which won the Grove Press Award for the best fiction in 1954 and a classic two-volume History of the Sikhs, Singh believes that Truth, Love & A Little Malice is the last product of his muse. "Some gossip, some titillation, some tearing of reputations, some amusement -- that is the best I can offer."

Exclusive excerpts from 'Truth, Love & A Little Malice'

JAWAHARLAL NEHRU
'Lady Mountbatten was his favourite hobby'.

On Pandit Nehru's first visit to England as PM, we had decided to bring out a weekly tabloid, India News, to mark the occasion. The banner headline was to read 'Pandit Nehru in London'. When the proofs came for corection, the letter 'P' had been substituted by 'B' - 'Bandit Nehru in London'. The typesetter had never heard of the word Pandit and thought we meant Bandit.

The next morning: The Daily Herald carried a large photograph of Nehru with Lady Mountbatten in her negligee opening the door for him. The caption read 'Lady Mountbatten's Midnight Visitor'. It also informed its readers that Lord Mountbatten was not in London. Our PM's liaison with Lady Edwina had assumed scandalous proportions. When I went up to see Menon he barked at me, 'Have you seen The Herald? The PM is furious with you'.
'I had nothing to do with it', I pleaded. 'How was I to know that instead of going to his hotel, Panditji would go to the Mountbattens' home?'

Panditji had a couple of days free to indulge in his favourite hobbies, buying books and seeing Lady Mountbatten.

MAULANA AZAD
'He enjoyed his Scotch by himself'

Everytime I asked him if there was anything I could do, he would answer 'Sardar Sahib, maza kariya' - enjoy yourself. The one time I was asked by a senior delegate to get his approval of a particular proposal, I had to disturb him at his hotel in the evening. He was very curt. His evenings were sacred as he enjoyed his Scotch by himself. He wanted his drinking habits to remain unknown in order to preserve his image of the Imam-ul-Hind - the think-tank of Muslim India.

KRISHNA MENON
'Menon was a bachelor, the same as his father'

Why Menon got where he did under the patronage of Pandit Nehru remains, and probably will remain, unexplained. Panditji had him elected to Parliament and sent to the United Nations to lead the Indian delegation. He was then made Defence Minister against the wishes of almost all the members of the Cabinet. He wrecked army discipline by promoting favourites over the heads of senior officers. He was vindictive against those who stood up to him. More than anyone else he was responsible for the humiliating defeat of our army at the hands of the Chinese in 1962. Pandit Nehru stuck by him to the last ... General Shiv Varma summed him up aptly when he said, 'Menon was a bachelor, the same as his father'.

MORARJI DESAI
'The man, despite his fads, was honest'

When I had run out of my questions he asked me to switch off the tape recorder: he wanted to talk to me man to man, or as friends. 'You make fun of my insistence on prohibition and advocating urine therapy. If I persuade you that drinking is bad for you, will you give it up?'
'Morarjibhai, I have been drinking for 50 years and have never been drunk even once in my life. If I persuade you that drinking is not bad for you, will you have a drink?' I asked in reply.

He went on to extol the benefits of urine therapy. He told me innumerable cases of sickness, which had been declared incurable by doctors, responding to fresh urine.

He was friendly enough for me to question him on another of his fads. 'Morarjibhai, I have also written about your view of abstinence from sex'. Before I could proceed, he cut me short, 'I do not wish to discuss the subject with you'.

INDIRA GANDHI
'She was petty and vindictive'

Long years at the helm of affairs of the nation had lent her a certain imperious arrogance and intolerance of criticism. It should be borne in mind that Indira Gandhi had made no great success of her own marriage. Her husband, Feroze Gandhi, was the son of a Parsi liquor vendor of Allahabad. After bearing him two sons. Rajiv and Sanjay, she deserted him to live with her father to act as his housekeeper and hostess. According to M O Matthai, Pandit Nehru's personal secretary for many years, neither father nor daughter was sexually inhibited ...

She could be petty and vindictive, as she showed herself to be in her dealings with her widowed daughter-in-law, Maneka. She could be very discourteous to senior officials... She particularly enjoyed snubbing people who assumed she was their friend.

RAJIV GANDHI
'Mrs Gandhi had a poor opinion of Rajiv's intellect'

Rajiv and Sanjay never got on. When Sanjay made a mess of his Maruti car project and exposed his mother to charges of manoeuvring to get money for him, Rajiv held him responsible for giving the family a bad name.When Sanjay rose to power, Rajiv retired into a sulk and had as little to do with him as he could.
Rajiv's envy for the sudden eruption of his ne'er-do-well brother now turned into hate. He held Sanjay responsible, perhaps rightly, for the catastrophic fall in the status of the family, from being the most respected to social and political outcasts.

Mrs Gandhi had a poor opinion of Rajiv's intellect. However, after Sanjay's death she successfully built him up as her successor. Rajiv proceeded to get rid of Sanjay's men and replaced them with his own. His choice of many advisors included men who had been in the restricted atmosphere of an expensive school with him.

SANJAY GANDHI
'He is innocent'

What Sanjay did during the Emergency gave him the image of a monster... When he launched on the family planning programme, wild stories were circulated of people being pulled out of cinema houses and bus queues and being forcibly sterilized. The Emergency was soon broadcast as being a dark period in Indian history. It cannot be denied that thousands of innocent people suffered arbitrary arrest and imprisonment on orders issued by people who had been put in key positions. In many instances they acted on their own, without the knowledge of Mrs Gandhi or her son ...

MANEKA GANDHI
'She won the first round with Mrs G with a knockout'

In the two-and-a-half years of the Janata regime, during which Mrs Gandhi was imprisoned twice (once for a night, another time for six days), her chief morale-boosters were Sanjay and Maneka (with Amteshwar close behind her)....If Mrs Gandhi had harboured any resentment against Maneka, she had not said or done anything about it as long as Sanjay was alive. There may be some truth in the belief that she both loved and feared her second son. Sanjay was more relaxed in the Anands' home than his mother's... Mrs Gandhi disliked Sanjay's preference for the Anand home to hers. It did not take long after Sanjay's tragic death for the Gandhis to make it known to Maneka that she was a misfit in the Prime Minister's residence.

I have little doubt that Sonia was the more favoured daughter-in-law, just as Sanjay was the more favoured son.

Source: Outlook

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