Curfewed Night: By Basharat Peer – Book Review

I had read this book immediately after it appeared it print in 2008. Recently I happened to re-read it and found that it has lost none of its authenticity or relevance. A work of non-fiction by Basharat Peer, a journalist who now lives in the US, Curfewed Night is the story of Kashmir, Peer’s Kashmir and, my, my, what a tale it is!

The first dozen odd pages tell us the story of Kashmir prior to commencement of the insurgency in January 1990. Peer’s prose is excellent and his description of life in Kashmir reminded me of a collection of Armenian short stories (“We Of The Mountains”) I had read many, many years ago. Life in the valley was simple, sweet and straight forward. It also reminded me of Kerala a little bit, what with farmers holding government jobs – Peer’s father is the headmaster of a government school and his father a civil servant – working nine to five and taking care of their fields and crops after office hours.

Until the troubles erupted in 1990, Peer tells us that Kashmiris weren’t not too political. They supported the Pakistani cricket team when it played India but otherwise, their political affiliation with either side was lukewarm. Even Peer, the son of a Kashmiri civil servant, cheered for Pakistan. Peer doesn’t explain why this should be so. No, Peer doesn’t question Kashmir’s accession to India – he merely tells us that when Pakistani tribesmen supported by the Pakistani army invaded Kashmir, Maharaja Hari Singh decided to join India and that Sheikh Abdullah, who was a friend of Nehru, supported the Maharaja.

In the beginning, Peer’s narrative is essentially what he himself saw in those turbulent days rather than a holistic one. Peer is very sympathetic to the Kashmiri freedom movement and dreams of joining the militants. Once again, there are no long drawn (ideological) explanations as to why Peer wants Kashmir to be independent rather than be a part of India. Peer tells us that the militants killed many Pandits and those who survived left the Valley. Many classrooms became half empty. Some of Peer’s friends went off to join the militants and never returned. Peer makes it clear that the Pandits’ departure made him sad, but his support for the militants doesn’t abate as a result.

The average Kashmiri’s support for the insurgency is shown to be tempered with pragmatism. Ordinary people do their best to dissuade militants from attacking convoys near their houses out of fear of having to bear the brunt of the army’s retaliation. Just as in Mirza Waheed’s “The Collaborator”, Peer too shows the Indian army and paramilitary forces as overwhelmingly strong and powerful. Peer doesn’t hesitate to tell us of casualties suffered by the militants, but is silent on the number of soldiers or paramilitary men killed. For example, Peer tells us how once JKLF militants attacked an Indian army convoy that passed by their village. All villagers fled to the neighbouring village before the attack began. No, no one even thought of warning the army, though, before fleeing, they did (unsuccessfully) plead with the militants to attack the convoy elsewhere. Peer and his family returned the next day and they found bullets inside their house. We are not told of the outcome of the attack on the convoy – most probably Peer thought it irrelevant to his story.

One of the best things about Peer’s tale is that he manages to bring out the human side of the militants’. Peer tells us how Asif, a militant, gave up fighting.

'One day our commander told us that we had to attack an army convoy. I picked up my Kalashnikov. We were about to leave and I began shivering. I was too scared and death seemed so real. I left soon after that. My commanders were kind enough to let me go.’

If you thought that Curfewed Night is all about violence and anger and hatred, you couldn’t be more wrong. Peer does not fail to see humour even when the talk is of fighting and death.

'One morning a young man from our village who worked in Srinagar gave a speech at the mosque. He grabbed the microphone and shouted, ‘Kabiran kabira!’ The slogan meant, ‘Who is the greatest?’ But no one understood. None of us spoke Arabic. He shouted again and there was silence – then the adolescents in the last row, the backbenchers of faith, began to laugh. Embarrassed, the young man explained that in reply to the slogan, we were supposed to shout ‘Allah o Akbar!’ (God is great.) He shouted again, ‘Kabiran kabira!’ He was answered with a hesitant, awkward ‘Allah o Akbar’. For about a year after, we teased him.'

I don’t mind repeating yet again that Peer writes very well. When Peer wants to elaborate how school students and teenagers idolised militants, he says:

‘Militants wore Kamachi shoes and boys wanted Kamachi shoes. Militants replaced the stones in their rings with pistol bullets and boys replaced the stones in their rings with pistol bullets.'

After about sixty pages on militancy in Kashmir, Peer starts telling us of how he moved to Delhi, studied at the Aligarh Muslim University and later Delhi University and then found employment as a journalist. After the shift to Delhi, I started to understand Peer a lot better. Suddenly, he became someone like me, someone I could understand, even relate to, in certain respects.

The attack on the Indian Parliament made life difficult for Peer on account of his Kashmiri origin. Unable to find a Landlord who would agree to have a Kashmiri Muslim tenant, Peer considered leaving Delhi, until a kindly Kashmiri Pandit landlady gave him a roof over his head. Peer devotes a number of pages to the Syed Geelani story pursuant to the attack on the Indian parliament. Geelani was convicted by the trial court under POTA solely on the basis of a semi-coherent two and a half minute phone call made on the day after the attack. Later the Delhi High Court acquitted Geelani, quite rightly in my opinion.

Once Peer decided to tell Kashmir’s story, he went out of his way to meet victims of torture by Indian security forces, displaced Pandits and even Indian soldiers - to find out their point of view. He succeeds admirably with regard to torture victims and Pandits, but I thought his effort with Indian army men was not very impressive.

Curfewed Night is a slim volume, it does not exceed 250 pages, but is crammed with information about Kashmir. There are stories of funerals of militants, of militants switching sides and joining the Kukka Parray, of (failed) attempts by fundamentalists like Asiya Andrabi to impose a Saudi style of Islam in Kashmir and how much it takes to bribe minor bureaucrats and policemen so that relatives of innocent people killed in the violence can get some compensation. Peer also throws in bits of Kashmir’s history here and there and one gets to know of its Buddhist heritage and how it became a part of the Mughal Empire.

The only factual error I could find was when Peer tells his readers that ‘Kashmir was the largest of the approximately five hundred princely states under British sovereignty as of 1947’ Wiki tells me that it was Hyderabad. Kashmir came in at number two. In these matters, I trust Wiki more than Peer.

“The Most Dangerous Place”, by Imtiaz Gul – Book Review

Veteran Pakistani reporter Imtiaz Gul is also an executive director at the Centre for Research and Security Studies in Islamabad. Gul’s book The Most Dangerous Place was first published by Penguin in early 2010 and as a paperback in 2011. Pakistan and Afghanistan have been in the global limelight for many years, for all the wrong reasons, and any book which focuses on the badlands of Pakistan is likely to become outdated very quickly, since there is so much happening every day in that part of the world. Maybe it is for this reason that The Most Dangerous Place comes with a preface, a preface to the paperback edition and an epilogue, each of which seeks to catch up with new developments and place the book in context.

Gul is a reporter and one of the first things that hits you even before you cross page 30 is that The Most Dangerous Place is almost entirely a compilation of past reports and quotations from various players with Gul almost never taking a stand or expressing an opinion of his own – until he gets to the last chapter, “Who Funds the Militants”. If one ignores the near total absence of the author’s opinions and views, one can get a blow by blow account of how, starting from the period just before the Soviet’s invaded Afghanistan, Pakistan got enmeshed in Jihadi politics, and fighting, which was at times between various Mujahidin factions, and ended up as the most dangerous place on earth.

As if to compensate for the absence of any analyses till then, the last chapter is packed with theories (most of them quotes given by others) and Gul finally expresses an opinion or two. Who funds the militants? Gul examines various possibilities. Are militants funded by the proceeds of cultivating poppy? Is the Frontier Corps also a culprit? Does the timber mafia have a hand in funding the Pakistani Taliban? What role do Islamic charities and the Hawala system play in funding insurgents? Do the Americans fund the Taliban? Gul does not rule out this possibility. Gul quotes Brigadier Mehmood Shah, a former security secretary for FATA who suggests that the Americans might be trying to co-opt some of the militants into their operational strategy and fix Al Qaeda from within. Is it Saudi Arabia? Not the Government of Saudi Arabia, Gul seems to say, though private individuals and parties based in Saudi Arabia could be funding the Pakistani Taliban.

Is there an Indian hand behind the Pakistani Taliban? No, Gul doesn’t rubbish this possibility, though it sounded ridiculous to my ears. Rather, he puts forth a lot of circumstantial evidence to suggest that there could be some truth behind this allegation. For example, after the Kandahar hijacking, an Indian security official is reported to have told Gul – “we will absorb what you have done to us, but can you absorb what we might do to you?” Gul quotes from Baitullah Mehsud’s aides who mention offers of alleged assistance from India. Gul doesn’t straight out say that he believes India is funding the Taliban in Pakistan – that would be too ludicrous. He does however try to build a case for this theory.

Is the ISI in cahoots with the militants in Pakistan? This is one theory which Gul categorically dismisses as silly – even this dismissal is done in a roundabout manner. Do please read this interesting book to know more about these theories and Gul’s views on them.

One of the good things about The Most Dangerous Place is that is has a number of trivia on the Taliban. We hear an explanation given by the Taliban to a potential suicide bomber who wanted to know why the Taliban never attacked Saudi Arabia or other Arab countries which shelter American troops. The answer is that “We receive funds from Arab countries, therefore we cannot carry out any attack there, and if we commit any wrong there, they will stop supply of funds to us. But Jihad in Pakistan and Afghanistan is lawful, even the Saudis believe so.”

There is a description of how the University of Nebraska, which had an association with Afghanistan ever since 1975, when its Afghan Centre linked up with Kabul University was tasked by the CIA in the early 1980s with producing new textbooks that would help inspire the Afghans to “jihad” against “infidel Soviets.” This message made its way into the pages of primary school textbooks in forms like this alphabet song:

A [is for] Allah. Allah is one
B [is for] Father (baba). Father goes to the mosque
D [is for] Religion (din). Our religion is Islam. The Russians are the enemies of the religion of Islam.
J [is for] Jihad. Jihad is an obligation. My mom went on jihad. My brother gave water to the Mujahidin.
P [is for] Five (panj). Islam has five pillars
V [is for] Nation (vatn). Our nation is Afghanistan. The Mujahidin made our nation famous. Our Muslim people are defeating the communists. The Mujahidin are making the dear country free.
Z [is for] Good news (muzhdih). The Mujahidin missiles rain down like dew on the Russians. My brother gave me the good news that the Russians in our country will taste defeat.

The lessons for older students were more explicit: one fourth-grade mathematics question asks students to use a bullet’s speed and its total distance travelled to calculate the elapsed time before its strikes its Russian target in the forehead.

In 2002, the Afghan Center at the University of Nebraska was approved to begin a fourteen-month, $6.4 million co-operative agreement with USAID, designed to assist in the opening of primary and secondary schools in Afghanistan by printing and distributing textbooks in Dari and Pashtu. An elederly Afghan teacher scribbles in a register, “we are now removing what we inserted into these books twenty years ago.”

Some of the best things about this book are its two appendices which has profiles of a number of Pakistani militants and militant organisations. For someone like me who is very much interested in knowing more about Pakistani militants and their groupings, this book serves as a treasure trove of information. A veritable encyclopaedia it is! Also, Gul’s descriptions of events such as the Kaloosha incident where scores of South Waziristan Scouts were killed and details of the fighting that took place in Swat, especially the tactics used by the Pakistani army in recapturing lost terrain and driving out the Taliban, are excellent.

Now that Osama bin Laden has been located and killed, every time I read a book on the Pakistani Taliban that was published prior to his killing, I look for theories on bin Laden’s location or predictions for his capture. Gul tells us that “Bajaur’s proximity to Kunar fuels suspicions that Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri may be hiding in the area.” A few pages later, this theory is mentioned again. In the first paragraph of the original preface, Gul quotes Barack Obama who mentions bin Laden’s name as he elaborated how the Af-Pak border is the most dangerous place on earth. Towards the end of the first chapter, Gul tells us that “back in the 1980s, Osama bin Laden had also found sanctuary on the fringes of Miranshah in North Waziristan, the tribal agency that borders the eastern Afghan province of Khost.’ There are a few references to Ayman al-Zawahiri and Mullah Omar as well. In his epilogue, Gul says that “it is unlikely that Pakistan will go after the most wanted leaders of Al Qaeda or the Afghan Taliban, such as Mullah Omar or Gulbuddin Hekmetyar.” Right! Pakistan didn’t, but the United States did. In all probability Gul was as surprised as anyone else when bin Laden was located and killed in Abbottabad, not far from the Centre for Research and Security Studies in Islamabad where Gul works.

“Descent into Chaos: Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Threat to Global Security”, by Ahmed Rashid – A Few Observations

I recently re-read Ahmed Rashid’s “Descent into Chaos” which was released sometime in the middle of 2008. A masterpiece by an expert who has very peers in his field, Descent into Chaos is relevant and useful for someone who wants to understand the Af-Pak conundrum, even three years after its publication. Rather that write a detailed review of this excellent book which has been reviewed so many times by so many clever writers, I propose to make a few observations:

1. After the caveat that Hamid Karzai is a good friend, Rashid has nothing but praise for Karzai who hasn’t exactly lived up to the expectations created when he took over power. The number of times Rashid criticizes Karzai can be counted on the fingers of one hand. I found the near total absence of criticism of Karzai to be the biggest drawback in this book.

2. Rashid devotes extensive space to explain how the US administration under George Bush flagrantly breached the Geneva Convention as it set up detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay and other places and carried out renditions of suspected Islamic fundamentalists. I wonder if Rashid would continue to feel so strongly about the use of torture in light of the fact that information gleaned from suspects through the use of intensive interrogation techniques helped locate Bin Laden. The fact of the matter is that torture does work at times and those who are against the use of torture should be willing to say that States should not resort to torture even if it may work.

3. Rashid describes Nawaz Sharif thus: ‘A businessman from Lahore whose family had prospered enormously under the Zia regime was a dour, unintelligent politician who had been promoted and patronized by the military.’ I find this description very interesting. I’ve never heard anyone else call Sharif unintelligent. Mind you, I have no reason to think Rashid has got it wrong.

4. Rashid has only praise for Benazir Bhutto, even more than he has for Karzai. There is a vague mention of the corruption charges against Bhutto, but Rashid tells us that ‘There is little doubt that Bhutto and Karzai working together would have formed a team committed to combat extremism.’

5. Asif Zardari is depicted as a wise man who, unfortunately and for no fault of his own, happens to be corrupt.

I guess when one is Pakistani and is close to most of the big players in that region, one is bound to have a few sacred cows in one’s backpack. I realise that my observations above may give the impression that I did not like ‘Descent into Chaos’. Far from it, I really liked the book and Rashid’s pithy style of writing.

Rashid concludes by saying that (remember this is mid-2008): ‘The American people have elected a new President who is largely committed to change and improving the world we live in. Obama has generated enormous expectations in the Muslim world, especially in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In order to live upto those expectations, he has to help deliver a long-lasting peace and stabilization program in the region.’

The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed – A Book Review

'Captain Kadian takes a large swig from his glass tumbler, closes his eyes for a moment, smacks his lips and says, "the job is not that hard you see, you just .....................'

The opening sentence of Mirza Waheed’s novel gave me the feeling that I was reading one of those Soviet era books set in the years following the October revolution and that ‘Kadian’ was possibly the abbreviation of an Armenian name. But no, Captain Kadian is employed by the Indian army, has been deployed in Kashmir for a three-year tour of duty and is responsible for most of the unnamed Protagonist’s nightmares. Though ‘Kadian’ is not a common Indian name, Wikipedia informs me that there exists a Jat clan called Kadian and we are told by the author that Captain Kadian is ‘young, handsome, north Indian. A Punjabi perhaps, a Jat probably.’ A humble Gujjar lad, the Protagonist is a collaborator who runs dirty errands for the cruel Captain Kadian, who the Protagonist hates and fears in equal measure.

I began to hate The Collaborator even before I crossed the first twenty pages. Set against the backdrop of the insurgency in Kashmir in the early 1990s, The Collaborator depicts the Indian army as extremely ruthless and cruel. There are mentions of large scale massacres and mass-rapes where all women in a village are raped. I do know that truth is the first casualty in any war and that there have been human rights abuses by Indian security forces, but I felt that the ‘allegations’ in The Collaborator are over the top. More importantly, it shows the Indian army as overwhelmingly strong, powerful and successful in fighting the insurgency, practically killing insurgents at will. No sooner do a number of Kashmiri boys trained in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir cross over into India than the Indian army crunches into action and kills off most of those crossing over at a time of the army’s choosing. In fact the author goes to the extent of telling us, through Captain Kadian, that the Border Security force (BSF) is even tougher and nastier than the Indian army. There is one instance where the BSF’s intelligence unit, the G-Branch, is shown as giving the army a lesson in mountain warfare when some militants were holed out in a few caves and the army didn’t know how to clear them out!

However, as I progressed, I got to know the Protagonist better, and even his fears and dreams, I started appreciating The Collaborator better. The Protagonist, who remains unnamed till the end, does not appear to support Azadi in any serious manner. True, he is petrified of the Indian army and the black cat commandoes who carry out the occasional cordon and search operation and dawn raids. He admires the Kashmiri insurgents who are always shown as inferior in strength to the Indian army, whose soldiers are very shown to be very fit and strong. He is fearful of the ruthless and cruel Pathans, Afghans, Arabs and Chechens who have contempt for Kashmiris’ fighting abilities. He gets bugged when a militant group broke up video rental shops, torched cinemas, dragged frightened little girls out of school, checked their hands for nail polish and sent them home in knee-length burqas. We hear that Gujjars are not trusted by other Kashmiris, though some of them do become insurgents. Slowly we get to know that the Protagonist’s father, the village sarpanch, had fought the tribal raiders from Pakistan just after independence. The sarpanch is liked by the villagers who saved him from the insurgents’ wrath.

After all his friends cross the Loc and go to Pakistan and he is the only teenager left behind in the village, the Protagonist too tries to follow then over the LoC. As he proceeds towards his rendezvous with the guide who is to take him across, he thinks thus of Pakistan: ‘A place of which I had an obscure vision, an image, as being the country where we boys went to become militants and which supported us and welcomed us with open arms, and where they were all Muslims and were in fact sending their own sons to fight alongside us, but a place I did not really know. It was, now I understand, and still is, a khayal, just an idea.’ The Protagonist does not make it across since he is turned away by the guide, with a gentle reminder of his father’s past fighting tribal raiders and accepting government grants.

Captain Kadian uses the Protagonist for a dirty chore. The chore itself is unrealistic (I would rather not reveal what it is and play spoil sport) and descriptions of Captain Kadian’s operations are equally unrealistic, as explained earlier. The soldiers are there in strength in the Protagonist’s village since it is very close to the LoC. Around there, ‘the Indians kill just about everyone. Who will know and object, leave along protest, in this remote, cut-off wilderness? You know, sometimes I wonder – because for Kashmir, there is always an Indian and a Pakistani version of everything – what if they have their own pasture of dead boys on the other side of the border? Their own stash of the infiltration residue? Young men who lost their lives while learning to walk the perilous path to freedom. Treachery is a word everyone should learn.’ One hears an old man tell the Protagonist of elite Makara soldiers who even eat people, old people mostly. The Protagonist seems to believe every word he hears. Later when the Protagonist’s friends leave him behind and cross the LoC, the village is at the receiving end of the army’s raids. Curfew is imposed for days at a stretch.

Kashmir has a new governor, a man very stern and ruthless, who is described as ‘the former leader of the demolition gangs and their bulldozers (who ran over the one-room tenements and lavatories of the poorest of poor squatters in India’s capital because their haphazard slum-clusters had no storm-water drains), the clinical undertaker of forced, compulsory vasectomies.....’ Though not mentioned by name, it is very obvious that the reference is to Jagmohan Malhotra who was the governor of Jammu & Kashmir from 1984 to 1989 and then for a few months in 1990. I found this implicit reference to Jagmohan a bit confusing since in the beginning of the novel, there is a reference to a dead militant’s watch which keeps ticking and shows the date as ‘16 April 1993’. The blurb on one of the side flaps of this book says ‘It is Kashmir in the early 1990s......’ From May 1990 to March 1993, Girish Chandra Saxena was the Governor of Jammu & Kashmir and not Jagmohan, but hey, this is fiction and one shouldn’t nitpick, right?

Towards the end of the novel, one hears of the insurgents torturing the guide and his family who they (wrongly) suspect of having helped the Indian army. By that time, the villagers have had enough of searches and curfews. They all pack up and leave, all except the Protagonist and his parents. Where do the villagers escape to, with all their cattle and other belongings? Do they cross the LoC in the middle of the winter? I was half-expecting them to, since they had nowhere else to go. But no, to escape from the Indian army, they flee to ‘India’! By this stage, I had started liking the Collaborator.

A lot of the information that is conveyed to the reader by the Protagonist is hearsay. A man is snatched from the Protagonist’s village by black-cat commandoes who turn up in LMG-mounted gypsies. The Protagonist tells us that from a distance, the commandoes looked like a ‘pack of animals’. After the snatched man is returned to the village, theories abound. One theory is that he was not harmed at all since he readily divulged all that he knew. Another theory is that ‘he was tortured day and night by Kashmiri Pandit police officers, bent on revenge after their tragic exodus from the valley...... Another theory was that ‘he was made to pee on an electric heater while they threw ice-cold water over him; they pierced a red-hot knitting needle through his...... Finally the Protagonist goes to visit the victim one afternoon and without being asked, the victim lifts up his kurta and shows the area above his groin which has small, etched black pits all over the pubic area.

Captain Kadian trusts the Protagonist sufficiently enough to give him a pistol. The Protagonist hates Captain Kadian enough to want to use it on Captain Kadian. Does the Protagonist summon enough courage to do so? Do please read this extremely interesting book, written in exquisite prose, to find out. Exaggerations notwithstanding, it is a very good read.

The Author of The Collaborator Mirza Waheed spent his childhood in Srinagar, read English Literature at the University of Delhi and later worked as a journalist in Delhi for four years. Since 2001, he has been living in London where he works for the BBC's Urdu Service as an editor.

Book Review: “Absolute Khushwant”

I am a hardcore fan of Khushwant Singh’s writings and think he is the best Indian writer alive today. I picked up Absolute Khushwant in order to know more about Khushwant the human being. A simple book of 189 pages, it appears to have been dictated by 95 year old Khushwant Singh to Humra Quraishi over a few days. The narration is rambling and there are repetitions, but this book is the closest thing to Khushwant Singh’s autobiography.

Absolute Khushwant doesn’t hold many surprises. Khushwant Singh is not a reticent man and people who follow his writings would be aware of his views of topics ranging from the Emergency to Indira Gandhi to Operation Blue Star to the BJP. Khushwant Singh doesn’t hold back on his personal life either. He talks of his first love, how he visited a prostitute for the first time, his unhappy marriage (which was not an arranged one), how he had courted his wife-to-be etc.

I knew that Khushwant Singh was not a prude and I was not disappointed. “If you ask me what’s more important, sex or romance, it’s sex. Romance is just a gloss, some sort of sheen that wears off, and it loses its lustre very soon. I’ve never really had the time or the inclination for romance. Romantic interludes take up a lot of time and are a sheer waste of energy, for the end result isn’t very much. Sex is definitely more important, though sex with the same person can get boring after a while..... When it comes to sex, I don’t think looks matter much.”

The Partition of India left Khushwant Singh badly wounded. Khushwant Singh feels that Partition was inevitable since Hindus and Muslims had not integrated. They did not inter-marry, did not share food or living quarters. No, Khushwant Singh does not say that they were/are two separate nations, but that would be the logical conclusion to his argument. But Khushwant Singh also suggests that Partition could have been avoided if Jawaharlal Nehru hadn’t been so keen to become independent India’s Prime Minister. According to Khushwant Singh, “having accepted the Cabinet mission plan to hand over power to a united India, he (Nehru) reneged on his undertaking when he (Nehru) realized Jinnah might end up becoming Prime Minister." Khushwant Singh thinks Nehru was the second best Prime Minister India has ever had. He admires Nehru’s secularism and atheism, but doesn’t seem to have liked him much. He tells us that Nehru had vision and charisma, but was instinctively anti-American and pro-Soviet. Nehru was impatient with people and had favourites. Like Indira, Nehru can be accused of nepotism.

Khushwant Singh liked Sanjay Gandhi, despite the damage he did to India’s democracy, something Khushwant Singh acknowledges. However, since “Sanjay was always extremely courteous towards me” Khushwant Singh continues to like him. I found Khushwant Singh’s honesty in this regard extremely refreshing.

Khushwant Singh tells us that Nirad C. Chaudhuri is the most knowledgeable person he has ever known.

Khushwant Singh also believes Manmohan Singh is the best PM we have ever had. To illustrate his point, Khushwant Singh has this anecdote about how Manmohan Singh’s son-in-law came to borrow some money during Manmohan Singh’s election campaign. The amount borrowed was just two lakhs, to hire taxis that were needed for the election campaign. “They didn’t even have that much to spare. I gave the money in cash. Only days after he had lost the election, Manmohan Singh called me himself and asked for an appointment. He came to see me with a packet. ‘I haven’t used the money,’ he said and handed me the packet with all the cash I had given his son-in-law. That kind of thing, no politician would do.” Here I find myself unable to agree with Khushwant Singh. If Manmohan Singh is incapable of effectively utilising for his campaign two lakh rupees given to him legitimately by a supporter, does it suggest a capable politician or a timid bureaucrat who his afraid of taking risks and independent decisions?

I read this rambling account in one go, in around three hours' time. Absolute Khushwant is a must-read for every fan of Khushwant Singh’s writings.