Nandita Haksar’s autobiography is the story of India and the loss of a dream
Ghazala Wahab
I have been an admirer of Nandita Haksar’s works longer than I have personally known her. I first met her in February 2013, after the UPA government decided to hang Kashmiri prisoner Afzal Guru, accused of providing logistics support to the terrorists who attacked Indian Parliament in 2001, in a belated demonstration of being tough on terrorism.
She had represented Guru’s family in filing a mercy petition after he was sentenced to death. She had also represented and got acquittal for another accused in the case, Delhi University lecturer SAR Geelani. In 2007, she wrote the book Framing Geelani, Hanging Afzal: Patriotism in the Time of Terror. She was disturbed by the manner in which the Supreme Court had pronounced its verdict on the case sentencing Guru to be hanged until death. The bench of the highest court of the country, adjudicating on Guru’s case, justified the sentence on the ground that, ‘The collective conscience of the society will be satisfied only if the death penalty is awarded to Afzal Guru.’
Far from being satisfied, my conscience was troubled after his hanging, and what it reflected about us as the people of India. I sought a meeting with her to get a better perspective about the case—something that made allowances for both nationalism and humanism. She asked me to come to her flat in south Delhi; it was chaotic. There were piles of books on all possible surfaces in the living room. There was half-eaten food on the dining table. And a couple of young men, who didn’t look as if they belonged there, were floating around the house. When Nandita joined me, she explained the chaos. She was leaving for Goa for a few months; hence her books were being sorted out for packing. In the course of the conversation, I gathered that the young men, who aroused my curiosity, were refugees from Myanmar, whom she had provided temporary shelter.
I was astounded. Not only Nandita represented the most marginalised without charging them anything, but she also allowed them use of her house and facilities! While my purpose of meeting her was to understand the nature of injustice meted out to Afzal Guru, but I learnt so much more from her in that one day. She contextualised the case to demonstrate to me that the nature of Indian democracy and lower judiciary itself allows for majoritarian sentiment to overpower everything else. She gave examples of how notions of national security come in the way of justice and fair play. She spoke about the Nagas as one of the victims of this. She spoke about the refugees she was working with and how Indian law and society come in the way of letting them have a dignified existence. Finally, she also put a mirror to my own prejudices and internalised racism; something that she did to herself regularly.
“That’s the only way you can rise above them,” she said. And it is this self-reflection that shapes her recently released autobiography The Colours of Nationalism: A Memoir of Dreams, Hopes and Betrayals. It is embedded with gems, such as these:
‘It was only the Indian communists who seemed to set much store by looking and dressing simply. I wondered why. I once put the question to Kumkum Roy, a historian who specialises in ancient India. She said it was a Brahminical value, a way of distancing oneself and establishing moral high ground.’
‘Papa always made a distinction between the people and the state. People should not be made into enemies even though states sometimes are.’
‘We had a memorial event which was rooted in the Ganga-Jamuni culture, with a revolutionary song to add a touch of red. At the same time, I remember thinking how, in this secular culture defined by the two great rivers, there was no place for Papa’s Naga Christian son-in-law. My husband had no connection to this history.’
And most important of them all: ‘My experience of the law had convinced me that it could never be an instrument for change or liberation. It was essentially an instrument to help maintain the status quo to uphold patriarchy, the caste system, class divisions and racism. What I liked most about being a human rights lawyer was that it allowed me to take sides, and I had chosen to stand by the side of the economically poor, the politically disenfranchised.’
Though the book has several personal nuggets, including about her first marriage to a Communist colleague and later to her present husband Sebastian, these form part of the narrative of either her personal growth or professional campaigns. So, in that sense, she makes it clear that for her, personal has always been political.
I have been in touch with Nandita since 2013. Yet, nothing prepared me for The Colours of Nationalism, which is not only an insight into her life, but also into the trajectory independent India took. Two recurring thoughts stayed with me while reading the book. One, what a privileged upbringing she had. Almost, all top government officials, political and bureaucratic, were her family friends. Two, how she used this privilege for helping the hapless, instead of furthering her personal interests.
Haksar was born in 1954. Hence this book is as much her memoirs as it is a potted history of independent India’s struggle with idealism and pragmatism; justice and vested interests; constitutional values and political expediency. Above all, it a citizen’s chronicle of her unwavering commitment to the idea of a plural and equitable India. So, when she writes–‘I cannot put my finger on the day when I stopped dreaming of a time when India would be the country imagined by my parents. Perhaps it happened in May 1987, with the riots in Delhi and Meerut, and subsequent brutalities inflicted on Muslims’—one can feel her sadness.
As the title says, the book starts with her early experiences in India and abroad (with her diplomat father P.N. Haksar) which were full of optimism. Like most people of her generation, she grew up believing that India was poised to become an inclusive nation in which freedom would automatically imply equality and justice. Her early disillusionment came when she was studying in Delhi University. History was one of her favourite subjects, which she wanted to pursue further in JNU. However, when her BA results came out, she had flunked history. So, she repeated the exams and failed again. Eventually, her teacher Uma Chakravarty carried out some internal investigations and found that ‘Jana Sangha sympathisers had managed to get themselves appointed as examiners of the history papers. They had deliberately failed anyone whose answers did not conform to their historiography.’
However, over the years, she discovered that the Jana Sangha sympathizers had permeated all levels of the civil society. Recording the reluctance of the human rights organisation PUDR, of which she was the member, to conduct fact-finding among the Muslim victims of Delhi violence, she writes, ‘Many of the activists who had felt so strongly about the massacre of the Sikhs did not have the same depth of feeling for the Muslims. The response of civil society, which had been so robust after the massacre of Sikhs, was negligible following the Hindu-Muslim tensions in Delhi. There wasn’t a similar outpouring of concern, or the emergence of an organisation along the lines of the Nagrik Ekta Manch… One member told me she was not interested in “religious” issues!’
Eventually, when she went to Meerut in 1987, in addition to her, the fact-finding team comprised only three other members—all Muslims. That religion came in the way of even recording of events was evident when these three members refused to speak with the local administration to get their version of the violence. She writes, ‘…for them, there was nothing to check with the authorities when the reality was there before us. One of them even hinted that I was able to see both sides because I was a Hindu!’
This ability of her to see both sides is what make The Colours of Nationalism a valuable piece of contemporary history. Just as Haksar has been candid about the Indian activist community, of which she has long been a part of, she been equally dispassionate in her assessment of her own family. While she acknowledges that her personality and worldview were shaped by her parents’ idealism and the opportunities, which they provided her with, she doesn’t shy from acknowledging that ‘Papa was after all patriarchal. For all his talk of independence of women, the future he saw for me was as a “wife” of someone. My mother, too, could see few other possible choices available to a woman.’
Perhaps, this is a strong indictment of her parents, because her father not only introduced her to various activists in the course of her growing up, he also encouraged her to undertake voluntary work in the backward areas during her summer breaks. It was this exposure to voluntary work, that illuminated for her the path she would take in her life, that of a human rights activist. Interestingly, when it came to her career, she had less clarity. She started as a journalist, toyed with the civil services, eventually moved on to become a human rights lawyer and thereafter a full-time author. But all through this, her work was shaped by her activism. For instance, she moved to Bangalore to join the National Law School of India University. She was asked to formulate and teach a course on human rights from the legal perspective. However, soon she got involved in trade union activities of public sector undertakings, from which the government had started to disinvest.
Eventually, her commitment to the workers of Bharat Electronics Ltd took precedence over her teaching job. It also made her do rapid learning of corporate law so that a petition could be filed against disinvestment and workers could be made stakeholders. Her efforts were only partly successful because both the workers and the trade unionists lost interest over a period of time. Worse, quite unlike her beliefs, they remained driven by religion, region and caste.
Nandita remained an outsider in Bangalore. She was forced to return to Delhi, but en route was enchanted by Goa. The place also provided relief to her asthmatic condition. But after living there for 25 years, she had to move back to Delhi, because only that felt like home. For a person who had travelled across India since her childhood, and had spent extended period of time in places at diverse as Bengal, Nagaland, Bangalore and Goa, either she or her Naga husband Sebastian remained outsiders in all these places. As she writes, ‘I wanted my last years to be spent in a place where I could feel I belonged where I was not an outsider. It could not be Ukhrul or Manipur. There too I would remain the outsider. Sebastian had once said he felt at home wherever we lived together; but even he felt more at home in Delhi then in Goa so I moved back to Delhi where I continue to struggle with the idea of India.’
My only complaint with the book is its structure, which is thematic rather than chronological. So, it is difficult to place the events in the context of the politics of that time. Often, it is difficult to understand exactly when those events occurred in her life. But with a bit of back and forth, one gets the tenor of the narrative. And eventually, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is to bear witness to the gradual whittling down of the idea of India; and the price the nation is paying for nationalism.