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Naipaul's Way

© Mrinal Bose

On January 13, 2003 most important morning dailies in India carried a picture –some on their front page – of V.S. Naipaul and his wife Nadira along with an Indian journalist called Tarun Tejpal. They were chatting among themselves and looked somewhat anxious and tense. For those who have not heard about Tejpal, he is an intrepid journalist who exposed the corruption of Indian defence ministry through his unique news-portal ‘Tehelka’, and has now been paying a heavy price for it.

The picture, apparently an innocuous one, stumped quite a lot of people in the Indian Government and outside of it. For one, the Indian Government views Naipaul as its best ambassador for its idea of cultural nationalism overseas. Tejpal, on the other hand, has been a bete noire who it hounded and battered no end, so much so that he had to shut down his news portal, burdened with huge debts, a commission to inquire into Tehelka affairs and a number of court cases to boot. Now, by our current standard of political correctness, the winner was supposed to fight shy of the loser by all means.

But it was Naipaul, and the rule did never apply to him. Although he came to India to attend a conference of non-resident Indians, he took time off to see and express solidarity with his young friend, and even went out of his way to attend a Supreme Court hearing in which the government allegedly framed a Tehelka journalist on false charges. The picture was taken when he came out of the court after it had approved the bail for the journalist who had been in court custody for six months at a stretch.

Interestingly, Naipaul did not stop at there, he addressed a press conference the following day to vent out his feelings about this issue. “I’m profoundly disappointed over what happened to Tehelka which can damage the country,” the great writer said. He told reporters that the Tehelka episode had become a bad story because of the “lack of graciousness and perhaps the gracelessness on the government’s part”. He urged the government to withdraw what many consider the vendetta of the government against the news portal.

The writer was noticeably restrained all through, but if you analyze the sophistry or subtlety in his uttering for secondary interpretation, he could not be more distressed. And he drove home the message that he valued and cared for a scribe’s cause, and hardly bothered about the trappings of power. Is it not great in an age when there is growing genuflection and obsequiousness to power among our writers?

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