Starting in the early 2003, Shrilal Shukla wrote a column in the Hindi India Today magazine for a period of two years. These columns were a look at the contemporary news and a rumination on them. The book Khabron ki Jugali by Shrilal Shukla collects those columns. My previous post was also on a book which is a collection of columns over a similar passage of time almost two decades earlier than the columns in this book.

Interestingly, both the periods were significant from the Indian political perspective. Tulsidas Chandan Ghisain by Harishankar Parsai gave us an insight during the period of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, the anti Sikh riots and the ascension of Rajiv Gandhi as the Prime minister of India. This book gives us a look at the period of Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s government, the India Shining campaign and the comeback of Congress in power with the UPA (United Progressive Alliance).

While reading the book what struck me was the relevance of the major themes of the book even today. We are twenty years down the line and still some of the news at that time resonates even today. Most of the times what gets reported as news stops being relevant even the next day. But some of them stay. I have picked up a few such columns below.

Standard of debate in the parliament

In the column “Shishtachar ka daaliye achaar” (translated as “make pickles of etiquette”), Shrilal Shukla discusses the progress we have made as a nation and as a democracy. When we borrowed the Parliamentary democracy from the foreigners we also tried to adopt the etiquette from them. So, for first few decades the language in the parliament reflected that. So much so that unparliamentary language is a well recognized phrase in India. There was a time when a leader of any opposition party was called a “respected leader of the opposition party”. Now, the more suitable word is “enemy”. Shukla ji has given an example of the adoption of the new language and he quotes the Bahujan Samajwadi Party leader Mayavati speaking about the Samajwadi Party leader Amar Singh –

While reading this, I thought of the not so long ago incident between Ramesh Bidhuri and Danish Ali. And I thought what will Shukla Ji think of this one.

The Ram Janmabhoomi disappointment

A lot of Hindus had voted for the BJP in the hope that there will be a Ram temple at Ayodhya. In the 1990s almost all the traction that BJP was able to generate was on the issue of Ram temple. The column “Kalah ka ant hoga kabhi?” (translated as “Will there ever be an end to the quarrel?”) talks about the disappointment of not getting the temple even after four years of the Atal government. A character called Fatte (short for Fateh Bahadur Singh) announces that either the Prime minister should bring about a law for temple construction or he should resign.

Shukla Ji then advises on the fate of issues in India. In his words (slightly rephrased) –

“In our country  when something ties itself into a knot, has that ever straightened? When it is about to reach some sort of resolution, someone will file a writ in the Supreme Court or someone will do self immolation. Hence, for all problems there is a simple formula. Keep the issue in tangles. Let it get into more and more knots. Then let it ripen and then let it decay. Look at this issue as well, if you leave the craziness of 6^th December 1992, this has also been going on for 50 years. So, in a century or two even this issue will become as natural for us as the issues of starvation, unemployment, diseases etc. It will stay with us, but we will stop feeling about it.”

Now we are in the year 2024 and the temple is built. I will very much like to know how Shukla Ji would’ve reacted to this development.

Learning to be a reporter for the round the clock news

The start of the new millennium brought the Cable TV to majority of homes in India. And with the Cable TV came the round the clock news channels. But if you take something which used to be delivered in bulletins of twenty minutes to an hour and stretch that to the whole day, some natural difficulties are bound to arise.

The column “Khabaron mein phansi khabar” (translated as “The news stuck in the news”) is a look at this  difficulty. The first example he takes is of a news channel that was covering Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s (VHP) Sankalp Divas (the day of resolve) in Ayodhya. The newsreader asks the on field reporter – what is the state of affairs in Ayodhya? The reporter responds with –

“The state of affairs. As you can see the state of affairs, where I am standing. Meaning you can see what is happening behind me. You can see that the state is like, its not like how it was yesterday…..”

In another news channel, the reporting is about two terrorists in Shrinagar, Kashmir. The new reader asks the on field reporter – what is the state of the two terrorists? The reporter responds with –

“Its like this. At this time it is difficult to tell whether there are two terrorists or three. Perhaps there are two, but they can be three also. One of them has been killed. The forces think so, means the security forces think so. Maybe the third one is killed, or maybe the one who is killed is the second one…….”

The world has moved ahead from those days. We are two decades down the line, but the standard of reporting is still the same. Who can forget the famous reporting of the Biparjoy cyclone last year where a reporter held an umbrella while standing in the studio.

How to do a scam

In the column “Hamari Rashtriya Bhulakkari” (translated as “Our national forgetfulness”), Shukla Ji gives a masterclass on how to do a scam. This was the time when the Telgi scam had hit the news. A character in this column is a retired senior officer from the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). He runs a security consultancy after retirement.

Shukla Ji asks him that if Abdul Karim Telgi hires him as a consultant then what advice he will give. And the consultant suggested – make it as large as possible and get as many people in the circle of suspicion as possible. Make it so big that the investigators get so burdened by the weight of the scam that they move slowly. He says that as far as managing a scam is concerned, Telgi scam is on the right path. Latest was that the scam was of thirty thousand crore rupees. Unearthing the evidence for proving this scam will take rest of the lives of the investigating team.

Then Shukla Ji asks and what advice the consultant will give to the investigating team. And the consultant says – find one small case and imprison Telgi for that to start with. If we can put him behind bars for an year or two over an irregularity of even a crore, that will give the investigators the time and space to thoroughly investigate the other aspects of the case.

Looking the scams that have happened over the past decade or so, the numbers are sure climbing.

Each of the columns is a view on a world which was twenty years ago, but was very similar to ours in many respects. After Atal Ji lost the election despite the India Shining campaign, the new government was the UPA government with Manmohan Singh as the Prime minister. In that government Lalu Prasad Yadav was the railway minister. In complete contrast to the India Shining, the first thing he did was to mandate clay cups for serving tea on trains. Going back to our roots kind of movement. Shukla Ji comments on that.

Ishrat Jahan features in one of the columns. And also the world of Soap Operas, where the lady who has taken birth many times and has been killed by her mother in law in all her previous births gets the titular role. When I read Tulsidas Chandan Ghisain, it all felt distant. But this book, I watched all of this happening. Brilliant collection and a brilliant book.

May we keep inspiring each other.