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The man who first broke the news of Gandhi's assassination, James W.
Michaels, in conversation with Arun Venugopal
Interviews James W. Michaels
Few journalists in the world have had the chance to view India's birth
and growth better than James W. Michaels. After serving in the US Army
in the second world war, the veteran set up the New Delhi bureau of
the news agency upi or the United Press International in the last
months of the Raj. And in 1948, beat the competition by several
minutes to the biggest story of his life: the assassination of Mahatma
Gandhi, which is ranked among the 100 greatest news reports of all
time.
India should get the hell out (of Kashmir)... It's a drain on India.
They'd be better off under India, but they don't seem to want to. So,
to hell with 'em.
As editor of Forbes for close on 40 years, Michaels visited and
reported on the subcontinent several times. Here he speaks of India,
Indians and Indianness.
Massive riots to start off, rampant poverty, the father of the nation
dead not long after. Did you have any hopes whatsoever for India when
you left?
I don't want to exaggerate but I think most of us who were observing
it then thought the country would break up, and that parts of it might
revert to some kind of totalitarian rule. But out of that has
developed a functioning democracy, a country that has had good
economic growth—#though not as good as one would have liked—and it
takes its place among the leading nations of the world. So that's not
bad, considering the inauspicious beginnings. And India made many
false starts, of course.
Would you elaborate on any of these?
Well, Nehru, though we loved him and admired him at the time, was
probably the worst disaster to ever hit India, at least in economic
terms. (In India Unbound, by Gurcharan Das), it's said that Nehru was
basically a Brahmin snob, and he did not like business people. Instead
of the government getting out of the way and letting the market
allocate business resources, the government did it. And the result was
an incredible waste of resources. The way to fight poverty is not by
chopping the pie in smaller pieces but figuring out how to make a
bigger pie.
Did you expect the Kashmir problem to last this long?
I was one of the first reporters to get on the scene, so I saw that
from the beginning. This must have been the fall of 1947, when the
fighting broke out. The Pakistani army simply brought thousands of
these Afridi and other tribesmen down. So they crossed into Kashmir.
And these morons went crazy. They looted this Christian convent and
raped the nuns and went home. If these tribesmen had not looted and
gone home, they probably would've taken Srinagar, taken the airport,
and the Indians would not have been able to do anything about it. It
was that close. I wrote the story, and the Pakistanis denied it, and
the Indian representative—then must have been Krishna Menon—read my
dispatch in the United Nations.
Do you see anything moving forward?
I've told this to Indian friends, though they don't like it: India
should get the hell out, just do what we did in Vietnam. It's a
terrible drain on India. The Kashmiris would be much better off under
India, economically, but they don't seem to want to. So to hell with
'em. Let them stew in their own juice.
Mahatma Gandhi's economic ideal of swadeshi has in recent years been
seen as quaint and outdated, and his politics as overly passive. Do
you think Gandhi has any real legacy in today's India?
Of course, his economics was all nonsense. But the point is that
Gandhi was able to speak the language of these illiterate people with
his symbols of a spinning wheel and village self-sufficiency and use
of religious imagery.It made him a great leader for that time. And
India became independent. I suppose you could say he is redundant, but
as a symbol—through the means of reaching the masses of the people and
also as a reformer of Hinduism—he did a great deal for...what are they
now called?...the Dalits. We live in a world that is full of
euphemisms. First they were Untouchables, then they were Harijans, and
now they're Dalits.
Between the overpriced American fast food chains, the neon and the
techno music in restaurants, don't you find any aspect of India's
liberalisation unsettling? Really, is this Indian?
I don't like that but I don't like it here either, these aspects. Is
it Indian? No...it's not. It's kind of a worldwide pop culture that
seems to be able to cut across cultures. I spent quite a bit of time
last year in China. It's the same thing. The young people are wearing
blue jeans and American T-shirts and listening to that rock music. So
it's all over the world.
There's something about Indians that I find very interesting. I know
so many Indians who are so westernised in every surface sense of the
word, yet part of them remains Indian. There seems to be an ability to
hold both concepts in the mind at the same time. Something about
Hinduism, I guess, can absorb so much without being transformed by it.
As a journalist, would you see the Emergency as India's coming of age?
I happened to be there at the time, and I was there the night Indira
lost the election. I was in Delhi (after the Emergency). In the
beginning I thought she was doing the right thing because they were
trying to bring her government down with this illegal strike. Mr
George Fernandes, I remember, was behind all this. She came down with
a very strong hand and she invoked what the British called the Defence
of India Act. And knowing something about how volatile India was, when
she did that I thought she did the right thing. Because they were
trying to create chaos to bring her down. Fernandes was the boss of
the railroad union and he was in the Opposition, of course, so they
declared a strike and brought India to a standstill, and she ordered
them back to work. And food doesn't move, people don't eat if the
railroads don't move in India. And so she declared an Emergency. And I
wrote a letter to the NY Times, which they published, defending her.
But then she started to make some mistakes. Instead of using that just
to deal with the trouble-makers, she then imposed censorship and she
tried to extend the Emergency. And of course her supporters said
Sanjay put her up to that. And then they did this sterilisation stuff.
So they went too far. And in the next election they defeated her and
she lost her seat.
I talked to so many people and they said the same thing: "We like Mrs
Gandhi but she went too far." And sure enough, they returned her to
power two years later.
In the sense that Indians would not accept autocracy, they would not
accept the kind of thing that you have in Pakistan or some of these
other countries. Somehow, that sense of freedom and democracy was too
strong in India. So in a sense, yeah, India did come of age in that
period. There could have been civil war, there could have been all
kinds of problems. And yet, the country remained pretty stable. They
had orderly elections.
They turned her right out of office. And she was back in two years,
but chastened. In a way that was a turning point, a crisis point, in
Indian democracy.
Do you ever ask yourself 'What if?' when it comes to India?
The only 'What if?' I often play with is the Partition. In a very big
sense, Partition wasn't necessary. I can't tell an Indian from a
Pakistani. Can you? But if they had not made a Pakistan, you would've
had to accept a weaker Central government. The price would've been a
great deal of regional autonomy for eastern Bengal and Sindh. So that
might've strengthened these fissiparous tendencies. But Partition was
a terrible tragedy. It could've been avoided. Jinnah sensed that
Mountbatten's orders were to get this thing over with quickly, and he
just kept raising the ante to the point where even his own followers
didn't think he was going to get Pakistan.
The other 'What if?' is what would've happened if Nehru hadn't been
affected with this socialism. Rajagopalachari didn't want the
government to get involved (with the economy), he thought the American
model was right for India. And Sardar Patel also did not want all this
socialism. But south India got marginalised in the early days. So
Nehru did whatever he wanted.
(During his 38-year tenure as Forbes editor, James W. Michaels edited
some 1,000 issues, surely a large number for any editor. About him,
Richard Behar, formerly with the Forbes himself, said in a New York
Times article: "It was always said Michaels could edit the Lord's
prayer down to six words, and nobody would miss anything." Amen to
that.)