I persuaded him to accept nomination to the Rajya Sabha.
Many of us have personal Dilip Kumar “stories” up our sleeves. I shall relate two. I first met him in London in 1974. I proudly told him that as a first year History (Hons) student at St. Stephen’s College I had seen “Shaheed”. That was in 1948. I added that even after twenty years I remembered the song, “Watan Ki rah main…”
We took to each other. “Are you free this evening”, he asked me. “No. but I will make myself free for you.” “I will take you to see ‘Hare’. James Stewart is the sole actor.” There was no hare on the stage but James Stewart convinced the audience that there was one on the stage. The play lasted 90 minutes. It was a memorable occasion. To see a very great American actor perform, and that too in the company of India’s top actor/star. At the end of the play he remarked in Urdu, “Is ko khetain hain acting.”
Twenty five years later I persuaded him to accept nomination to the Rajya Sabha. He was reluctant to do so. I took him to meet Sonia Gandhi. He did, finally, gracefully agree.
I have a signed copy of his autobiography, “The Substance and The Shadow”, which I shall always treasure.
***
Father Stan Swamy’s death in the prison outraged me. It is a very poor reflection on our judicial and police establishments. How many of us choose to live in the wilderness of Jharkhand to serve and look after the tribals? The Government should give Father Stan Swamy a posthumous Padma Award.
***
The long-awaited Cabinet reshuffle was, to say the least, drastic. Of the 43 new ministers, I recognized Jyotiraditya Madhavrao Scindia, Narayan Rane, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Hardeep Singh Puri, Meenakshi Lekhi, Rao Indrajeet Singh, Anurag Thakur. 12 come from Schedule Caste communities. Twenty seven are STs. Five from minorities. Fourteen ministers are below 50 years of age. Three, in their 40s. Two in their 30s.
The youngest is Nisith Pramanik, 35. The average age of the Council of Ministers is 58. Eleven lady ministers, the largest number ever.
The new ministers must straightaway get down to learning their job and to control the all-powerful bureaucracy.
***
On 1 July the Communist Party of China celebrated the hundredth anniversary of its founding. On 1 October 1949 Mao Tse Tung had declared the establishment of the People’s Republic of China from the ramparts of Tiananmen.
On 1 July, President XI Jinping appeared on Tiananmen in a green Mao style suit. The rest of the leadership turned up in western clothes. Tiananmen Square is bigger and more impressive than the Red Square in Moscow.
By all accounts President Xi is the most powerful leader of China since Mao Tse Tung, who died in September 1976 at the age of 83. Deng Xiaoping, the great reformer, had laid down Presidents of China would have two five-year terms. President Xi Jinping has done away with the ten-year limited. Mao ruled for 27 years.
I lived in Peking for two years—1956-1958. Sixty-five years ago, China like India was a backward, underdeveloped country. Today it is fifty years ahead of us. It’s a world power. We have yet to become one. Xi’s China has proved that world is not unipolar. It is bipolar.
I shall quote a few excerpts from President Xi’s Speech. No Churchillian or Nehruvian soaring idealism. “…The leadership of the Party is the defining feature of socialism with Chinese characteristics. We must uphold the core position of the General Secretary of the Party Central Committee and in the Party as a whole, and uphold the Central Committee’s authority and its centralized leadership.”
Next comes up to date Maoism, “We must accelerate the modernisation of national defence and armed forces. A strong country must have a strong military, as only then can it guarantee the security of the nation. At the point that it was engaged in violent struggle, the Party came to recognize the irrefutable truth that it must command the gun and build a people’s military of its own.”
“The Chinese nation does not carry aggressive or hegemonic traits in its genes.”
“We must continue to adopt Marxism to the Chinese context. Marxism is the fundamental guiding ideology upon which our Party and country are founded; it is the very soul of our Party and the banner under which it strives… At the fundamental level, the capability of our Party and the strengths of socialism with Chinese characteristics are attributable to the fact that Marxism works.”
The one thing President Xi Jinping dreads is the emergence of a Chinese Gorbachev, the head pall bearer of the coffin of Soviet Communism.