Nihal Passed away on 14th August, a few days after his 86th birthday. Nandi, Raffi and Anouk, his granddaughter, had been with him from New York till just a week before he died. In the weeks after he passed away, there have been glowing tributes to Nihal by his professional colleagues and from organisations in which he served. My tribute is personal, of friendship over decades with a multi-talented and kind-hearted gentleman, with a delightful sense of humour, who wore his talents so lightly.

I cannot speak of Nihal without talking of his wife Chitra. To me, they were an ideal union. They shared the same values of kindness, generosity, commitment, professionalism, humility and unquestionable integrity. They also shared many interests – in art, theatre, film, classical music (both oriental and western), literature and world affairs, to name a few. They were equal partners, each respecting the other’s views and looking out for the other. They had their arguments, but with never a loud, rude, harsh or unpleasant word.

I first met Nihal and his family nearly 50 years ago in Manhattan, New York. I had moved to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, as a graduate student in January 1978. I had an introduction to them from my close friend Radhika Coomaraswamy, who had known them since her student days in New York. Nihal was Counsellor at the Sri Lanka Mission to the UN. He and Chitra, together with their 6-year old twins, Nandi and Satya, graciously opened their home to me. From the beginning, I was made to feel a part of this delightful family and I considered their apartment in Manhattan as my “home away from home”. I regularly dislodged one of the twins from a bed to a sleeping bag on the floor, whenever I turned up in the “Big Apple” on the six-hour greyhound bus ride from Ithaca, comfortable enough to occasionally bring a friend along as well!

I have such happy memories of walking in Central Park eating ice-cream with the foursome, or going to movies and Broadway shows with Chitra. Our friendship never wavered over the next several decades and geographical distances, as they moved from one diplomatic post to another. I remain ever-grateful to Radhika for that initial introduction.

My father (Sam Wijesinha) had befriended them before me, when he had accompanied a Parliamentary delegation to Australia in 1970, in his capacity as Secretary General of Parliament, and he was a great fan. Nihal was then acting High Commissioner and they had brought him to their home for a chat and informal dinner after an official party they had all three attended. When they got home, both Nihal and Chitra realized that neither had taken their keys with them and they were locked outside their own home with their guest! Undeterred, Nihal managed to prise open the kitchen window and climb into the house to let the other two in. My father remained a great admirer of Nihal and Chitra forever after!

From Counsellor in New York, Nihal rose to Ambassador status, SAARC Secretary-General and Foreign Secretary, and finally as our Ambassador in China. They were such fun and gracious hosts when my husband and I visited them in both Kathmandu and Beijing and made their home our base while travelling in Nepal and China. They were the perfect diplomatic couple, able to converse with, and entertain royalty, presidents, the literary, arts and business communities and regular citizens, with equal ease, grace and dignity. It certainly did not harm the Sri Lankan image that they were also an extraordinarily good-looking couple!

Nihal and Chitra met as students at Peradeniya University in its golden years. They enjoyed Ediriweera Sarachchandra’s plays at the famous open-air theatre, while Nihal was also President of the English Drama Society. On my return to Sri Lanka in the mid-‘80s, it was Chitra who introduced me to Sinhabahu and Maname, as well as all the glorious ballets performed by the Chitrasena and Vajira dance troupe.

As mentioned by others, Nihal was an authority on art and a painter himself. Nihal, Chitra and fellow students were befriended by George Keyt, then living in Kandy. Canvasses in their home showcase Nihal’s artistic talents, as well as early Keyt paintings, gifts from the artist himself. Later, Nihal served on and supported the George Keyt Foundation in many ways. He was also a lover of, and an authority on film. I remember especially the Audrey Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart classics. If one wished to watch, one had only to visit the Rodrigos and ask- Nihal had an entire collection of those DVDs.

Nihal could speak with authority, in language a lay person could understand, on geopolitics, especially the power changes taking place in an increasingly volatile world. His astuteness on Sri Lanka’s diplomatic relations was ahead of his time.

In the early 1990s, Nihal was Secretary to a high-level Foreign Affairs Study Group (FASG) appointed by President Premadasa and chaired by Dr. Gamani Corea, with Mervyn de Silva, Lakshman Kadirgamar and S.K. Wickremesinghe among its members.

As the Cold War had ended and Asia began emerging as an economic force, Nihal saw that, along with two economically awakening giants China and India, fast developing countries in East and South East Asia would become increasingly important to Sri Lanka for its own future development. He therefore officially co-opted me, from the Central Bank’s Economic Research Department, to provide the FASG with regular statistical updates of Sri Lanka’s economic and trade links with those very countries.

His thinking has proved correct, although I do not think successive Sri Lankan governments gave such astuteness the importance it warranted.

His final diplomatic posting, as Ambassador to China, reflected the enormous respect in which he was held. His time there was invaluable to Sri Lanka. Since his return to Sri Lanka in 2007, he was one of the most sought-after authorities on China in the region. He lectured in academic institutions and was a popular speaker on Sri Lanka’s foreign policy for well over a decade after his retirement.When his health began to deteriorate, he led a quieter life, meeting friends and family in their home, ably cared for by his devoted wife through the years that followed.

Nihal’s and Chitra’s interest in world issues and the arts have been inherited by, and nurtured in both Nandi and Satya, and most likely, Anouk too. Today, where are those delightful six-year olds whose beds I took over all those years ago?

Nandi is Head of Research at the New York Times Magazine, married to Raffi, a senior writer for the New Yorker, and Satya, a senior diplomat in Sri Lanka’s Foreign Service, currently serves as our Ambassador in Rome, with the same charm and professionalism as his father. So, to me, Nihal and Chitra were also role-model parents, giving their twins space to grow and develop their own individual personalities.

Nihal had many admirable qualities, but what I admired most was how his intellect and creative abilities sat so lightly on him. He shared of his knowledge, experience and wisdom without ever acting superior or talking down to anyone; he could turn a tense moment in a discussion and lighten the mood in a wink, with a delightfully witty remark or joke, and always had time to chat and joke with us younger adults, however busy his work schedule.

But Nihal was not all-perfect! It was Chitra, his soul-mate, he relied on so completely for all matters practical and financial, including hosting, entertaining and maintaining their homes all over the world, and for companionship, comfort, peace and harmony, in their own home in Colombo, in the final years of his life.

He will be missed by all who knew him, but we will all treasure memories of a talented, humane individual who made this world a better place. May he rest in peace.

Anila Dias Bandaranaike

By Ashanthi Ekanayake

There has been a trend in social media in inquiring of its users what their favourite literary works are and I took some time to explore which poem I might single out as the best of its kind written in English which is of personal significance. I immediately thought of the poem “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath. I made the choice quickly because I had been thinking of it since I began to read Amarakeerthi’s latest novel. The notion of the father and the larger metaphor of the patriarch or the arch patriarch has been something all societies have grappled with since the beginning. Plath declares in the second verse Daddy, “I have had to kill you.” This act of parricide has been a strong metaphor in many literary works and also in the etiological myths of many peoples.

I was initiated to the history of our race and nation as a young child and I remember that I had no qualms about accepting that I came from a lineage which had a certain “lion” in the beginning and that the lion had two children and that they “married” to start our race. Firstly, I heard this story as a young child and “marriage” did not mean much to me, secondly, I was from a generation which was not allowed to question and challenge my “elders and betters.” I was also a somewhat passive and placid child. When it was (unfortunately) my turn to do the honours in initiating my own offspring they were not so gullible. They were appalled and not impressed. They said in one voice “what ignominy to trace one’s beginning to parricide, bestiality and incest.” Fortunately for me I know some “Classics.’ So, my rejoinder was that even the Greeks and Romans have similar accounts and reminded them of Oedipus. Oedipus and Sinhabahu both have to kill their fathers to come into their own, regardless of the fact that Oedipus meets with tragedy. The notion of the patriarch and succession through parricide has been a historical reality and a literary strategy explored by many and has an etiological function.

In this sense the narrative of Piyăsara Gedara by Amarakeerthi Liyanage makes the reader question this accepted notion of the patriarch and also the role of the father/father figure by their presence and absence in the novel itself. Not stopping there Amarakeerthi uses the shadowy and unnamed yet unmistakable character of “sir,” in the novel as a parasitic dramaturge who has a rather overbearing personality. This shadowy figure is mirrored by the introduction of fathers who are not quite fathers in the later chapters. Amarakeerthi has been committed to writing novels experimenting with different styles while touching on themes which are current and relevant. His unhurried creative exercise has always managed to keep the reader engaged in questioning social norms and accepted values and exploring the very politics of the creative enterprise and also recent events. The metaphor borrowed from a renowned stylized stage play is an extended metaphor with the heart room of the Dias home gaining an importance as a significant space. (I refrain from exploring the obvious nationalist aspect because the readers will come to these assumptions on their own.)

Just as there are many fathers, Dias appears to be just like the youngsters in the narrative, lost in the ruminations of what his father might have achieved had he not been in the shadow of the dramaturge who himself remains a shadowy figure in the narrative rather like the murder instrument which is not one. His realisation that his father was not unique and not deserving of many of the accolades that Dias had wanted as a son for his father gives the novel a certain bildungsroman/coming of age quality even though Dias appears to be relatively old. A rather late coming of age for Dias because he has to see that his father was not all that he believed him to be. This aspect of the novel also resonates with the notions of anxiety of influence/anxiety of authorship because Dias whom the playwright wants to rename is in fact doing much of the groundwork in research for the work the person referred only as “sir.” The other fathers are of a variety of types that we encounter in our everyday relationships. The absence of one father encourages one character to become vigilante like. The introduction of the manikin/mannequin or “womannequin” provides an alter-ego to one of the characters who is also described as doll-like.

As always Amarkeerthi’s latest creation is packed with metaphors which keep the reader alert in piecing together the story. He opens the novel using a technique resonant with the ultra-performativity of the current day and age. His narrative has a cinematic quality which is in keeping with the modern experience of a drone capturing the action as it takes place. This makes the novelist appear very powerful, even godlike and the experience makes the reader a viewer in a sense. He ties this narrative strategy in the final few pages and carries it on to the acknowledgement which is rather like watching movie credits roll at the end where he names the cast and crew.

In addition to the dramatic/cinematic quality, the novelist also uses onomatopoeia as a narrative strategy which I will not spoil for those who are yet to read the novel. Among the many themes explored are the

There is an irony in the notion of the patriarch because the very patriarch we challenge literally or figuratively is the one who gives us our name and our being and makes us into who we are, and ultimately renders himself a figure we have to destroy in order to come into our own. All the characters in the novel, main and the relatively insignificant are all used in exploring this metaphor of the father.

Plath says at the end of the poem “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.” The irony of the presence or absence of the father and the notion of bastardy and the stigma involved and the social necessity of the presence of a father, is an aspect of our lives we will continue to explore in our creative enterprise.

Continuing Gopalakrishnan Gandhi’s fascinating tale of Independent India

by Tissa Jayatillake

Nehru had been a Prime Minister for 12 years when E.M.S. Namboodripad became the Chief Minister of Kerala in 1957, for the first time. Namboodripad’s was the first ever non-Congress government in the whole of India to take office after the general elections of 1957. This Communist government had defeated the revered Congress Party, in a free and fair election, while all the other states in India were ruled by the Congress Party.

Calling this unique Namboodripad government “an astonishing failure”, Nehru dismissed it in 1959, citing Article 356 of the Constitution of India. This was the time when Indira Gandhi had been elected President of the Congress Party and it was believed that she had much to do with this ruthless political act. Knowing how Indira Gandhi conducted herself in the office of the Prime Minister of India several years later, this early act of hers seems merely the tip of the iceberg. Perhaps Prime Minister Nehru, who had the authority but did not use it to prevent this political misadventure, could be held responsible for this fiasco.

Another reason why Nehru has been found wanting by his detractors, was due to the invasion (or the liberation and reunification, as some prefer to call it) of Goa in December 1961, code named Operation Vijay as well as for his left-of-centre politics, influenced, it is thought, largely by V.K Krishna Menon, India’s Minister of Defence from 1957 to 1962.

As the instances recorded in The Undying Light illustrate, Jawarhalal Nehru faced criticism from both his admirers and detractors for certain decisions made during his momentous 17 years (1947 to 1964) as Prime Minister.  For many, these policy choices were difficult to reconcile with the Nehru they knew – – as Mahatma Gandhi’s protégé, a pivotal figure in the independence struggle and a man defined by innate decency and civility.

However, Jairam Ramesh, a former Union Minister and at present a senior member of the opposition Congress Party, gives us a different perspective on Nehru and Menon in his biography of the latter titled, A Chequered Brilliance, The Many Lives of V.K Krishna Menon (2019). That Menon had been a complex character is generally known. Jairam Ramesh, in an interview in December 2019 with Karan Thapar of ‘The Wire’, tells us that Nehru and Menon were ‘soulmates’ who were on the same wavelength, politically.

They were both Anglophiles who were suspicious of the political motives of the United States and enamoured of the Soviet Union despite Stalin’s excesses. Jairam Ramesh observes that Menon was ‘an extraordinarily gifted, extremely well-read and charismatic figure’ who carried many demons within him. In fact, he describes him as a man who, like the notoriously right-wing U.S Secretary of State at that time, John Foster Dulles, was ‘a bull who carried his china with him’.

Menon’s role as the Minister of Defence of India, according to Jairam Ramesh, was controversial as he weakened the morale of the Indian army by creating dissension and distrust among the senior officers in it. Regardless of such shortcomings, it is to Menon’s credit that he had advocated for a negotiated settlement on the border issue between India and China. Moraji Desai and S.K Patil who led the right-wing segment of the cabinet and such Members of Parliament as Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Rammanohar Lohia and Acharya Kripalini opposed Menon’s advocacy.

In April 1960, when Zhou Enlai visited Delhi which probably was the last opportunity India had to seriously consider entering into a negotiated settlement with China on the border issue, those opposed to Menon schemed and conspired successfully to have him kept out of all meetings with the visiting Chinese Premier. Had Menon been listened to, argues Jairam Ramesh, the Indo-China war of 1962 could have been averted. Gopal Gandhi also attests to the fact that there was, ‘substantial goodwill’ in the 1950-1960 period between the two great Asian powers despite known differences over the border.

India’s international credibility and effectiveness at the UN were mostly due to that goodwill between the two countries. Moreover Bandung (1955), Brioni (1956) and the subsequent blossoming of the Non-Aligned Movement which brought together the emerging nations of Africa and Asia, would have been impossible had there been no cordiality and unity of purpose between India and China at the time.

Professor Howard Wriggins, a prominent scholar of Political Science and International Relations at Columbia University, New York, and a specialist in South Asian Studies, made the following observation in his book, Ceylon: Dilemmas of a New Nation (1960):

To my Ceylonese friends I would say that I have done my best with much sympathy, and I hope some intelligence, to convey to a foreign audience, the essential dynamics of social economic and political changes as I saw them. Those who feel dismay at what has been stressed should remember that a study of politics in any country is not necessarily a study of that country’s highest philosophy or its most gentle arts. Though politics demands the highest qualities of leadership and poised judgment, it is also the study of “who gets what, when and how”, which is not likely to be the field of human endeavor where the best is always revealed.

Perhaps Professor Wriggins’ words go some way towards explaining the anomaly in some of Nehru’s political decisions during his tenure as Prime Minister.

It should be noted that none of those who disagreed strongly with Nehru like Chakaravarti Rajagopalachari (Rajaji), Sarvepali Radhakrishnan, Jayaprakash Narayan (JP) and Babasaheb Ambedhkar, among others, had to bear the onerous responsibility of being the Prime Minister of India for 17 tumultous years. None of them, therefore, had to experience being ‘on the precarious perch of a tightrope walker’ to use Gopal Gandhi’s words, as Nehru did.

Gopal Gandhi describes Jawaharlal Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, as a dramatically different kind of politician from both her father and her immediate predecessor, Lal Bahadur Shastri.  Indira Gandhi, appears in The Undying Light, as in life, ‘the invincible iron lady of India’. The consensus was that she was not a likeable person. Instead, she was a determined and, on occasion, a ruthless politician.

Interestingly, when the question of Nehru’s successor figured in conversations as early as in 1954, when the seemingly indispensable and irreplaceable Prime Minister was 65, the names suggested were Jayaparakash Narayan (JP) as the first choice and Moraji Desai, as the second. Neither Lal Bahadur Shastri nor Indira Gandhi was on anybody’s mind. A mere five years later, however, the latter became the President of the Congress Party.

Two significant events took place as Indira Gandhi succeeded the saintly Shastri as Prime Minister. On the day she was sworn in as Prime Minister on January 24, 1966, coincidentally or otherwise, Homi Bhaba, the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission of India and close associate of the late Lal Bahadur Shastri, was killed in a plane crash. And in March of that year, the Mizos of the Northeast of the country, in what was termed ‘Operation Jericho’ demanded independence from India. The rebels had captured several installations including the Treasury in Aizawal.

Indira Gandhi’s response was to bomb Aizawal. In effect, the government of India bombed its own territory! Rammanohar Lohia, an opposition politician had described Indira Gandhi, rather crudely, as a “gungi gudia” or ‘dumb doll’. This was a grave misperception of the strong- willed personality that she was.  It was not only this opposition politician and his colleagues who misperceived Indira Gandhi. Senior members of the Congress Party did so as well. They believed she was a pliant leader who could be controlled by them.

However, in 1969, she demonstrated that she was made of sterner stuff. Firstly, she ditched her own Party’s candidate for President, Sanjiva Reddy. Following much political manoeuvering, Vice- President V.V. Giri was elected President. This led to a major split in the Congress Party with Deputy Prime Minister Moraji Desai resigning in protest. In the same year, she nationalized 14 commercial banks and launched the ‘Garibi Hatao’ (Remove Poverty) scheme, to placate the rural and urban poor.

Gopal Gandhi describes this measure as ‘the beginning of realpolitik in India’. All these events took place in 1969, a mere five years after Nehru’s passing and in the year that the Mahatma, had he lived, would have turned hundred. No longer was an India-serving Nehru at the helm. Instead, India had now been transformed into an Indira- serving nation. Everything was now Indira-centric, not India-centric, as before.

In the 1971 general elections, the Congress Party won 350 out of 518 seats in the Lok Saba placing Indira Gandhi firmly back in the saddle. She had now been Prime Minister for eight years having won two general elections: narrowly in 1967; and effortlessly in 1971. Though unloved by the people, she was nonetheless a consummate politician who had mastered the art of winning elections. But by 1974, Gopal Gandhi informs us, misgovernance, corruption and unemployment were rampant in India. Large numbers of people were unable to meet their living expenses. India was in turmoil.

Unrest in Gujarat resulted in large numbers being injured and over a 100 being killed. The unrest spread to Bihar. A year later, tension mounted as violence was unleashed on peaceful demonstrators in Patna, Calcutta and elsewhere in the country. On June 26, 1975, at the Prime Minister’s request, the President declared a national Emergency. The night before the declaration of the Emergency both Jayaprakash Narayan and Moraji Desai were arrested and on June 27, press censorship came into play for the first time in India since Independence.

The Emergency continued into 1976 and Indira’s rule as a virtual dictator was now in full swing: Jayaprakash Narayan was released from prison and sent to Jalok hospital in Bombay for emergency treatment before heading back to his home in Patna, for rest and recuperation; Moraji Desai continued to be stuck in jail; Karunanidhi the Chief Minister of Madras, an ally of the Indira Government in 1971, was dismissed by the end of January 1976 and 25,000 members of the DMK including Karunanidi’s son, M.K. Stalin were imprisoned; Tamil Nadu was placed under President’s Rule; and George Fernandes, the prominent Indian socialist politician and trade unionist, was arrested in Calcutta, imprisoned in the Red Fort in Delhi and viciously ill- treated. Indira and her son Sanjay Gandhi were effectively running the show.

By 1977, the economic situation had begun to worsen. Indira could not but be aware of her unpopularity. The term of Office of the Lok Sabha was extended to mid-1978 and there was talk of an Indira-raj. Ominously, Y.B. Chavan, the Minister of External Affairs in Indira’s cabinet told his countrymen on November 2, 1976, that ‘mere elections are not democracy’. But on January 8, 1977, to the surprise of all, Indira Gandhi announced that elections would be held in March. With this announcement, all political prisoners were released.

The results of the elections held in March 1977 were disastrous for Indira Gandhi and Congress. Congress was decimated in the north with Indira Gandhi being defeated in her Rae Bareli constituency. Only the south stood by her.

Moraji Desai became the new Prime Minister. Cast aside by the people, Indira Gandhi was a political nobody now but as Nehru’s daughter, she knew she had a role to play. The very disappointing performance of the new government with Moraji Desai at the helm paved the way for a sensational comeback by the indomitable Indira Gandhi.

In the elections held in 1980, Congress won 351 out of the 525 Lok Saba seats. Indira Gandhi won back the seat in Rae Bareli which she had previously lost in 1977. She also won in Medak, Andhra Pradesh, her back-up seat which she had contested in the event that she lost the seat in Rae Bareli. Sanjay Gandhi won in Amethi, Uttar Pradesh, which had vigorously rejected both the mother and son in 1977 but voted them in, in 1980.

Indira Gandhi kept her new seat and handed over her Rae Bareli seat to B.K. Nehru. She was back, stronger than before. Her son Sanjay was no longer the power behind the throne. He had become a powerful political figure in his own right. But destiny makes its own plans. Sanjay Gandhi, the chosen successor of the Prime Minister, was killed in a plane crash in June and succeeded by his brother, Rajiv Gandhi.

Whatever one may say about Indira Gandhi and much has been said earlier on in this essay, her courage in adversity has to be admired. In the face of a personal tragedy of such magnitude as the death of her son and heir, Sanjay, she continued stoically, to lead the country with calm strength. From the early 1980s onwards, Indira Gandhi and her government were faced with threats to the political integrity of India.

In 1980, extreme political violence led to the hideously brutal killing of prisoners awaiting trial in Bhagalpur, Bihar. Once again in Bihar, in late April of 1981, a riot between Hindu Yadavs and Muslims in the town of Bihar Sharif, left many dead and many more, seriously injured. Indira Gandhi, on learning of the dreadful events, visited the area, immediately. Gruesome events of a similar nature took place in Assam in 1983. There was little that the Prime Minister could do in these circumstances, except to show her concern.

Trouble was brewing in Punjab as well. In 1983, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, leading the Sikhs, demanded a greater measure of independence from the central government, if not a separate state. Bhindranwale, having made the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the holiest shrine of the Sikhs, his headquarters, encouraged and fostered a hatred of Hindus, of Congress and of India in general, among the Sikhs.

With his encouragement, violence against Hindus erupted on October 6, 1983. Indira Gandhi responded by taking decisive action. She dismissed her own Congress government in the state, imposed President’s Rule, declared Punjab a Disturbed Area, invoked emergency internal security protocols and ordered the Indian army to remove armed militants from the Golden Temple. Operation Blue Star had begun.

Governor General Mountbatten recieves his successor at the head of the grand steps, forecourt, Government House, New Delhi, June 1948. The author of the book, Rajmohan Gandhi was a grandson of both the Mahatma and Rajagopalachari

Contrary to what the military intelligence had led the Prime Minister to believe, there were many more followers of Bhindranwale within the Golden Temple Complex in Amritsar, than she had anticipated. Thus, despite orders to use minimum force, the storming of the Golden Temple resulted in heavy casualties on both sides. The result was that Indira Gandhi became a much-hated figure among the Sikhs. In 1984, two of her own trusted Sikh bodyguards assassinated her. She was succeeded by her son Rajiv Gandhi, who, like his mother, became the victim of a political assassin later on.

While Indira Gandhi had veered sharply away from the policies of the governments headed by Nehru, the current Prime Minister of India, Narendra Damodardas Modi, discarded them altogether. Modi’s political career began in December 2002 when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won in Gujarat and he became the Chief Minister of Gujarat. On June 8, 2014, the BJP named the Gujarat Chief Minister as its Prime Ministerial candidate. Born in 1950 after India’s independence, he sought the vote of a nation that appeared to have abandoned the ethos of those who fought for independence.

In the event, Narendra Modi and the BJP won the 2014 election resoundingly with Congress reduced to a historic low of a mere 44 seats. The left parties fared as badly, losing power in their traditional strongholds.

If the first four decades of independent India could be categorized as those shaped by the Nehru-Gandhi nexus, India after 2014 was being shaped by Modi. If the ethos of the former was ‘democratic republicanism and secularism’, the latter embraced ‘majoritarian nationalism and Hindutva’. By 2019, the Modi era was in full swing. Elections that year for the BJP were almost a mere formality, and the election of Modi for a second term, a foregone conclusion.

To borrow Gopal Gandhi’s words from 2019 onward, the Modi era has been firm and strong, with ‘its supporters a heaving ocean and its critics a still pond’. However, some cracks have since appeared in Modi’s popularity. A massive protest by the farmers of North India against certain farm laws and Prime Minister Modi’s retraction of them, Arundathi Roy’s persistent and searing one-woman criticism plus the most recent protest by the Cockroach Janata Party which demanded and secured the resignation of the Minister of Education, Dharmenda Pradhan in July 2026, are indicative of the fact that the Modi government, however electorally powerful it is, cannot suppress forever the will of the people of India.

In his epilogue in The Undying Light, Gopal Gandhi shares some concluding thoughts with his readers. Those which resonated with me are the following:

The economic disparity of India where 220 million Indians out of a population of 1.428 billion live below the poverty line. This ranks India, 11th out of 125 nations in the Global Hunger Index; 129th out of 146 countries surveyed in the Global Gender report and 176th out of 180 nations surveyed in the Environmental Performance index. Ironically, however, it ranks third in the Forbes billionaire list;

The author’s reference to Manmohan Singh whom he rightly describes as, ‘the last living Statesman I have known’. On his passing at almost the end of December 2024, Gopal Gandhi observes that ‘[the] Indian Sky had decidedly darkened at the departure of this good man’, who had shown us all that there was space in politics for decency and for decency in politics;

His reiteration of Mahatma Gandhi’s prayer in the months before his voice was stilled: ‘Grant, please, God, good sense to all’. He then draws our attention to Babasaheb Ambedkar, the man who had crafted India’s Constitution. who joined the Mahatma’s funeral procession with no fanfare and, due to his poor health, walked in it for only a short distance. He then refers to the fact that Mahatma Gandhi and Ambedkar had had disagreements on matters political but that all of them – Subhas Bose, Nehru, Patel, Kripalini, Azad, Ambedkar and Gandhi, despite their disagreements and different views, stood for a united India based on the highest principles and values.

Saroj Devi and Gukesh were two individuals who displayed on the world stage what it is to be generous and magnanimous to one’s rival. The former, the mother of the javelin thrower Neraj Chopra was warmly appreciative of Arshad Nadeem of Pakistan who bettered Chopra’s throw. Nadeem reciprocated in similar vein.

Likewise, when 18-year- old Gukesh, became the world chess champion on 12 December, 2024, he paid tribute to his Chinese opponent, saying that he ‘is a true champion’. Had they been around, I feel that while Mahatma Gandhi would have been delighted to hear of the bond between the representatives of India and Pakistan, Krishna Menon and Jawaharlal Nehru might have rued afresh the missed opportunities to have forged a closer link with China before the war erupted at the border.

In the course of his book, Gopal Gandhi says, ‘The independent India that has surfed the moon, holds dark craters in its soul’ and that, ‘Just as perversion hides and is never suspected to exist until it is too late, human solidarity stays unseen and unknown to stir at a moment’s notice. That is India, the theatre of strife between the hideous and the humane’.

The narrative of how India emerged from the shadow of Western imperial domination to be the proudly independent country it is today, is well known. But in Gopal Gandhi’s masterly account, the reader is placed at the very epicentre of this evolution and made privy to behind-the-scenes happenings, when its leaders sought to heal the wounds of partition and build a cohesive new nation.

Gopal Gandhi offers the reader insight into significant events that took place in India, from the time before independence to the present, while, at the same time, presenting a nuanced critique of key figures who played a part in shaping the India of today. Despite its mammoth length, the book is unputdownable; and Gopal Gandhi’s love for his country is plain for all to see. In the final reckoning, Gopal Gandhi makes it abundantly clear to the reader that no matter what challenges the future may bring, India will always hold its own.

And so, it is appropriate for Gopal Gandhi to end on an optimistic note when he observes that:

India’s light can dim; it cannot, will not die.