“The forsaken hero”

In the editorial "The forsaken hero” (Parsiana, July 21, 2012), certain opinions have been expressed and questions raised on the non-acceptance of the late Minoo Masani as Prime Minister of India, based on his son Zareer Masani’s comments in his memoirs And all is Said: Memories of a Home Divided.

Zareer has stated that "as a Parsi he (Minoo) could ever hope to be accepted as Prime Minister-in-waiting in a predominantly Hindu country. Your editorial suggests otherwise: "One wonders if being a Parsi is what prevented Masani from becoming the Prime Minister, or his stubbornness... After all the present Prime Minister is a Sikh...”

Kristi Mihir’s report on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in Time magazine of July 16, 2012 explores his past record based on information provided by Singh’s sister Gobind Kaur. Born in what is now Pakistan, at the time of partition of the country the Singhs fled to Amritsar on the Hindu side where the family found their feet in the young nation. "Kaur remembers her elder brother as a social but serious boy who studied feverishly, and whose hero was Bhagat Singh, the freedom fighter... By the time he was 30, Singh had economics degrees from Panjab University and Cambridge, plus a doctorate from Oxford. He went on to occupy India’s key economic posts becoming a governor of the Reserve Bank of India and deputy chairman of the Planning Commission.”

With such credentials how could Singh be bypassed for the premiership? One must remember that Masani and Singh were potential candidates at different periods of India’s political history, never rival candidates.

Can one fault the government for ignoring Masani? Objectively speaking, could a Prime Minister with roots neither in the Hindu majority or the Muslim minority have been able to cope with crisis after crisis brought about by the Hindu-Muslim divide? This would have been a dilemma for anyone holding the post.

To illustrate, I would like to mention what happened at the time of the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992. The late Arjun Singh, chief minister of Madhya Pradesh wrote in his posthumously published memoirs, A Grain of Sand in the Hourglass of Time: "Prime Minister Narasimha Rao was trying to keep everyone happy on the Ayodhya imbroglio. Whenever news of a serious nature came to him, he immediately wanted to meet someone or the other from the Hindutva brigade in an attempt to smooth ruffled feathers, so much so that, at one stage he even decided to call on the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) chief (Baladaheb Deoras) himself and implore him to relieve the pressure on the government.” Would Masani have been able to do such a thing?

Zareer’s conclusion may be right, but so was the government’s decision. In the aftermath of the demolition, which Parsi Prime Minister would have been able to cope with matters like the burning of the Sabarmati Express at Godhra, the subsequent riots in Gujarat, SIMI (Students’ Islamic Movement of India), Al Qaeda, the bomb blast at German Bakery in Poona, terrorists Abu Jundal and Kasab, a trigger-happy nation like Pakistan which harbored Osama bin Laden and terrorized our country by lying about its connection with the Taliban, etc? Can any Parsi hope to fit the bill?

RASHID G. KHOSRAVI