From Quest to New Quest

Turmoil and Transition

________________________________

The year 1972 was a turning point in independent, post-colonial India’s history. It
was the year in which Indira Gandhi found her formula for success and popularity.
India humiliated Pakistan in a large scale war and helped the linguistic nationalist
people of East Pakistan to carve out their own nation-state---Bangladesh. In her
own strident style, India’s first female Prime Minister brought under her own
control all intelligence agencies: the RAW, the CBI, the IB, and revenue
intelligence. This was a step towards autocratic rule though hardly anybody saw in
it the seed of the forthcoming national emergency in 1975 after the Allahabad
High Court nullified her own election and her opposition demanded her
resignation in a vociferous chorus.

However, my story of the transition from Quest to New Quest needs a flash-back
to more than a decade before the Emergency era in which Minoo Masani insisted
that the publication of Quest be suspended in protest of the pre-censorship laws
imposed by Mrs Gandhi on all media. A.B. Shah’s response was exactly the
opposite. He wanted to defy pre-censorship by publishing the magazine without
submitting its contents to government censors. When there was a deadlock on the
use of the registered name Quest, Shah opted to launch New Quest.

It was both a personality clash between Masani and Shah and a difference in their
political response to dictatorial rule. Shah’s style was closer to that of Jayaprakash
Narayan’s. It was Gandhian in a way. New Quest was to be a voice of protest,
freedom, and democracy as well as of faith in the use of the intellect as a weapon
to preserve its own liberty.

Minoo and J.P. were close friends and comrades since they were in the socialist
wing of the pre-independence Indian National Congress. But they had drifted
away from each other in their political views since. Minoo was for a liberal
capitalist political economy and J.P. was still a socialist and more Gandhian than
ever before. J.P. courted imprisonment by confronting Mrs Gandhi. Masani
distanced himself from what became the biggest political upheaval since India
became an independent nation state.

Quest was a periodical launched during the cold war and unknown to its
management by the Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom the finance came
through conduits set up by the CIA. Quest was modelled on Encounter that was
also financed by the same secret sources. The Indian Committee for Cultural
Freedom was rocked when its alleged CIA connection was exposed.

Stephen Spender, the Editor of Encounter and a leading British poet, resigned to
distance himself from a scandal that rocked the intellectual world. Communists the
world over took their opportunity to sling mud at liberal intellectuals associated
with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, from the early 1960s through the early
1970s. The Cold War had peaked during the Cuban missile crisis. John Kennedy
was assassinated. Chinese troops had crossed the McMohan line into Indian
territory. Jawaharlal Nehru had died.

During this turbulent period of transition, I became a member of the executive

committee of the Indian Committee of Cultural Freedom at the instance of
Professor A.B. Shah, who was the new Director of Programmes in India of the
Congress for Cultural Freedom, now openly financed by a time-bound grant from
the Ford Foundation----capitalist yes, but State Department controlled, positively
and remotely no. I joined Shah as his assistant looking after cultural programmes
and publications.

Two stalwarts of the freedom struggle era, Minoo Masani and Jayaprakash
Narayan, lent their prestige to the Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom. The
image of Quest remained untarnished in the community of liberal Indian
intellectuals. Ably edited by Abu Sayyad Ayyub and Amlan Datta, Quest was the
only magazine of its kind in India with wide and varied contents.

Laeeq Futtehally was its literary and reviews editor and V.V. John and G.D. Parikh
were the new editorial duo when I started writing regularly for Quest. Antoinette
Diniz (who later married the physician, poet, and painter Gieve Patel) also worked
in the same office as did Sheila Singh whom Minoo Masani married after a long
courtship.

Our office was in the British colonial style Army and Navy Building at Kala
Ghoda, right across the street from the Jehangir Art Gallery. V. K. Sinha had been
with the ICCF before me and his friend, S.V. Raju, who worked in Minoo
Masani’s personnel and productivity consultancy next door on the same floor, also
functioned as secretary of the Swatantra Party of India founded by C.
Rajagopalachari and Minoo Masani.

Sinha and I were given a lift every evening by Raju in his car. We discussed
politics all the way. Masani was not only Raju’s employer but he was also his
mentor and. along with Rajaji, a father figure to him. Raju had exceptional
organizational skills, a ground-level understanding of how politics work, and an
ability to relate to people of all kinds. He was a key figure in the Swatantra Party,
though he remained behind the scenes. Sinha and he had been fellow students.
Sinha was a political scientist by training and before joining the ICCF as well as
after leaving it he taught political science in reputed colleges in Mumbai. He and I
were hand-picked by Shah when he resigned as a college principal to join the
ICCF as its full-time secretary.

A clash between Masani and Shah was inevitable. Both were liberal in ideology
but autocratic in behaviour.

Masani’s illustrious career awed us. After being educated at the London School of
Economics and being called at Lincoln’s Bar, he briefly practised law in Mumbai
before joining the freedom movement as a member of the Congress Socialist Party
along with Jayaprakash Narayan, Achyut Patwardhan, Yusuf Meherally, and Ram
Manohar Lohia. During the movement for independence he was imprisoned in
1932 and 1933. He was only 38 when he was elected Mayor of Bombay in 1933.

When Gandhiji launched the Quit India movement in 1942, Masani resigned his
jobs in the Tata organization to become a satyagrahi and spent two years in the
Nashik jail. Once out of jail, Masani entered legislative politics and was a member
of the Indian Legislative Assembly that became the Constituent Assembly later.
There he was a member of the Fundamental Rights Sub-committee and the Union-
Powers Sub-committee. The Government of India nominated Masani as its
representative on the United Nations Sub-Commission on Minorities. Later, he
was India’s Ambassador in Brazil.

In his student days in London in the 1920s, Masani became an ardent admirer of
the Soviet Union which he visited twice. However, Stalin’s excesses made him
recoil and revise his views. Eventually this disillusionment drove him towards a
more open, liberal ideology and its free market corollary. He was co-founder of the
Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom along with Jayaprakash Narayan, Asoka
Mehta, and A. D. Gorwala that was affiliated to the Congress For Cultural
Freedom in Paris. Quest was a periodical brought out by the ICCF during the peak
years of the Cold War.

Minoo was about twenty years older than A.B. Shah and Shah’s background was
entirely different. He was from a Gujarati Jain family near Surat but came to Pune
for his higher education and settled there to become a part of Maharashtrian
society. Shah studied and later taught higher mathematics in colleges in Pune and
Bombay. He had a deep interest in the history and the philosophy of science and
believed that a renaissance could be brought about in Indian society only through
the spread of scientific culture and rationalism. He was a staunch secularist and
critic of obscurantism in all forms.

Shah was a follower of M.N. Roy and the Royists were neither with the Congress
Party nor with the Communists. Roy himself was a prominent member of the
Communist International and had rubbed shoulders with the likes of Lenin,
Trotsky, and Stalin before differences with Stalin made him distant from the Soviet
communist party. On his return to India he founded his own Radical Democratic
Party which had only a minuscle following and he disbanded the party advising
his colleagues to get into the background of Indian culture to promote his ideal of
a cultural renaissance. Roy’s followers Lakshmanshastri Joshi, V. B. Karnik, and
G. D. Parikh were members of the ICCF.

Both Masani and Shah opposed Indira Gandhi’s Emergency rule and the
suspension of fundamental rights in that regime. Masani was already seventy in
1975 and he was withdrawing from active politics. His old CSP comrade,
Jayaprakash Narayan---though suffering from an irreversible kidney ailment----
found the strength to not only oppose Indira Gandhi but also to lead a mass
movement to demand the dissolution of her government. Shah was close to JP and
when Masani refused to continue publishing Quest under the banner of the ICCF,
Shah showed his dissent by launching New Quest and defy the censorship laws.

In September 1975, I joined the International Writing Program of the University of

Iowa and stayed on in the United States till the emergency was lifted and Mrs
Gandhi was decisively humiliated by a nation-wide mandate. New Quest was
launched when I was away from India but I remained its columnist and contributor
during that period and on my return Shah made V. K.Sinha and me its joint editors.

_______________________________________________(ENDS)