THE OUTSIDERS

Rajya Sabha members elected from outside their home states: Manmohan Singh: Lived in Punjab, worked in Delhi and was elected from Assam M. Venkaiah Naidu: The BJP president from Andhra Pradesh has been elected from neighbouring Karnataka Arun Shourie: The Stephenian who grew up and worked in Delhi represents Uttar Pradesh.

If Kuldip Nayar entered the Supreme Court earlier this week smelling of mothballs, that came as no surprise. His metaphorical black coat hadn’t had an airing for more than half a century. At 78, the man who has been journalist, author, academic, activist and diplomat in turn (and sometimes all of those at once) had put his law degree from Lahore University to use for the first time in his life.

Last week he filed a PIL in the Supreme Court, challenging the deletion by an amendment last year of a rule that makes it mandatory for a person to be a resident of a state if he seeks to be elected from there to the Rajya Sabha.

When the case came up for hearing, Nayar argued for himself. He spoke with considerable emotion — some even say he got a little carried away. The motion began on a personal note. “I told the Chief Justice of India that as a law student it had been my biggest dream to appear before the country’s highest court of law,” he says. “It took 58 years for the dream to come true.”

While some wondered what that had to do with the PIL at stake, the rest agreed that the man was sticking to form — Nayar has a penchant for giving things a dramatic turn. Some years ago, he was calling for peace on the Wagah border. Just a few months ago, he was urging civil society to stand up and be counted electorally. And now, his energies are focussed on the Rajya Sabha.

Nayar believes that the Upper House has been reduced to a “dumping ground” for defeated political leaders (his own term in it has expired). He was a Rajya Sabha member when the Representation of People Act amendment bill was floated last year. “I opposed it tooth and nail,” he says. But the bill got passed anyway.

If the Supreme Court, at its scheduled hearing on July 14, gives a favourable judgment, it will shake the destiny of many a Parliamentarian and would-be lawmaker. There is, already, a posse of politicians waiting to make its way to Parliament through the circuitous route of the states. If Nayar has his way, they will not be able to do so.

Nayar discovered the joys of activism when Indira Gandhi had him jailed during the Emergency. “In jail, I realised that the pen was not mighty enough. Grass-root activism was a more effective tool against political high-handedness,” he says. The latest on Nayar’s activism agenda is the People’s Political Front, a body that fielded two candidates for the Parliament elections earlier this year. Both lost.

But Nayar is not hanging up his boots, not yet. Even if age has its ways of catching up. On a flying visit to Bangalore, he played the perfect host in his hotel room, keeping the percolator filled with water and asking guests if they preferred tea or coffee almost as soon as they got in the door. Ten minutes into the conversation, Nayar realised he’d forgotten to switch the kettle on. But if memory sometimes fails the lanky, grey-haired gent, his associations with political bigwigs — from Gandhi and Nehru, down to Patel, Indira, JP, and, more recently, Vajpayee, remain fresh in his mind. “I have been instrumental in setting up third fronts against the BJP,” he says with not a little pride.

He is an avid BJP-basher. And religion, he says, is the reason why Nayar’s family left a flourishing establishment in Sialkot and fled to India, post-Partition. Kuldip was put in a caravan headed for Delhi with Rs 140 in his pocket, and through the treacherous road to India, he saw blood on both sides of the border. “It made me angry about religion as a system,” he says.

Nayar made another resolve on the 150-km caravan ride to India: “Indo-Pak peace became a commitment with me.”

So Nayar travelled on Vajpayee’s bus to Lahore, lit candles at the border and led a delegation to Pakistan. He’s as acquainted with the leaders across the border as he is with his own, but he is cynical of any efforts they may have made to achieve peace on the subcontinent. “They’ve all lacked commitment,” he pronounces.

Nayar may have started out as a journalist but he has enjoyed many avatars, including that of high commissioner to the UK, and it is now politics that gets his adrenalin rushing. Mention the word and it triggers a time bomb of associations in him. Journalism, he confesses, came about only by accident. His family lived in Daryaganj and young Kuldip, spurred by his love for delicacies of the kind not allowed in a vegetarian household, often went restaurant-hunting in the bylanes of the neighbouring Jama Masjid. It was on one such trip that he walked into a local CPI office and was referred for a job with an Urdu daily.

He started his career in journalism with the paper Anjam – which means ‘the end’. “I began with the end,” he jokes. But Nayar — ever the peripatetic — didn’t stick on for long. He went away to Chicago to study journalism, convinced that language journalism had no future. Back in India, Nayar headed the United News of India, was appointed resident editor of The Statesman in Delhi and was editor of The Indian Express.

He still writes an occasional column, but for Nayar, clearly, the focus is on the self-appointed task of cleaning the Augean stables of the Indian electoral system. And Nayar believes that the work will be done. “It will be a victory for civil society emerging as a counter-force to political parties,” he says. Even, perhaps, to the People’s Political Front.