A Good Read on a Long Flight

Off to Boston, for the long flight, I took two books- Pakistani-British writer Kamila Shamsie's Kartography was one of them. There is a backstory to it

- Bhaskar Roy

A new publisher looking for good scripts, I landed in Wajahat Habibullah's office one day. Chairman of the National Commission for Minorities, he had worked with both Prime Ministers Indira and Rajiv Gandhi. The trait of mutual trust had actually run across generations.

On the wall behind his bureaucratic leather chair was a black-and-white photograph: Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and an equally handsome man riding their horses in a bucolic locale. 'My father,' Wajahat quietly said, noticing my curiosity.

General Enaith Habibullah of the British Indian Army opted for India when Pakistan was carved out in 1947, acceding to Jinnah's demand for a separate Muslim nation. A rule guiding the Defence Ministry left such Muslim officers no choice but to quit the Indian Army. The general sought Nehru's intervention. Backed by the Prime Minister, Enaith became the first Commandant of the prestigious National Defence Academy. The framed photo in Wajahat's office commemorates Nehru's visit to the Academy in Pune.

A rather reserved but efficient officer of the Indian Administrative Service, Wajahat's toughest challenge was negotiating with Islamic terrorists holed up in Kashmir's hallowed Hazaratbal shrine in 1993. When his efforts had just begun to show some signs of a thaw in the standoff between the authorities and dug-in ultras, he met with a terrible car accident, taking him off the scene with a skull fracture. Another time, separatist Kashmiri militants fired at him near the Jama Masjid in the older part of Srinagar, apparently in an attempt to kidnap him.

“You were close to Rajiv Gandhi, why don’t you write about the man you knew?” I pressed the point. “That would be a good book to read.”