SEEING RED

A PORTRAIT OF SMRITI ZUBIN IRANI, THE POLITICIAN, AS A FIRST-TIME NOVELIST

- Shreevatsa Nevatia

Shortly after Maoists ambushed a CRPF convoy on April 6, 2010, killing 76 of its personnel, Smriti Zubin Irani was invited to discuss the violence on a 9 o’clock television news programme. Irani remembers the day well: “One of the panelists said, ‘When you get into the armed or paramilitary forces and wear its uniform, you know you have written a prescription for your own death.’ What if a family member of an officer was watching that debate? I was infuriated, and for a decade, that rage only kept building.”

Anger—never an easy emotion to process—sometimes needs to be channelised, and for Irani, it was her writing desk that became a site of catharsis. “I wanted to manifest my rage somewhere, and I thought it could be expressed as part of a fictional story,” she says. Lal Salaam, Irani’s debut novel, releases on November 29. On the surface, it has attributes of a thriller— unadorned prose, unobvious twists, an undeterred detective—but beneath it all, the book is plain polemic. It rebukes Maoism, its philosophies, practice and also its idealisation. “For the longest time, the romanticisation of the Naxal movement was a story told everywhere. Popular literature never really made place for the gory truth.”

In 2015, when Irani was the Union minister for human resource development, she went to Dantewada to meet its people, especially its children, but her research for Lal Salaam, she tells india today, exceeded the odd official trip: “I have had the privilege of meeting some of the finest officers who have served in the red corridor. It was from their experiences, from public records, from my interface with citizens at large, that I’ve tried to draw a parallel to the ground operations of the Naxal movement.”