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Warrior of the Fourth
Estate
RAMNATH GOENKA lived by the norms he himself set. But to search for those norms is to search for a needle in a haystack. He was a bundle of contradictions. He believed in the freedom of the Press so long as he could hire and fire his editors. He built his "fourth estate" on the solid foundations of his real estate. Goenka valued ethics so long as it did not come in the way of using his newspapers for personal political campaigns. He claimed to be neutral while hobnobbing with the Right and winning a Lok Sabha seat with its support. He laid great store by democracy even when he had no compunction in employing every trick to browbeat his employees. He had a scientific bent of mind, which did not disturb his patronage to godmen. And when a rival publisher described Goenka as one who committed every crime under the Indian Penal Code, save murder, which too would not have been a taboo, had a need arisen, he simply laughed it away. For all his failings, he would still be ranked as one of the makers of modern India. An authoritative biography of Goenka was, therefore, long overdue. The Express group could not have found a better person than B.G. Verghese to shoulder this responsibility. He knew Goenka, having been the editor of the Indian Express for over three years. It must be said to his credit that he did not allow the book to end up as a hagiography. He has brought out the best in his subject, warts and all.
Goenka saw to it that his political interests did not subsume his business interests. Verghese provides a peep into his business acumen when he narrates an incident when Mahatma Gandhi, on a visit to Madras, found it difficult to cope with the rush for his Darshan. Goenka found a solution: "This he did by persuading Gandhi to stand at the doorway in front of which he spread a white cloth on which he said each person should place a donation to the Congress, each according to his or her ability. The stratagem worked! Darshan was granted and a goodly collection obtained". He had the Midas touch when in 1932, he bought Tamil Nadu, originally a vernacular weekly but a daily since 1927, and converted it into the Indian Express. By the time he died, he presided over a media empire spanning the country in seven languages and read daily by some five million people. Verghese has not narrated this stupendous story in a chronological order with the result that there are many avoidable repetitions. Goenka fought many a battle in his life, some of them for petty monetary gains, but the one fight which would be recorded in golden letters in the history of Indian journalism is when he took on the might of the government during the Emergency. When most other newspapers crawled when they were asked to bend, he valiantly fought back. This was the only time Goenka found use in the Working Journalists Act, which he quoted like the Scripture to resist pressures for the sacking or transfer of some of his editors like Kuldip Nayar and Ajit Bhattacharjea, whom the establishment found inconvenient because of their outspokenness. Thankfully, Verghese expends quite a few pages on this glorious chapter in the annals of the Express. But too many details on Goenka’s court battles, his shareholdings in IISCO and the fight he had with Dhirubai Ambani are a distraction for the readers. The Indian Express never turned pink and Parvati Krishnan was with the CPI, not CPM. Such errors do not redound to the credit of the author. Most readers would find the virtual sacking of V.K. Narasimhan, who held aloft the Express flag during the Emergency, incomprehensible. But then was Goenka ever comprehensible? He ran the empire on the assumption that the Express was Goenka himself. He was not a great institution builder in the sense he could not foreclose the possibility of a vertical split in the organisation with the southern editions of the Indian Express adding a "New" to their mastheads to stamp the separation. The Express was never known to be a profit-maker. It barely managed to bring out editions and pay the staff their salaries in time. But there is something in the Express, which enables a young reporter to be irreverent as he deals with those in power and authority. It is a trait that seeps into anyone who has ever worked with the newspaper. A legacy of Goenka, this keeps the Indian Express, feared rather than respected. |
There is very little in
the book on Goenka’s early life from the day he was born at
Dildarnagar, near Darbhanga in Bihar, in 1904 to his arrival in Madras
with no more than a "lota and a nine-cubic-feet dhoti"
in 1922. The famed "Marwari enterprise" was in his blood and
it did not take long for him to earn wealth and fame in the southern
metropolis and a seat in the Madras Legislative Council at the young age
of 22.