Kuldip Nayar
The real force of a general problem or crisis strikes us only when the affair comes to have a personal application. Thus it is With the arrest of The Spectator's Indian correspondent, Kuldip Nayar, distinguished alike by his career in his own country and his informed contributions to our own columns and those of the Times. Kuldip Nayar is merely one of many victims of Mrs Gandhi's state of dictatorship, and he may well have suffered less than many others; but he is our friend and colleague, and we have a special concern for him. In recent months he has, clearly, become more critical of the Indian government than he had been before: the strength of his work for The Spectator lay more in his sympathetic exegesis of the difficulties and problems of Indian government than in any crusading or hectoring quality. Indeed, especially during the Indo-Pakistani war he continually demonstrated rare insight into and understanding of the special difficulties which confronted the Indian government. Before Mrs Gandhi declared her state of emergency many English papers — including this one — wrote with warm sympathy of the survival of democracy in India which the verdict of the court on Mrs Gandhi's electoral activities seemed, for a brief moment, to demonstrate. Undoubtedly the Indian Prime Minister has had much to put up with from fractious opposition; and undoubtedly there are many political activists in India disloyal both to the established government and to the Constitution. But Kuldip Nayar cannot have been one of them; for we know that he was a loyal citizen as well as a highly. professional journalist. His arrest makes it clear how small was the substance of our initial optimism about the future of India; and makes more certain the descent of night on the democracy of that great country.
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