'Guru, nothing is going wrong. And nothing is going right. Life is boring.' This is how Ramnath Goenka, the founder of the Indian Express group, used to lament in the mid 1980s when there was very little political activity in the country with Rajiv Gandhi in power with an unprecedented three fourths majority in Lok Sabha. Ramnath Goenka, the man who, for four decades, monopolised the precept and practice of freedom of the press in free India, hated inactivity. That is why life seemed boring to him even if everything was going okay. To him there was no life is good life and good living. Life meant in his dictionary life full of activity, of challenges and tussles. That was why he found life meaningless when nothing was happening. Something must keep happening, even if it were not to his liking.

So bored he was that in the later part of 1980s, and with no activity worth the name in politics that has stagnated, he launched into a different kind of battle against corruption -- the battle against the corruptor, who always gets away with corrupting the system and those who run the system. He drew me in to that battle and that changed my life once and for all. Ramnath Goenka's battle against the corrupt and the corruptor brought together both who converged against him. Finally he ended up in a war against the most powerful of the governments in free India, the Rajiv Gandhi government, on Bofors, submarine and other scandals. That became his final war - the war in which the man came out, once again, as the victor. But that victory was not ordinary victory as much as the war was no ordinary war. Ramnath Goenka had to employ all his political skills to bring together the entire spectrum of non-congress parties, from the BJP to the Marxists, to defeat a Prime Minister who commanded the greatest majority in Parliament in free India. The result was not a great government, but one just enough to replace Rajiv Gandhi. And that was all that the old warrior wanted.

Whether it was the fight against Pundit Nehru on the Mundhra issue in 1950s or his battle with Indira Gandhi who Goenka charged with splitting the congress party to serve her personal interests in 1960s, or the greatest war of his life that Goenka waged against the internal emergency in 1970s, each one of these epic events constituted a land mark in the evolution of a non-formal moral power that acted as a safeguard against authoritarianism and corruption. In most battles he was alone, fighting his adversaries like Abhimanyu did in Mahabharata war, but with a difference. The Abhimanyu in Ramnath Goenka aimed to win, and not just to fight and die. He was in that sense like a Shivaji who fought to win and not like a Maharana Pratap who fought and demonstrated his valour and lost. Goenka, the battle veteran, was always calculative. His battle norms rested on his calculus of victory. He was, as a keen observer of him once said, a Rajput among Marwaris! The bania in him ran the business and ran it successfully and the Shivaji in him waged and won the political wars for him. He was a strange alloy, a special alloy of great qualities. He was God fearing and he knew no other fear. His day never opened without his going to temples. When in Delhi he would be seen in the Hanumanji mandir in Karol Bagh; when in Chennai he would be in the Kapali temple, Myalpore every day. He brought in Jayaprakash Narayan in to the Bihar movement via Tirupati. When JP had reservations about leading the Bihar movement on health grounds saying he would not live for long, Ramnathji, along with Nanaji Deshmukh and Ramdhari Singh Dhinkar, took him to Tirupati where Dhinkarji prayed to the Lord to give the remaining years of his life to JP. All of them returned to Chennai, and Dhinkarji died on the lap of JP in Ramnath Goenka's house. This was how JP was brought into the Bihar movement which changed the grammar of national politics in mid 1970s.

He ran his newspapers with a high moral purity. He chose editors of high intellectual and moral standing.Whether it was Frank Moraes, or Mulgaonkar, VK Narasimhan or George Verghese, Arun Shourie, or NS Jagannathan, AN Sivaraman or Iravatham Mahadeven, they were all men of high moral and intellectual integrity. He made editors drive the paper, and news fuel the readers mind. He used to say that the Indian Express must be the talk of the town. He used to point out how important is news more than views saying that the news once published could not be ignored by other newspapers. He knew how to energise and activate the parliament or assembly through his exposes in his paper. He exposed and fixed many Chief Ministers and even Prime Ministers. But he kept himself away from any kind of publicity. When accidentally a photograph in which he was seen as talking to MG Ramachandran and Morarji Desai was carried in the Indian Express, he felt humiliated. Why? His photo has appeared in his own paper!

Arun Shourie used to say that Ramnath Goenka was really Article 19(1) (a) of the Constitution that gave the right of freedom of expression. Yes he represented the spirit of the freedom of the press enshrined in the Constitution. He was willing to stake his entire empire repeatedly to fight to write what his editors and he wanted appear in his paper. He fought against powerful governments and also powerful businessmen. His paper was never financially strong. It had a strong voice but not a big purse. Yet that mattered very little to him. He used to quote the Bhagvat Gita to say that one must get into battle without looking at the gain or loss that would result. The verse in the Gita which he most liked and used to quote often was that in which Sri Krishna tells Arjuna, "If you win the war, you get this world; if you die in it you get the other world. So fight." This principle of battle guided all his battles with the high and mighty.

In the world of media today, which has turned into just a formula for making money and merry and in which page three personalities are slowly moving into page one, those who dissent against this hysterical pursuit of the trivia recall those days when the corrupt and the high and mighty used to tremble at the very name of Ramnath Goenka and his editors. One man like Goenka can even today reverse the trends in the media that is degenerating by the hour. All that one needs is leadership that has the courage to refuse to join the herd in rush for the smallest memento and possesses the vision and the imagination to prepare and present a different road map for the people of this country. Today is Akshaya Trithya. This was the day on which Ramnath Goenka was born. Today, more than ever,we need him and desperately.

Courtesy: www.newindpress.com, May 08, 2008