Dear Smt. Smriti Zubin Irani Ji,

I had no plan to write this open letter to you. It is circumstances which forced me to do so. I attended your programme at the recent Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) where you were in conversation with Pragya Tiwari based on your crime thriller ‘Laal Salaam’.

Actually, there was no need for me to attend the session, as I had attended another online session of the JLF where my friend, S Prasannarajan, introduced the same book. After listening to you, I bought the book online and read it one go. I wrote a review of the book on Facebook. Let me add here, I found the book quite readable and engaging. What the last sentence contained was a jerk for me! 

After listening to you at Jaipur, I wanted to ask you a simple question. Despite my best efforts to draw Pragya Tiwari’s attention, I failed to do so. One of my friends and writer Chetna Keer saw my predicament and tried to help me. Instead of giving me the microphone, it was given to her and she had no intention to ask a question.

The Front Lawn where the event took place was overflowing with book lovers. I remember a Colonel of the Indian Army thanking you for presenting the chief protagonist of the novel, Vikram Pratap Singh, in the correct perspective and how as a uniformed person he felt proud.

That was enough of a provocation for you to bring home the point that the armed forces were doing a wonderful job. My father was a soldier and I have done the war correspondents course organised by the defence ministry. In any case, we all citizens are proud of our armed forces.

The question I wanted to ask you was: “What was the need for introducing a character called Samuel Chandy?” He does not play any role at all in the investigation of the case. While you present Vikram Pratap Singh as a bold, brave officer, Chandy is a good-for-nothing CRPF officer.

Let me quote from the book: “The CO (Chandy) pours so much milk into his cup that he seems to be having milk with tea rather than the other way around.” As a Malayali and Syrian Christian to boot, I felt bad reading about the caricatured version of a senior CRPF officer. 

You claim that it was the “massacre” of a large group of CRPF personnel by the Naxalites in Chhattisgarh which prompted you to write the book. You may not even be aware that it was one Chandy, who first reported the massacre. Many factors like luck, contacts, speed, availability of telecommunication facilities etc play a role in doing a scoop.

I am not a supporter of Naxalism. I believe in non-violence. I am happy to hear from you that the Naxal problem is on the wane. I want it to be over at the earliest. Having said this, the picture you portrayed of the Naxalites running a Rs 200 billion industry is utterly unbelievable. Do you mean to say that they collect Rs 200 billion every year? It was like Modi claiming that hundreds of crores of rupees were spent on Sonia Gandhi’s treatment.

On what basis did you arrive at this figure? You also portray the Naxalites as rapists and child traffickers. How can you make such wild allegations from a stage where literature was discussed? Who are the Naxalites? They are poor people who have been cheated of their rights and privileges as citizens of this country. 

I personally saw how a tribal woman, who was going to the Chaibasa market in South Bihar, now Jharkhand, with a live chicken in her hand was deprived of the bird by two motorcycle-borne persons.

Of course, they threw a currency note at her as they sped away. She picked up the note and was wondering why this was done to her. I could not do anything except mention it in a column I did. Do you think that the woman was out to wreck the state?

Many decades ago, I read an article written by Justice VR Krishna Iyer about his journey in what was known as the USSR. A woman boarded the plane and sat next to him. She had a basket in her hand. And, do you know what it contained? A live chicken.

You may ask me whether passengers are allowed to carry such a basket. I do not know but it was a domestic flight. If that tribal woman in Singhbhum turned against the dikkus, as the outsiders were called, could she be blamed?

Everything is not white and black, as you presume. There are also shades of grey which you should accept. I know that you may brand me as an urban Naxal but I can’t help it. I know what the all-powerful Indian state did to Fr Stan Swamy who was not even told what crime he committed.

A girl from the audience reminded you that one day you, too, would fail. Everybody was stunned but you took her comment a little philosophically. I admire you for that. But what you said in response to it was shocking. You said, you had your moment of failure at Amethi in 2014.

Where was the failure, Madam? You were immediately accommodated in the Union Cabinet and given a portfolio only persons of such stature as Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Prof Nurul Hasan, Arjun Singh and Murli Manohar Joshi held. It showed your leader’s utter contempt for the democratic process. You were not the only beneficiary.

Another star of the Cabinet was Arun Jaitley, who was roundly defeated by the Congress in Amritsar. He was given finance and defence portfolios. You call it defeat? My friend’s novel is titled “Giddha on My Gulmohar”. You were allowed to do a Giddha On Your Failure at Amethi.

You made a claim that “I am fighting against a legacy (Gandhi family) that is bleeding my country dry”. What has the Gandhi family done to you? Or, to the country? Where did they take away the country’s wealth? Your party used to say that Sonia Gandhi would return to Italy if the Congress lost power. Have they gone anywhere?

If they have taken the national wealth, why is it that your government has not done anything to recover it? Do you know how the economy was ruined when demonetisation was introduced without anybody in the Cabinet knowing about it? You have no idea because you live in your fantasy world of success.

You were claiming great success as an actor, a writer and a politician. Recently, Malayalam cinema lost a great actress in the death of KPAC Lalitha. I have seen some episodes of the serial in which you acted. Do you think it was great acting? You might have made much more money than Lalitha, who virtually died poor. Success is a relative term. I heard you saying that you were poor etc. Many successful people make such claims to curry favour with the audience. 

I knew one Christian preacher who spoke only about his days of poverty. I never understood how he could have been so poor in Kerala when his father was a government employee. It is like Modiji saying that he was a tea-seller, though nobody has ever seen him selling tea.  

I did not know in what context you suddenly mentioned, “We had genocide of a whole community in Kashmir and nobody spoke about it”. Some of those in the crowd would have enjoyed the reference. To be frank, I did not know why you raked up Kashmir all of a sudden.

I realised later that you said it in the context of a film called “Kashmir Files”. Someone sent me a picture of UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath shedding tears while watching the film. For all you know, it may be a fake picture. I have not seen the film but it is about the migration of Kashmiri Pandits.

I grew up hearing or reading about the migration of a whole group of people from Egypt to Canan under the leadership of Moses. It took them 40 years to cover the distance we can now cover in a few hours. The book of Exodus in the Bible is all about it. Over the last three weeks, millions of people have migrated from Ukraine to neighbouring countries like Poland and Romania.

Forced migration is terrible. Whether it is in India or abroad. In my younger days, there was a Malayalam movie which was exempted from tax. You know why? The film promoted the idea of family planning. I have forgotten the title of the film. Educational films should be promoted. Equally important, films that promote national integration, too, used to be given tax exemption.

It is for the first time that state governments led by the BJP are competing with one another to provide tax exemption. In Madhya Pradesh, government employees are given paid holiday to see the film. Even Modi has been subtly promoting the movie.

What is so great about it? I will wait for the fervour to end to see the movie. I visited Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. And I have seen houses vacated by the Pandits. I did a story on such houses. They hoped the Pandits would one day reclaim their houses. One house I photographed had only one door that remained!

Now, how did the Pandits’ migration happen? MJ Akbar is a senior member of your party. He was a minister in Modi’s Cabinet. In other words, he was your colleague in the government. He had to leave the government, because of a case about which I do not want to write.

Akbar wrote a book titled “Kashmir: Behind the Vale (LotusRoli)”. Let me quote a few lines from the concluding portion of the book: “Jagmohan’s response was to combine a programme of pure terror with the politics of pure manipulation. On the one hand, he encouraged the growing Hindu-Muslim divide and persuaded the already frightened Hindus in the Valley to migrate, convinced that their refugee status would generate support for the whip-hand tactics which appealed to his temperament. 

“Simultaneously, he felt that this was the moment to finish both the National Conference and the Congress from the Valley. And he proposed to fill the political vacuum with the militants! He was quite ready to offer them power in Kashmir as the quid pro quo for technical acceptance of India's geographical boundaries…

“A small ray of political hope appeared when George Fernandes, Union Railway Minister, was given additional charge of Kashmir in March, but his positive beginning was sabotaged when VP Singh succumbed to BJP-Jagmohan pressure. 

“Politics, not policy, was the sole motivation of the 11 months of VP Singh’s prime ministership, and blood stained more than one corner of India, as each of his “moves” evoked an opposite, if not, always equal reaction. 

“Kashmir, tragically, was emptied of its Hindus by this awful violence — so that for the first time since Bud Shah brought them back Kashmir’s Pandits were forced to leave their homeland. That was the saddest wound on Kashmiriyat”.

Jagmohan was a BJP leader. Now, tell me why are you giving tax exemption to a film that should have shown the machinations of Jagmohan and the political forces behind him. 

I have one more question to ask you, you have been a minister since 2014. What have you done for the benefit of the Kashmiri Pandit? Do you know that for every Kashmiri Pandit killed by the terrorists, hundreds of Kashmiri Muslims were killed, equally brutally.

What has your government done for the victims of terror, whether Muslim or Hindu? Precious nothing. Having read “Lal Salaam”, let me request you to confine yourself to the realm of either fiction or fact but not a combination of both.

Yours etc 

ajphilip@gmail.com