Journalist Barkha Dutt’s debut as a writer, This Unquiet land, entails her accounts of various crucial points in Indian political history after the rise of television news reporting. Starting from her childhood, she proceeds to talk about her coverage of the Kargil war and her perceptions of the formidable Indian military, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, life in Kashmir, Indian politics, and much more. In an interview, she divulges further about her experiences.

You have provided personal accounts of many political events. Can journalists separate the personal and political, or rather, should we mark a distinction thereIJ

I think that’s a very interesting question. This book is partly personal, yet not a memoir of any kind. It’s not about me. I have written only about things that I have experienced as a reporter and I am using them to make a larger argument about India. I have not gone into areas that I have not reported on, like the stock market, or sports. This book entails what I have reported on and also how my own responses to those issues have changed over 20 years. Many of the things I experienced coincided with many of the changes in India. 

Now to address the second part of your question, can a journalist separate her personal opinions from objective reportingIJ I think in some cases, you can’t. I believe no matter what, homosexuality should be decriminalised, or marital rape should be recognised by the law, or disallowing a Dalit from entering a temple is wrong. So there are some issues where I think there’s no other side, and I take an activist’s position on them. Other than that, most things, such as the boundaries of nationalism, how do you define it, how do you construct secularism today in India, how has politics changed, what it means to be Right, left or Centre, does capitalism work, how do you tackle Naxalism, what do we do about Kashmir, and so on, on all these questions I am not ideological. I am quite willing to engage with different strands of opinion about them.

An important part of this book is a narrative on gender. Speculations about your personal life and vitriol against you particularly in social media refuse to die, and many of them are sexist remarks, do you attribute this to your genderIJ

I don’t know for sure, but I do wonder sometimes. But what I do know is that any woman in a public space will get scrutinised in a different way from men. To give you an example, I don’t know of any male colleague of mine whose personal life has been so dissected as mine has been. I keep getting tweets that I have a Kashmiri Muslim husband, which I don’t.

And Wikipedia, unless updated now, has married you three times over!

Yes, one of them to Haseeb Drabu, who is a friend of 20 years. Of course, I find that sexist, to conclude, “Oh her marriage explains her politics”. And I have not married even once. I don’t see the personal lives of Arnab Goswami, Rahul Kanwal, Rajdeep Sardesai ever commented upon to explain their positions. So certainly, one aspect of scrutinising a woman in a profession is through gender, but that applies to women in all fields.

Now because I’m from the first generation of television reporting, whatever happens on TV, somehow I become the shorthand for it. So on debates as to whether television made mistakes while reporting on 26/11, it’s no longer about television, it becomes about Barkha. Why should I be solely responsible for the industryIJ So yes, I am partly aware of being deconstructed on the basis of gender, but partly I am very conscious of not using the gender card to play victim. I think the slander comes from being at the turf of public eye.

There are very moving and thought-provoking accounts of your own experience of child sexual abuse by an older male relative. How difficult was to write about themIJ Did you decide to speak about them now because you are in a position toIJ

I thought really hard about whether to include it or not because it is traumatic to revisit those memories even today after so many years have passed.

You are absolutely right, somebody like me now has the protection of the environment to be able to talk about it, compared to other people. The reason I added it is two-fold. One, I cannot be writing a chapter on gender without being fully honest about my own experiences. Two, I want to say that it’s alright to come out and speak about it. And I hope if I do it, in some way, somebody who is in two minds may find it a little easier to go ahead with it.

You mention that when people in Mumbai went about their personal lives the very next day after the 26/11 attacks and everyone appreciated their spirit, it was not really about resilience but the fact that they hardly had any other option. As a reporter who has covered such attacks and riots, how prepared do you think we are to face terrorIJ

I think we are still very vulnerable. I’m not saying that nothing has changed after 26/11; the coastal security has improved, Intelligence gathering has improved and there’s new technical sophistication now, but the dilemma for all open societies is that every time you walk into a railway station or a mall, the thought that how easy it could be to plant a bomb in the crowd still crosses your mind. We are diverse, crowded and bustling, and that makes us a sitting duck target. Frankly, I think no country is terror-proof. look at what happened in California recently.

To give you an example, in India, when you enter most hotels, they screen your bags but in the US they don’t. I guess that’s because their focus is on Intelligence gathering, on pre-empting it. This is not a comment on any security apparatus, but I do feel that we should focus almost entirely on Intelligence gathering too. Terror should also be free from politicisation.

Were there more than 10 terrorists in the 26/11 attacksIJ

That’s what the former NSG chief told me. At that moment, the man who was overseeing the operation believed that there may have been more than 10 attackers. And he also could not corroborate it beyond an assessment of the way the operation was unfolding. The figure 10 was concluded on the basis of the number of AK-47s that were accounted for. I don’t think that is a very conclusive calculation.

The Ministry of External Affairs has now retaliated to your claim of a secret meeting between Narendra Modi and Nawaz Sharif in Nepal during the SAARC summit 2014 moderated by Steel honcho Sajjan Jindal (and brother of Congress MP Naveen Jindal), saying that there has been no such meeting.

I stand by my story. In fact, I thought the denial would come much earlier! When a leading daily extracted that portion, they had called the MEA for responses but none was received. The extract was online for 48 hours till a reaction came. The meeting had absolute plausible deniability, nobody could prove that it happened. While the Opposition is treating it as a scandal, I think it was perfectly within Intelligence diplomacy for leaders to try and meet off the record without the baggage of the media. My line of argument focussed on the industrialist being a conduit for the meeting.

Recently, former Pakistan Foreign Minister, Khurshid Kasuri, too argued that for backchannel negotiations to work for Indo-Pak relations, media has to be kept out of it.

Yes and I completely agree with it. The principle of an under-the-radar meeting is not something that I might find problematic. As a journalist, I am saying that it did happen, but it’s not wrong that it happened. Both these PMs decided to keep the reins of the equation in their own hands and did not apply backchannel onvoice and maybe talked informally through this one person they both felt comfortable with, but the backchannel meeting itself, I have no problem with.

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