Spine was always a scarce commodity in Indian newsrooms, but it has become scarcer since 2014. Sankarshan Thakur had a whole mountain of it, and he carried it with a light touch. Now that he has suddenly vanished, I am repeatedly reminded of a story he told me in January 2019. 

I was wrapping up my excavation of Vajpayee, who had just passed away, and was organising the material to finally begin writing. Sankarshan had turned in what was easily the sharpest obituary of ABV in The Telegraph. It was shrewd, wise, clinical, precise:

Vajpayee’s PMO was a construct of survival, a place where he jumped the barricades to escape the ivy embrace of his saffron brotherhood. In that sense Vajpayee was like no other prime minister before him. He ruled at the expense of his own party and, when convenient, by feigning distance from its ideology...

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He lived with Narendra Modi and the Gujarat genocide. He arrived to wipe tears a month later, when tears and blood alike had dried. He reminded Modi, apparently harshly, of raj dharma, shed sentiment at the Shah Alam camp in the morning, and turned up to heap marigolds on Modi in the evening...

His poetry was about irreverence, revolt; his politics was downright conformist, slave to survival and other daily conveniences.

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I knew that he had once known ABV’s household well. He had earlier, quietly, mentioned that ABV’s partner had been a Rakhi sister of sorts to his father. I went to meet him to ask how he had reconciled those old bonds with his stinging assessment – an assessment some of our mutual friends thought was too harsh. He said he had closed his eyes and prayed for the departed soul before filing the obit: “Hum aankh band karke unko pranaam kar liye, then I rushed to write what I had to write.” 

One of my favourites from Sankarshan Thakur’s reportage is from the Kargil warfront. Guns and Yellow Roses was the lead essay in the eponymous collection, and a universe apart from the loud, spectacle-driven television coverage of the war that I recalled from my childhood. 

This officer shall remain unnamed in the story for reasons that have to do with the strange workings of the defence establishment —  the games they can play with good officers and the petty wars they can unleash. But if this man wasn’t a good soldier, true to his calling and country, the Indian Army probably doesn’t have any. He, more than anyone else, introduced some of us to the face of the war and  to the life of the man who wages it: the footsoldier. He showed us how spectacular and how sorry war could be, how exciting and spectacular and frightening, how necessary and how utterly futile. 

It was at his unit that we heard the first horror stories of initial attempts to recapture the heights — stories of boulders being rolled down on hapless Naga soldiers trying to make blind runs up the mountains by night, stories of assault parties being exterminated in ambushes because they had no idea where the enemy lay, stories of jawans arriving from the plains and being sent up heights above eighteen thousand feet in nothing but canvas shoes and cotton jackets. It was at his unit that we got accounts, first hand, of the unpreparedness of the army — of there not being enough guns and men to fight off the intrusions, of there not being enough for the soldiers to eat. The first parties moved up without rations. They rubbed snow for water and lived on nothing. When the food did arrive, it was useless. “They sent us puris and subzi. At those heights puris and subzi freeze to stone, you can’t eat any of it,” a young officer who had miraculously returned from a reconnaissance mission up an intruder-ridden peak told us. He had survived on cigarettes and chocolate in his pup tent. “But my poor jawans had virtually nothing to eat, they were eating snow and they were in the open.

And towards the end:

Trust is tough in Kashmir and both sides have good reason not to trust. This is not a black and white story; it is grey and very grim. One late night on a gun position in Drass, when the war was at its peak and rum had again inured us to shellfire and plunged us into the temporary vortex of bluntness, the old debate re-emerged from the confines of politeness. A few army officers began complaining that the media was “not supporting” the war effort, just as they had been complaining that the media had not supported the anti-insurgency drive in Jammu & Kashmir; it had turned “anti-state” by reporting excesses by security forces. One of them referred to a report I had written from the front about the tremendous odds the Indian jawans were up against and said, “Do you know that the report has hurt the national interest? It has hurt the jawans’ morale?” No jawan on the front was getting to read The Telegraph, or any other newspaper. The only thing the report had probably hurt was the defence establishment because it showed them up as unprepared for the enemy and uncaring for its own soldiers. The officer spoke as if the interests of the defence establishment were the same as the “national interest”, just as governments tend to confuse their interest with the national interest. 

We saw only one side of the war and most stories we reported were stories told to us by Indian soldiers. A lot of what the jawans had to say mismatched with what the defence establishment thought. Accounts of how well-entrenched the intruders were, for instance; that was anathema to the government because it was handy proof it had let its guard down. Accounts, also, of how our soldiers treated intruders when they could lay their hands on them. New Delhi made quite a show of mutilation of some of its captured soldiers by Pakistanis but much the same was happening on this side. Troops of the Naga and Jat regiments told us quite plainly they had killed a few intruders they had captured alive in the heights above Drass. “It was rage, just rage,” one Naga soldier said, “They killed many of our mates, we were angry. When we got them, we butchered them.” As and when they brought bodies of intruders back from the heights, the tied them with ropes and dragged them down. “We had enough load to carry as it was, who was going to bother carrying their bodies? Dragging them down was a favour.” There was no sense of guilt or remorse there, just plain retelling; it was as if a fire of emotion had cleansed the act of murder.

Though I have learnt so much from reading his dispatches and interacting with him, on some occasions I have quibbled with his Bihar books. (For one I thought the Lalu-Nitish biographies could have been framed better in terms of the historical inevitability of the rise of the middle castes, rather than treating the 1990s primarily as a law-and-order wasteland.) But I am aware that they were written by a reporter in a great hurry, between day jobs. By that measure they are very good books. That Subaltern Saheb still holds court two decades on in an ode to his craft.

To some of us his loss cuts deeply also because: he represented the best of Maithil-Bihari modernity. He carried all the style and swag of a metropolitan, yet stayed deeply rooted in the politics and gossip of his ancestral village. The image of Sankarshan, collar popped and cigarette dangling like Camus, fits perfectly. But so does the one of him tucking into a Maithil choora-dahi-tilkut breakfast on Makar Sankranti mornings. 

One got the sense that if he had his way, Sankarshan would take a break to pursue other things – write books at leisure, read, paint. But he was too caught in the inertia of motion, unable to get off the track. His steering of The Telegraph, its punchy front-page headlines, show that it was a day job that desperately needed to be done by someone of his calibre. 

He was a veteran of old guard journalism, with all its eccentricities and virtues and fads – complete with the romance for out-of-print typewriters. Of late, he had turned quiet, and for a while I thought he must have been on a social media detox. Like many veterans of that breed, he was a chain-smoker; and that habit wrote the cruel final chapter: lung cancer. Sixty-three is no age to go. The flood of tributes – flowing not just from friends and colleagues but also from readers and other citizens – shows that, in the end, courage and compassion matter more than cowardice and comfort with power.

So long, sir.

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