Review of I, Witness: India From Nehru to Narendra Modi, by Shahid Siddiqui (Rupa, 2025)
Reading Shahid Siddiqui’s I, Witness can make it seem that the author has been almost everywhere—at least, as far, as Indian politics and public life are concerned. For those who have read Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, especially back in the 1990s or early 2000s—a time that is most diligently captured in Siddiqui’s memoirs—the comparison of I, Witness with Rushdie’s booker-bagger will not look erroneous. What inspires this comparative framework, above all, is the sheer scale of Siddiqui’s social circuit; almost everyone of any consequence in Indian public life has appeared in the star-cast of Siddiqui’s life’s journey, and they appear in this book, as well. From Jawaharlal Nehru, to Lal Bahadur Shastri, to Indira Gandhi, to Rajiv Gandhi, to Narendra Modi—Siddiqui has met and known them all, and rather personally. Almost like Saleem Sinai, Siddiqui was born very close to the idiomatic ‘Midnight,’ on the day of the Indian Independence. However, while Saleem Sinai’s sincerity is questionable, Siddiqui’s shines in contrast.
Having been an Urdu/Hindi journalist—the editor of the weekly, Nai Duniya—and public intellectual for as long as one can remember, Siddiqui’s ringside perspective on India’s most defining political moments began as early as his childhood when he was taken by his father to meet the first Prime Minister of India. Without much ado, it needs to be acknowledged that Siddiqui’s offering is a highly recommended inclusion in any bibliography of researches into India’s political history—whose seven decades the book covers, ambitiously and assiduously, albeit through anecdotes. The ‘I,’ therefore, is not merely a pun on the word ‘eye’ but also signals something deeper, an ‘I’ndelible signature, perhaps, if not a feeble sense of privilege, too. And Siddiqui is, of course, entitled to it, given how physically and intellectually close he has been the object of his study for what seems like a lifetime. This reviewer was also reminded of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s admonition to a journalist who came to interview him with a tape recorder. “One should, in an interview like this,” said Marquez—to paraphrase from memory— “not tape anything but reproduce from reminiscences of the impressions of the interview, even if one does not get the exact words that were spoken during the conversation.” Siddiqui’s book should be assessed by that yardstick—not necessarily for its fine-toothed accuracy (which is not necessarily under scrutiny here) but for its great anecdotal variety and intimacy with the unembodied political lives of India that he has interviewed for so long, so to speak.
Siddiqui proceeds with an approximate chronology of events, with every chapter leading us through the times revolving around lives of leading political figures. His principal methodology is that of eyewitness testimonies packaged as anecdotal vignettes that succeed on account of their immediacy and textures of lived events. It is closer to oral histories than ‘serious-minded’ historiography. And the book does not suffer for it. Siddiqui, who is always appears to be at the center of any significant occurrence of national scale—making private visits or being in the thick of election rallies or one among those peopling the corridors of power and elite decision-making—renders the atmospheres of his scenes quite livable for his readers. One would not be surprised to see this book being commissioned for cinema, for instance.
I, Witness vividly details the hush of Delhi in the days of Jawaharlal Nehru, the years of the Emergency, deadening shock after Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, the electric tension of election rallies, the decline of the Indian National Congress and the rise of the Bhartiya Janata Party, and all of this without deifying or demonizing any protagonist from his dramatis personae. Nehru, for example, is shown as a pluralist statesperson with a large heart and intellect and a small vision on the economy. Indira Gandhi’s charisma and authoritarianism are both underscored. Lal Bahadur Shastri’s emblematic sense of uprightness and his political destiny on account of it are made even more accessible to readers. Rajiv Gandhi comes across as deeply farsighted and perhaps even as a victim of his own largesse. Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s silent triumphs and regrets seem to make him even more humane, once again. Narendra Modi’s multifaceted persona is not diluted either in the name of transparency and secularism that, otherwise, Siddiqui attempts to observe. The raconteur does not pretend to be tread a ground holier than his interlocutors and characters. The moral ambivalences—a most unfashionable concept in today’s times—of almost all these and others discussed and described in this book are highlighted with integrity. For someone to be able to express that India’s growth has neither been linear nor flawless, while also imbuing one’s representation of the nation’s politics with so much of the personal, and then to tell that story in the form of such a well-received book, is an enviable achievement.
Arup K. Chatterjee 