Why Goenka matters

The birth centenary of Ramnath Goenka is of course a special occasion for the several thousand men and women associated with this newspaper. Express is the fruition of his imagination, his labours, his dreams. But if that were the only significance of the occasion, it would not have merited more than a passing mention. The fact remains that Goenka was not just another entrepreneur who built an empire and made a success of his life. What he built was a life’s mission. The running of a newspaper was, for him, not a matter of profit and loss, but a form of national service. And it was a service in the course of which he was not prepared to make compromises. The single-mindedness with which he used his resources and his energy for the common good made him a newspaper proprietor unlike any other.

Two elements in him made Goenka an Indian original - his sense of history and his instincts of patriotism. An active participant in the Independence movement, he could have settled back to enjoy the fruits of freedom as a great many ‘‘freedom fighters’’ did. But he preferred to stay outside the corridors of power, watching, counselling, cautioning. By the late 1960s, he saw the Congress leadership straying from the moral moorings of the nation’s founders. From then on it was a relentless campaign against corruption in public life. The persecutions he suffered in the process have since become the stuff of legend. The lesson to learn is that one man chose to set his personal interests aside and stand up for probity and reasonable levels of fairness in politics - and that one man made a difference to the course of history.

What motivated Goenka to take up positions that threatened his peace of mind and risked the safety of his newspapers and even that of his family? Many personal qualities in him have won the admiration of those who knew him at close quarters. The quality that lent lustre to other qualities was, in one word, his patriotism. It seems trite to say that nothing mattered more to him than India. But in a very real sense, all the risks he ran, all the fights he fought, all the fortunes he lost were ultimately aimed at defending his country from those who would injure it, loot it or defame it. He was prepared to lose if that was how his country could gain.

Considering that our land continues to be injured, looted and defamed, it may be said that Goenka’s patriotic energies were expended in vain.That would be tantamount to taking a narrow view of history. Mohandas Gandhi did not labour in vain although his followers betrayed him. Our early freedom fighters who were killed or permanently disabled by police tortures did not suffer in vain just because free India’s police continue to torture innocent citizens. Politics have become murkier, not cleaner, in the thirteen years since Goenka’s passing. That does not in any way detract from his life’s work for a healthy, progressive and united India. No doubt, Ramnath Goenka matters because he was the first to conceive of one newspaper covering the whole of India. But he matters more because he was more than just a newspaper owner. He was an Indian. He cared.

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