With few correspondents overseas, independent India’s newspapers have depended on agencies and publications in London or Washington, content to wear the blinkers of the West. The world, in other words, was not their story. Saeed Naqvi spent his sixty-year career trying to make it one. His journey began at The Statesman in the 1960s, where he made his name with an exclusive on the Beatles in Rishikesh and won Jayaprakash Narayan’s confidence while reporting the Bihar movement. Later, at The Indian Express, his association with Ramnath Goenka drew him into the paper’s battles and politics, especially during the Emergency.
After leaving The Indian Express in 1984, Naqvi founded the news agency World Report to put Indian journalists at the scene of global events. His reporting took him to 110 countries, often as the only Indian journalist there. He covered the 1971 JVP insurrection in Sri Lanka, the Sino-Vietnamese War and the TWA 847 hijacking in Beirut; saw Nelson Mandela walk free; interviewed Fidel Castro, Mikhail Gorbachev, Muammar Gaddafi and Israeli prime ministers; and reported from Iran during the Islamic revolution and Iraq during Operation Desert Storm. From Rwanda, Sudan, Haiti and Kosovo to Gaza, Kabul, Nicaragua and Northern Ireland, he went where Indian newspapers rarely sent their reporters. In the years before mobile phones, every such assignment was shaped by constraints beyond the reporter’s control, demanding resourcefulness and a fair measure of luck.
The World Was Not Their Story is candid about the bargains and accidents of life in the news. Yet the book is more than a plaint against the narrow horizons of Indian journalism. It offers vivid glimpses of world history as old political orders collapsed and new ones took shape—history witnessed at close quarters by a pioneering Indian reporter determined to see the world for himself, and to free journalism from the biases of the West.
