Story:
I was born in 1926 to Sardar Sunder Singh and Kundan Kaur in my mother’s village of Moga in Punjab. I grew up in Dehradun, where I attended Presbyterian School until college. In 1951 I went to England for a Ph.D. in the field of solid state physics, where I coined the term “fiber optics,” for a phenomenon I discovered that entailed “bending light” using specially developed “optical fibers.” The researcher who built on my work to develop technology for long distance communications won the Nobel Prize for fiber optics.
In 1947, I was 18 or 19 years old, and I recall a lecture Jawaharlal Nehru gave on Independence Day and the exciting things he said. Everybody believed that when the British would leave, everything would be wonderful. Nehru talked about the origin of the Indian Independence Movement, with compliments to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
I met Gandhi once when I was 18 or 19 years old. I was over six feet tall and I recall Gandhi being much shorter as he stood next to me. That doesn’t take anything from his greatness, however! This was around the time of Partition, and I was in Dehradun. My parents were gone to Shimla and we were aware that something was going to happen, but we were not sure of it. Our family had a Muslim domestic helper, his name was Gulu; Gulu’s father worked for my grandfather, Gulu worked for us and his son worked for us also. One night, at around 2 o’clock in the morning, Gulu came and woke me up. The house was on the outskirts of Dehradun and we could see fires in the city, we could hear shouting, and there was a lot of killing going on. Gulu was very worried. The next morning I decided to go and see, and what I saw was the worst thing in the world one could see. The mob had found a number of Muslim girls, and although I don’t know what the mob did to them, they eventually killed the girls. There was a truck nearby loaded with dead bodies; it was an utter disaster, and I saw it with my own eyes.
In the next few days, there were a couple of other incidents. The next day, some people in the village realized that our household employed a Muslim domestic helper, and about a hundred of the mob came and approached the boundary of the house. I reassured Gulu, that I had my father’s gun, and that I had the gun loaded. The mob approached the house, and I went to the entry gate. I said to them, “You’re not coming to this house and taking [our employee] away; if you do, I’m going to kill you.” One amongst the mob was a Sikh man and he convinced the others to not do anything and to disperse.
The next day, I saw the most horrible thing. Next to the house, there was a Muslim toy factory, and someone had opened the doors and left the doors open. Kids decided to go in there and get the toys since the toys were right there. They would go in and run away home with a toy. A contingent of British soldiers came, and I saw this with my own eyes, how one kid was running just at the boundary of our property, and how one of the soldiers went and killed the boy. I saw that. I saw the boy dying. It was an utter disaster. It was a horrible thing that happened there. The only explanation I can think of for what I witnessed is that the kids were being accused of looting, so the soldiers did what they did.
Besides hearing Jawaharlal Nehru’s lecture at the time of Partition, I also saw and met the man a few times. The first time I saw Nehru, I was as a young man in Ambala. The second time was in Dehradun at a major gathering, and on that occasion, I took a beautiful picture of Nehru, with a box camera my father gave me. The third time was in Mussoorie, where Nehru was horseriding. I was walking by and saw him there. The next time was in 1958 when I was in New York City visiting and talking with delegates to the United Nations (UN) under the Permanent Representative of India to the United Nations, then V. K. Krishna Menon. I was talking with people in the UN’s delegates’ lounge, and suddenly someone shouted in the back, saying, “Sir! I thought I left only one of you and now there are two of you!” I turned around and it was Krishna Menon; he had a stick in his hand, and he had a problem with his leg or something. He was a brilliant but opinionated guy. He either liked you or disliked you. Nothing in between. We became very good friends. Menon was a very decent man. He asked me to come to his residence hotel in New York City, and he said to me, “Look, you worked long enough abroad, I want you to come back to India.” My response was, “What do you want me to do?” Menon said, “I would like you to be the scientific advisor to the Ministry of Defense,” and I was only in my early 30s. I was a young guy. Menon continued, saying, next time I came to India, I must go and see him. So I went to India with my wife and called on Menon, who shared that a couple of weeks later, there would be a science conference happening and that he would like me to be there. However, I was visiting with my new wife as part of our honeymoon, and during the conference, we would be in Kashmir. Menon’s response was not to worry, that they would send me a plane, and they will fly me over for the conference, and then I would get back to my honeymoon.
So I went for 2 days, and Menon added me to the conference where Nehru talked, and Krishna Menon talked, and Homi J. Bhabha – the atomic energy guy – talked, and then I talked, and there were thousands of people there speaking on lots of interesting topics. It was on that occasion that Menon arranged for me to meet Nehru, and this was the last time I would meet him. That meeting was a person-to-person discussion that lasted an hour. Nehru asked many questions, some personal, some about my technology, and so on. Nehru had with him a folder with all of my material in it, and there was a wrap-around to the folder, which Nerhu flipped and on top of which he wrote a note to the head of the Union Service Commission in Delhi, saying to send a letter of appointment to me and to give me 6 months to return to the United States. With my wife, I went back to the United States, and we were in Chicago, where we waited for 1 month, then 2 months, a 3rd month, and then 6 months. After 6 months of waiting and nothing happening, I said to myself that something had to happen because we had young children to care for. I decided to do something here in the United States, and I went to the Bank of America to fund my business idea based on my fiber optics discoveries. When I came back home after the bank meeting, there was a letter of appointment from India. But it was too late because the letter came after I had made the decision to stay in the US. That was the story of my meetings with Nehru.
The thought at the time was that the country became divided because of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, but with new information being revealed over decades, a shift occurred and the thinking is that Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel were the cause. The statements that were being made were that Nehru and Patel wanted to secure independence, so they agreed to the division. It produced horrible results then, so many millions of people died. Lots of horrible things happened. If Nehru and Patel did it, I really wonder whether becoming the head of the state was more important to them than the unity of the country. So one begins to have second thoughts about what Nehru was really thinking. My impression of him was very positive, but every person has weaknesses, and this might have been one of them.
I think that with more wisdom, Partition could have been avoided. Partition did not make any sense, it killed so many people. It was a disaster.
