Gulchain Singh Charak and I

Parvez Dewan

Th. Gulchain Singh Charak and I first met because of Mr. Jagmohan’s orders.
For several previous weeks, Charak Sahib had headed an agitation on behalf of the pavement vendors of Raghunath Bazar and Residency Road. Mr. Jagmohan wanted these illegal vendors removed, but Charak Sb. wanted them rehabilitated.
Mr. Jagmohan was in the early weeks of his second tenure as Governor of Jammu and Kashmir. This was in March 1990, and militant violence in the Valley of Kashmir had peaked. The Secretariat had moved to Jammu, but the Governor, Chief Secretary, Home Secretary, DGP and other top officers stayed back in Srinagar because of the emergent situation.
At that stage, the thinking at the highest level in the state was that things were extremely volatile in the Valley; therefore, the least these officers enjoying the comforts of Jammu could do was ensure total peace in Jammu.
Against that background, we district authorities had to defuse Charak Sahib’s agitation. The Governor asked Charak Sb. to meet me. I had just taken over as the Deputy Commissioner of Jammu. Meekly, I tried to suggest to Mr. Jagmohan that rehabilitating these vendors-illegal encroachers-was not a good idea. This was partly because it would give an incentive to other people to encroach on government land and demand rehabilitation, and partly because street vendors, whenever authorities “rehabilitated” them, always came back.
Mr. Jagmohan was not someone you debated or discussed things with. He made up his mind and issued orders, and you implemented them. People remember his tenure, especially in Jammu and Katra, as a golden era when historic developmental works that have benefited generations, and continue to do so, were implemented in record time.
But his centralised style also obliged him to leave a few weeks later, in May, because some middle-level officers, infinitely junior to him, badly handled a procession.
Be that as it may, those were his orders and I complied. We gave these illegal vendors space in a well-constructed shopping complex along the National Highway between Jammu and Samba.
It was a huge victory for Charak Sahib.
Mr. Jagmohan was a genius regarding urban development. But because he had not risen through the districts, he had no experience regarding how such rehabilitation schemes worked out.
A year or two later, vendors were back in Raghunath Bazar. Needless to say, I was not happy.
The following year, in 1991, Charak Sahib stormed into my office, very angry. He was extremely furious about a major conspiracy that the highest-ranking officers in the district administration below me were hatching. This conspiracy involved a very large chunk of land in a village that was just outside Jammu city in those days and is now part of Jammu suburbs.
Charak Sb. told me that these officers had illegally transferred some meadows, which belonged to the entire village, to four individuals from that village. Though those officers were my juniors, only the Divisional Commissioner, who was my boss as well, could hear appeals against their orders. Therefore, as rules required, I passed this information to Mr. Sahasranamam, the Div Com, who cancelled the illegal order within a few weeks.
But the worst, or as I now realise, from my point of view the best, was yet to come. A few months later, Mr. Charak was back in my office, not so much angry as contemptuous. He revealed that my juniors had physically paid ?1.53 crore of government money to illegal individuals, despite our orders. (Perplexity AI says that ?1.53 crore in 1991 equals about ?13.81 crore in 2025 purchasing power.)
Goaded by Charak Sb. (and guided by Mr. M.S. Qureshi, the Chairman of Jammu and Kashmir Bank, and Mr. David, the head of State Bank of India in our state), I recovered two-thirds of the money within six days. On the seventh day, just as I was about to proceed to recover the remaining one-third, officials from the agency officially supposed to handle such cases formally asked me to hand over the case to them.
If the remaining one-third was ever recovered, it has stayed outside public knowledge.
The Daily Excelsior made a hero of me and put me on the front page, top headline, for six days running. It was one of the highlights of my career, and I thank Charak Sb. for this.
But the most delicious part of our association was yet to come.
A few years later, some friends and I went on a road trip of Eastern Europe. The layout of the main palace in Warsaw is very much like that of our Mubarak Mandi, but two or three times as big. A large central lawn exists in both cases, with a road running around the lawn and buildings all around the road.
The Polish authorities had allotted musicians and other street entertainers places on nine or ten spots scattered along this rectangular road, which is somewhat wider than ours. They play classical music, folk music, and perform other acts of entertainment free of charge. If anyone wants to leave money in their collection box, that is good for him.
That is the Jammu tradition as well. Street performers used to give such performances on the traffic island opposite the Ustad Mohalla Mosque and Amar Singh Ahata.
By then I had been made the state’s tourism secretary.
I decided to replicate the Warsaw model in Jammu on the occasion of Baisakhi. Without using any extra government funds, I arranged for the Song and Drama units of both the central and state governments, along with our Cultural Academy, to contribute performers who were already part of their teams.
We placed one group of performers at Jewel Chowk (where a memorial for martyrs now stands), at Shahidi Chowk further north, outside the Tourist Reception Centre (as it used to be called), at the mouth of the road that leads to Bloom Hotel and McDonald’s, and at two places in the Mubarak Mandi complex.
That is when Th. Gulchain Singh Charak offered to bring Dogra musicians and dancers from the rural areas. And what an offer it was!
Charak Sb. must have spent weeks rehearsing and a substantial amount of money from his organisation’s coffers.
The result was spectacular. Charak Sb. dressed a few hundred able-bodied Dogra men, each man clad in a pure white Dogra-style kurta and tight pyjama with an orange cummerbund and orange turban. (These are called achkan, suthan, cummerbund, and saafaa, respectively.) Their mere arrival from rural areas into Jammu in these clothes brought unimaginable colour into the town.
It was a massive feat of organisation: arranging the artists, their clothes, their rehearsals, their transportation to Jammu City, their refreshments, and their musical instruments.
This musical procession started from Shahidi Chowk through Rajinder Bazar and then uphill through Jain Bazar and the lanes of Panjtirthi, finally reaching the marble platform within the Mubarak Mandi park.
The show was far grander than the street performances I had originally envisioned. Charak Sb. had taken it to another level altogether.
Needless to say, the Daily Excelsior covered it in detail.
(This memoir restricts itself to the period before Charak Sb. took to electoral politics.)
(The author is formerly of the IAS, was Secretary to the Government of India and an adviser to the Governor of Jammu and Kashmir)

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