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Thursday, January 16, 2003

The latest from India:

Two days after the Nobel laureate, V.S. Naipaul, came out in open support of Tarun Tejpal and the Tehelka team, the former Samata Party president, Jaya Jaitly — who had sought the author's intervention in the case in November 2001 — today said the writer should "not lend his stature where it is not called for".

Reacting to Sir Vidia's press conference on Tuesday, where he articulated his faith in and admiration for Mr. Tejpal and his team, Ms. Jaitly issued a statement "requesting" him and "his Pakistani wife" not to play politics in India "on behalf of his website friends and to keep himself away from the dirt and machinations about which he claimed to have no interest".

While training her guns on the Naipauls, Ms. Jaitly uses Ms. Naipaul's own words as firepower. In her response to Ms. Jaitly's letter to Sir Vidia in November 2001, Ms. Naipaul had noted that her husband had a "larger historical interest in India" and was "removed from the dirt churned by the day to day machinations of democracy".


Read the full report in the Hindu; or this version in the Times of India.

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