November 4, 1977. An Indian Air Force special aircraft carrying Prime Minister Morarji Desai and his son Kanti Desai took off from the Palam airport of Delhi on an official tour. That night, it crashed into the slushy paddy fields near Jorhat in Assam. The Prime Minister and his son survived miraculously. But five members of the crew died in the accident.

Among the 17 other survivors were two journalists deputed to cover the Prime Minister's tour: K Govindan Kutty of All India Radio and NVR Swami of the Press Trust of India.

Kutty, then in his early thirties, lived 49 more years, long enough to tell this extraordinary tale along with many other explosive stories, before he passed away quietly in a senior living home in Thiruvananthapuram the other day. Kutty, known to friends and colleagues as “KGK”, used to recall the incident with his trademark humour that literally made him “accidentally famous”.

Most remarkably, the accident also gave KGK his biggest newsbreak. Wading through the marshy fields on that ill-fated night with mud up to his knees and nearly blind in the pitch darkness after losing his spectacles, KGK, along with Swami, trudged about eight kilometres to the nearest army camp. From there, he managed to book a trunk call to the AIR’s Delhi office. By the time KGK got through, barely 15 minutes remained before the last bulletin of 11 PM. In those precious minutes, he conveyed to the world the eyewitness account of the Prime Minister's survival, which was his own survivor story as well. The journalist’s instinct was to turn the catastrophe into history. However, many years later, KGK said in an interview with a sense of modesty, rare among journalists, “As with most great stories, everything about it was accidental. I just happened to be at the right place, at the right time. If I were unable to stand up and walk that night or if a Malayali Havildar Mathew had not directed me to the nearby army camp, the story would not have been aired that day”.

Though KGK escaped with little more than a bump on the head by jumping out through the emergency exit with only a bump on the head, he had lived until last with the trauma. The aircraft’s pilot, Clarence P Lima, who was thrown out of the cockpit into the marshy field, died on KGK’s lap. The co-pilot, Mathew Cyriac, from Kerala, too, did not survive. Though Prime Minister Desai escaped with only his artificial tooth uprooted, his son had sustained some fractures. Both the PM and his son were carried away on charpoys brought by local villagers to be taken to the Air Force's hospital.

Though it involved a significant personal risk, the incident was imbued with drama, adventure and history- the most thrilling elements of great journalism. No wonder the incident prompted KGK to leave the secure job of a “government journalist” and join the risk-filled but exciting terrain of newspaper journalism. They were the post -Emergency days, and The Indian Express newspaper had a heroic image as India’s only national newspaper, other than Kolkata’s The Statesman, which had refused to bow, let alone crawl, before Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian regime. KGK, by now well-known on account of his air crash story, joined the Express as a roving correspondent in Delhi at the behest of the paper’s Kerala Resident Editor, SK Anantharaman. At the Express, he broke many stories, including the exclusive about the “alternative document” authored by CPI supremo S A Dange against his party’s decision to break ties with the Congress party. Dange was expelled from the CPI for opposing the party.

In the early 1980s, KGK returned to Kerala to take over as Special Correspondent at Express Trivandrum. In Thiruvananthapuram, the nerve centre of Kerala politics, the chief political correspondents of Malayalam newspapers were once as influential as political leaders themselves. Earlier, figures such as K. Balakrishnan, KC Sebastian and KR Ravi held sway. In the 1980s, it was Manorama’s K.R. Chummar, Mathrubhumi’s P.C. Sukumaran Nair and P. Rajan, and Deshabhimani’s K. Mohanan who dominated the inner corridors of the capital’s politics.

KGK’s arrival marked the first and formidable challenge from an English-language journalist in this arena ruled by Malayalam media heavyweights. Perhaps, apart from KC John of The Times of India, no other English journalist had managed such influence. Like the Malayalam stalwarts, Govindan Kutty’s office and residence too were located in Shanti Nagar, Pulimoodu—the “Fleet Street” of the capital in those days. For the Indian Express to stand shoulder to shoulder with Malayalam newspapers in covering Kerala’s political, social and cultural spheres was no small achievement.

The 1980s were a decade of intense internal storms within both the Congress and the CPM in Kerala. In the Congress, it was a factional war between K. Karunakaran and A.K. Antony. In the CPM, the battle between the leadership of E.M.S. Namboodiripad and M.V. Raghavan shook the state. KGK cultivated close relationships with all these leaders. Yet, like any accomplished journalist, he never let such proximity prevent him from splashing stories that displeased them across the front page. Though he maintained warm ties with EMS—his neighbour in Shanti Nagar—during the party’s internal conflict, he also became a confidant and political adviser to M.V. Raghavan. When MVR was expelled from the CPM, it was KGK’s byline that first broke the news.

It was KGK who wrote the scoop on Karunakaran’s mysterious Mumbai trip—yet he also went on to author Karunakaran’s biography in English. The explosive reports that first brought the Idamalayar case—later culminating in the imprisonment of R. Balakrishna Pillai—into public view were also KGK’s.

In the 1990s, when KGK returned to Delhi, he became a close associate of T.N. Seshan, India’s most powerful Chief Election Commissioner. Seshan chose the brilliant KGK as his biographer. That biography, which contained sharp criticisms of leaders such as Periyar E.V. Ramasamy and C.N. Annadurai, sparked major controversies and legal battles in Tamil Nadu. KGK also wrote the biographies of “Biscuit King” Rajan Pillai, who died in Tihar Jail, and K.M. Mani. His own memoir of his journalistic life is titled Kalakshepam: A Ride Along the Path of News.

Though he maintained close ties with national leaders of the Communist parties, KGK often forged even stronger friendships with those expelled from them. Curiously, he frequently found himself reporting—sometimes even contributing to—the disciplinary actions taken against them. As with Dange, it was KGK who first reported the expulsion of MV Raghavan from the CPI(M). The details of MVR’s “alternative document,” which led to his ouster—much like Dange’s “alternative document” earlier—were also KGK’s scoop. KGK once said that P. Govinda Pillai lost his opportunity to enter the CPM Central Committee after he reported Pillai’s anti-Stalin speech at the party’s Madras Congress in the 1990s. He also revealed that it was the veteran leader M. Basava Punnayya who had provided him with the Party Congress stories at the time.

The present writer had a long and close association with KGK and had the opportunity to work with him for two years when he became Editor of the South Indian-language editions of India Today. Just as elegantly as in English, he wrote in Malayalam as well, penning his column “Nerum Nunayum” for India Today. When EMS passed away, it was KGK who persuaded K. Karunakaran to write a tribute in India Today.

Wide-ranging knowledge, an insatiable curiosity for breaking news, personal connections across fields, sparkling language and uncompromising integrity—these were once indispensable weapons for great journalists. K. Govindan Kutty was an exemplary representative of that era.

© Mathrubhumi English