Excerpt from One-man Lobby by Robert Shaplen in The New Yorker, March 17, 1951:
After Pearl Harbor, it was agreed that the League’s principal objective should be to convince Americans that the Indians would put up a real fight for the Allies only in return for Britain’s promise of freedom. A campaign was mapped out “to influence the influencers,” a phrase that has since become a slogan with [Sirdar Jaglit] Singh. “We decided that in order to get anywhere,” he explained not long ago, “we would have to get after the columnists, the radio commentators, and the rest of the blah-blah people who make public opinion, as well as those who make policy.” Help came initially from an unanticipated source—William Randolph Hearst, who in one of his columns advised the British to concede the Indians their independence at once. Singh wrote Hearst a letter of thanks which so impressed the publisher that he used it as the basis for a second column on the subject and asked Singh for more. Singh quickly adapted himself to the peculiar chest-thumping, boldface-caps San Simeon style. He wrote of “the bloodstained claws of the Japanese” and sounded dire warnings about America’s “duty to herself and the cause of democracy to make the British yield.”
Although Singh has always had a rare gift for promulgating ideas, and a zeal that is both tireless and infectious, he knew very little at first about American publicity methods or about speechmak ing. The Americans who enrolled in the League became his coaches and collaborators, marshalling his facts for him and helping him write his speeches, and they marvelled at his aptitude. The ideas Singh soon was promulgating were, if not always feasible, at least headline-catching. He urged President Roosevelt, for example, to rush a million modern rifles to India for a volunteer corps—that had still to be formed to defend that nation against possible attack by the Japanese, and suggested that a special diplomatic team composed of Wendell Willkie, Lord Halifax, T. V. Soong, Manuel Quezon, and Maxim Litvinov take off immediately by plane for New Delhi to arrange a truce between the Hindus, the Moslems, and the British. The weekend Nehru was arrested, in August, 1942, Singh was a guest at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Luce, in Greenwich (he had got to know Mrs. Luce by helping her arrange a trip to India, from which she had just returned). Singh told his host and hostess that he thought Nehru’s imprisonment was imminent, and their respect for their guest increased when his prediction came true shortly after he returned to town. “I WON’T SAY I TOLD YOU SO,” Singh wired Luce magnanimously, “BUT NOW I NEED YOUR HELP,” and he went on to appeal for the support of the Luce magazines. Time quickly came up with a cover story on Nehru, representing an editorial decision that Singh doesn’t believe was altogether a coincidence.
The definitely Mephistophelean expression that Singh can assume on occasion, always elegantly set off by neatly tailored two-hundred-dollar suits, has frequently helped him gain entrance to cloistered places and to command an audience with their occupants once he gets there. He showed up, looking his fiercest, one summer day in 1942 in the precincts of the Times and, sweeping past a brace of startled attendants, strode into the office of Edwin L. James, the managing editor, where he denounced the Times for not printing a story on a League meeting held the previous night, although the Herald Tribune had written it up. Incredulous, James began to thumb through a copy of that day’s Times. “Don’t bother to look. It’s not there, you know,” Singh said. After a vain search, James called in a reporter, and the next morning the Times printed a long interview with the president of the India League that more than made up for the oversight.
