Remembering Shubha Singh: Foreign Affairs Journalist and Unlikely Admirer of Prince Charles

The Hindu

29-05-2025

Published : May 29, 2025 15:43 IST - 5 MINS READ
In the mid-1990s, the only person in the world who thought highly of Prince Charles (now King Charles III) was Shubha Singh, my colleague at The Pioneer. Charles's then-wife, Princess Diana, was globally beloved, and this was even before her fatal car crash in Paris in 1997. Prince Charles was much reviled: on seeing Camilla on TV, various acquaintances would seethe about the 'horsey-faced woman'.
Shubha, however, had a different view, and part of the reason was that she was our Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) correspondent. Besides dealing with India's mandarins in South Block and networking with the embassies in New Delhi, she was invited to state banquets for visiting dignitaries, including princes.
A perk of the MEA beat was that it was almost daily that one embassy or another held a reception. Our art writer Juliet Reynolds, an English expatriate with a caustic style, once whispered that a senior editor from the paper (and wife) did not miss a single embassy cocktail party, 'gobbling up all the food'.
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Shubha, however, was not a glutton for hors d'oeuvres. She was tall and thin, among the seniormost of our political bureau. The bureau was headed by the late Padmanand Jha (Paddy), and we had been hired by the legendary Vinod Mehta when he launched a New Delhi edition of The Pioneer in 1991, the old Lucknow paper started by the English in the 19th century, famously counting Rudyard Kipling among its sub-editors.
It had fallen on hard times, however, and now looked drab and small-town. Industrialist Lalit Mohan Thapar bought it, and Vinod produced a beautifully designed newspaper with interesting stories that was the rage in Delhi for the three years he led it.
Shubha was full of grace. She never talked of her pedigree to her rag-tag bunch of colleagues. Her brother Ajay did a stint as Minister of State for Railways in V. P. Singh's short-lived (but momentous) government. I was unaware of this connection until our deputy bureau chief and resident quipster, KV Ramesh, referred to Ajay as the 'jeans-clad Jat'. Even Shubha laughed, though she never wore jeans; her daily wear was a nondescript salwar kameez and Rajasthani Bundi waistcoat.
Woman of vast knowledge
Shubha spoke often about the Pacific Island nation of Fiji, and her depth of knowledge about it puzzled me until she revealed that she had lived and taught at a school there. Her father, Captain Bhagwan Singh, was posted as High Commissioner (1971-1976) soon after Fiji's independence. He had served in the King's army during the Second World War and was India's first Jat IAS officer. He was also the grandson of an indentured worker, Ram Chander, taken from their ancestral village in Agra to Fiji in 1917. (Ajay represented Agra in the Lok Sabha, 1989-1991, and followed his father's footsteps as high commissioner to Fiji in 2005.)
Shubha was 38 when she joined The Pioneer from the Telegraph (I was 27). She was thin-faced, wore glasses that hid her shrewd eyes, and had thinning hair that she kept short. Her smile revealed full upper teeth, but when she was tickled her upper gums showed.
In a newspaper newsroom, activity is concentrated in the evening. The Pioneer bureau was a zany place, though we were steps from Vinod's door (and he had a habit of quietly strolling up from behind). Two of our colleagues in their mid-30s, Prakash Patra and the late GK Singh, would finish their copy first (our department had three computers) and then spend the evening with Patra ragging GK. Shubha would laugh the loudest.
She never spoke in anger. In KV's words, she had a 'sardonic sense of humour' and not 'a bad bone in her body'. She generously passed news tips to those of us on other beats. She broke the news of India's recognition of Israel (under then Prime Minister PV Narsimha Rao). Like the rest of us, she was politically left-of-centre. She was part of the gang that started the Indian Women's Press Corps in 1994.
Shubha was unflappable, even when one of our political correspondents, Faraz Ahmed, habitually made the filthiest of remarks that cannot be reproduced here. However, she did raise an eyebrow at KV's occasional double entendre, and this kept the quipster in check.
She and I chatted as I was the Home Ministry correspondent and used to regularly report from Kashmir (for which I am eternally grateful to Paddy and Vinod). Her network of foreign diplomats was, during those turbulent and violent years, always keen to hear the latest from Kashmir; so, she and I routinely exchanged notes.
One day, our conversation drifted to Prince Charles, who in the 1990s visited India more than once. I casually. disdained his neglect of the beautiful Diana. 'She's nothing but a melodramatic bimbo,' Shubha hissed, much to my surprise because she rarely used such strong words.
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'What!' I exclaimed. 'Charles is no better.' Shubha countered by revealing that Charles was a deep and sensitive man. 'How do you know this?' I asked, incredulously.
She had sat next to him during a Rashtrapati Bhawan banquet that she was invited to as the MEA correspondent, and she had conversed with him throughout.
So what, I said.
She looked me in the eye. 'When you sit and talk to someone for a length of time, you get to know the person,' she said, with a mix of seriousness and passion. I could offer no reply.
Shubha passed away on May 25, weeks after turning 72. She had spent two years in agony, due to doctors' negligence at a corporate hospital. In 2023, after a routine gum cancer procedure, a tracheostomy mishap sent fire from her mouth down her airway. She was in and out of hospital since. Hopefully death was a merciful release.
Though many of my former colleagues have passed away over the years, this one hit me hard, even though we hadn't spoken in decades. Possibly that's because of recent bereavements. I wish I had kept in touch.
Aditya Sinha is a writer living on the outskirts of Delhi.