Whose friend was Adil Shahryar?

Since this is the season of reading from books, perhaps we can recommend another to external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj.

It is by journalist Coomi Kapoor (The Emergency: A Personal History, Penguin), and is a fascinating account of the Emergency years, with a preface by Sushma's colleague, finance minister Arun Jaitley.

Kapoor who knows her politics, writes of Adil Shahryar, making it quote clear that he was Sanjay Gandhi's friend. He was, of course, a family friend, but perhaps she can ask her own party MPs about Mohammed Yunus' troubled son, who died in 1990.

Excerpt from Kapoor's book:

A rumour from his youth which dogged Sanjay all his life was that he, along with his friend Adil Shahryar, son of close family friend Mohammed Yunus, had taken to stealing cars and going on joyrides. The story blew up when Shahryar was found unconscious after crashing a stolen motorcycle in May 1964. Earlier that same night, a car had been stolen by Shahryar and some other youngsters. The juveniles sped away without paying for fuel at a petrol pump and later crashed the car into a roundabout. The police tried desperately to hush up the affair, leading the Times of India to insinuate in a report that the spate of recent car thefts in the city was the handiwork of a gang of youths with connections in high places. DF Karaka's Current magazine named Sanjay as one of those involved in the car thefts and chellenged his mother to clear her son's name. Mrs Gandhi maintained that Sanjay was on a hitch hiking trip to Kashmir with a friend at the time of the car heist. Her opponents suggested that his mother had sent him post haste by plane to Kashmir to cover his tracks.