Mani Shankar Aiyar’s three-volume memoir is unusual in that it represents an unusually candid, honest, readable and even entertaining, but simultaneously a very intellectually and emotionally rigorous and sensitive, account of an Indian life in the last 75 years or so.
Aiyar has put all of us, citizens and scholars, in debt to him for undertaking the painstaking and often painful task of recalling, documenting, fact-checking and narrating in an engaging style the story of his life. As a historian, I can say with confidence that his story will be an important source for histories that will be written of this period. The first volume, Memoirs of a Maverick, covers the years from 1941-1991, but the part of that volume pertaining to his close association with Rajiv Gandhi was published separately as The Rajiv I Knew. The third volume, A Maverick in Politics, covering the period 1991 to 2024, takes us through the ups and downs of his political life, interspersed with his personal life. This review by no means claims to do justice to the wealth of experiences, issues and perceptions narrated in these volumes, but to give a flavour of the fare at offer, and entice the reader to taste more.
Memoirs of a Maverick: The First Fifty Years (1941-1991)
Aiyar begins the story of his life with the story of how he secured his birth certificate on a visit to Lahore in 2008 by challenging the mayor of Lahore who was boasting about how they had digitised their birth records to produce his birth certificate as he was born in Lahore in April 1941. This typifies his style. Where another writer would have begun by saying, “I was born in Lahore on the 10th of April,” Aiyar weaves it into another tale – of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf asking for his birth certificate on a visit to Delhi in 2003. He describes how it took a few months to be found and delivered, while Aiyar was instantly presented with his in Lahore! It is this ability to introduce a dramatic element in the narration that makes these volumes so readable.
Aiyar takes us back to the tumultuous years of the First World War, when his mother lost her mother and father in quick succession when she was only nine and was virtually treated as unpaid domestic worker by relatives who gave her shelter. She was rescued by a Good Samaritan, Sister Subbalakshmi, who ran a school for child widows in Chennai, where his mother’s elder sister, herself a child widow, was already studying. The elder sister became an accomplished doctor, and the younger one a teacher. Aiyar’s mother’s dreams of studying in the UK were stymied by the outbreak of the Second World War, and she had to return from her journey midway, heart-broken and indebted. Marriage followed, and children, Aiyar being the eldest. Though professionally his father became a renowned chartered accountant and money was plentiful, from Aiyar’s rather candid account it seems the parents did not get along well, and his mother tried her best to live apart from him but along with her children.
The early years were spent in Lahore, but Partition brought the family to Delhi, where they had trouble finding a place to stay and suitable schools for the children. So Aiyar and his two younger brothers landed up in Welham and then The Doon School in Dehradun. His father’s untimely death in an air crash sent the family’s fortunes into a tailspin, till his mother’s chance discovery of a substantive life insurance policy which he had taken out but never informed her about! So, the children’s expensive education could continue but there was little left over after that. Hence, to save money, and keep the family together, his mother moved to Dehradun with his sister Tara and the children became day boarders.
On his own confession, Mani was not an outstanding student, unlike his brother Swaminathan (who grew up to be a well-known journalist), but he made it to a first division in his school-leaving examination and got admission in St Stephen’s for a BA Honours in Economics. At St Stephen’s, in his own words, “Life, real life, meant only one thing—girls” and “the last thing we cared for were our studies”. And yet, despite himself, he became an excellent debater and, once he set his sights on going to study in Cambridge, and realised that he needed a first division to get in, a diligent scholar who studied so hard he shocked his own head of department by getting a first division. And so it happened that this eldest child of an orphan woman from a village in Tamil Nadu, who lost his father at the age of 12, studied at the best institutions in India and succeeded in reaching the portals of the best in the world.
At Cambridge, Aiyar’s primary interest appears to have been the activities of the Cambridge Union, of which he soon succeeded in becoming an office-bearer and star speaker, an experience that stood him in good stead later in life. He combined this with trips to various parts of Europe, which inevitably turned into adventures recounted in his inimitable dramatic style laced with humour, usually at his own expense. By his second year in Cambridge his attention was focused more on preparing and sitting for the Indian Civil Services Examination to enable him to fulfil his ambition of joining the Indian Foreign Service. He cleared the written examination and the interview and was ranked seventh in the list, which meant he could now live his dream. As a reader, I heaved a big sigh of relief, imagining that I could now relax and look forward to reading a Mills and Boon rather than a thriller or a tear-jerker, which is what I had done till now. I thought it would now be seamless saga of sojourns in foreign lands followed by a charmed political career as a trusted aide of a prime minister who was also an old school pal.
But that wouldn’t have fitted into the plot of Aiyar’s life. And so, true to form, after attaining an all-India rank of seven, he is told that he cannot join any of the services. Inquiries revealed that objections were raised by the Indian Intelligence department on the grounds of him being a Communist. It took interventions by the president, the home minister and the home secretary to pronounce that Aiyar should be taken into the service because though he had Communist sympathies, he had never been a member of any Communist party. It’s a story worth reading, not only because it’s well-told, but because, as Aiyar says, “I was astonished at this outstanding example of how an obscure aspirant could be given such a patient hearing by so many from the highest ranks of the civil service and from the president to senior ministers…. they were more than willing to revisit their initial negative reactions to ensure that injustice was not visited on even one young citizen without adequate, proven cause. India under Nehru was truly a democracy.”
Aiyar then takes us through his various diplomatic assignments in Brussels, Hanoi, Delhi, Brussels again, Baghdad and finally Pakistan in December 1978. While he has many interesting stories and observations to share about all his postings, it is to Pakistan that he lost his heart, and never got it back. He went to Karachi as the Consul General and used his stint there to build the closest of bonds – personal, cultural, social and political – with the leaders and the people of his host country. This experience convinced him of the enormous goodwill that the people of Pakistan have for India and Indians, notwithstanding the positions adopted by governments of the two countries. It also led to the conviction which he continues to hold that India has not built on this foundation to strengthen ties with Pakistan, but has allowed itself to be trapped in the game of retaliation, denying visas to ordinary people, putting curbs on trade, not allowing sports, especially cricket, to be played, restricting artists, intellectuals and activists from travelling to and fro. It is a conviction of which he has remained an ardent advocate and for which he has often paid a heavy political cost in India. His compensation is the love and affection he has received from the people of Pakistan.
Aiyar returned to India in 1982 and served in various capacities in the Ministry of External Affairs, including helping organise the Non-Alignment Movement Summit in March 1983, and was deputed, first, to MEA’s Special Publicity Group, and subsequently to to the Information and Broadcasting Ministry. And it was from this vantage point that he was witness to Operation Blue Star and its subsequent fallout, the assassination of Indira Gandhi, and then Rajiv Gandhi’s elevation as prime minister. His account of these momentous events deserves close attention as he has painstakingly and with great sensitivity reconstructed the narrative based on his memory as well as information he gathered from different sources in later years. He candidly tries to answer all the difficult questions relating to these events, especially the pogrom unleashed on the Sikhs after Indira’s assassination. Why did the government with Rajiv Gandhi as PM fail to contain the violence in Delhi? What was Rajiv Gandhi’s role? Why did he make the statement about “when a big tree falls, the earth is bound to shake”, which was construed as trying to justify the violence on the Sikhs?
Aiyar concludes that in the first two days, Rajiv trusted that the minister and officials responsible would be able to handle the situation but when he found that it was not true, he personally took charge and within hours had called in the Army and brought the situation under control. He also believes that Rajiv’s remark about the big tree falling was made much after the situation was fully under control, on Indira Gandhi’s birth anniversary on November 19, 1984, and was in no way intended as a justification for the violence against the Sikhs.
The Rajiv I Knew
In assessing the second volume, one must keep in mind that it was originally written as a part of his memoirs (Memoirs of a Maverick: The First Fifty Years 1941-1991), but since it turned out to be much more than his personal recollections of Rajiv and acquired the shape of a biography, it was decided to bring it out as a separate book. Hence it is also not a biography in the usual sense, covering the entire lifespan of the subject of the study, but is confined to the period that Rajiv was the prime minister. In his own words, what Aiyar has done is to “fairly assess the high and low points of Rajiv Gandhi’s prime ministership”.
This is not a book written by a historian or social scientist, presenting an “objective” view of Rajiv Gandhi’s life and work. It is unabashedly an account written by an admirer who worked closely with the protagonist and believes not in his infallibility but in his essential integrity, decency and honesty of purpose. He also believes that Rajiv had a vision for India and made substantial contributions to improving the quality of life.
The book begins with a very moving dedication to his three extremely accomplished daughters, Suranya, a human rights activist, Yamini, a public policy specialist and Sana, a professor of history, whom he addresses as “my three lionesses”. It is clear from a reading of the book that the support of his family, his wife Suneet and his daughters, was critical in enabling him to take many important decisions which changed the course of their lives, such as his resignation from the Indian Foreign Service and plunge into politics.
The first chapter deals with the three accords signed by Rajiv Gandhi in Punjab, Assam and Mizoram and the agreements with Farooq Abdullah in Jammu and Kashmir and with Ghishing in Darjeeling. Aiyar argues persuasively that these were major achievements which have had a positive long-term impact, even when they were not seen favourably at the time, including by Rajiv Gandhi’s own party. In his opinion, Rajiv rightly placed national interest above that of party and successfully brought dissenters back into the national mainstream. He was also confident that even when party interests had to be sacrificed, in the long run the Congress party would gain, and that he was proved right.
His account of the developments in Jammu and Kashmir is particularly interesting, as it questions many widely prevalent notions about what caused the militancy to flare up in 1990 with blame being assigned to alleged rigging of the 1987 assembly elections by Farooq Abdullah held after the Rajiv-Farooq Agreement of November 1986. He insists that, though the charge of rigging by Farooq may have been true, the situation was under control as long as Rajiv was prime minister till November of 1989. Instead, he argues that militancy flared up as a direct consequence of the release of five terrorists by the newly-formed V.P. Singh government in December 1989 as part of the deal to secure the release of the home minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s daughter Rubaiya.
Added to it was the role of Jagmohan who was sent as governor by Singh. He dissolved the assembly, allowed the law and order situation to deteriorate rapidly, declared that Kashmiri Pandits were no longer safe, and actively arranged for their transportation out of the valley. His own memoirs, Aiyar demonstrates, do not support Jagmohan’s claims of exclusive targeting of Kashmiri Pandits. Jagmohan records that according to his own police statistics, during his tenure as governor, between December 1989 and May 1990, a total of 134 innocent people were killed by militants, and of them Hindus numbered 72. This implies that an almost similar number, that is 63, Muslims were killed.
That these were not some freak figures is revealed by an RTI response from the Deputy Superintendent of Police, Srinagar dated November 27, 2021, which states that the total number of Kashmiri Pandits killed since ‘the inception of militancy in 1990 is eighty-nine’, compared to the killing of people of other faiths (principally Muslim) that stands at 1,635. In other words, while the militants targeted all those whom they thought stood in the way of their separatist agenda, and this included Muslims in large numbers, Governor Jagmohan and his administration decided that Hindus were their prime target and that the only way to protect them was to remove them from Kashmir altogether!
The second chapter is titled ‘The Controversies’ and takes up Shah Bano, Babri Masjid, Operation Brasstacks, IPKF and Bofors. Mani essentially defends Rajiv’s position on all these issues, arguing that his intentions were always good, and the mistakes he made were usually because he was either too trusting, or ill-advised or not informed. He vehemently rejects the popular view that Rajiv’s decision to bring in legislation to accommodate the criticism from Muslim society that the Supreme Court judgment on the Shah Bano case had negated Muslim personal law, as also the argument of secularists and the Hindu right that his actions were designed to “appease” Muslims. He avers that while Rajiv was convinced that an overwhelming majority of Muslim public opinion was against it (for example all the Muslim MPs), he was also convinced after extensive consultations that Muslim Personal Law contained adequate provisions for taking care of divorced women. So the route he took was to make Muslim Personal law on this question justiciable in the Civil Courts, thus strengthening divorced women’s rights without upturning Personal Law.
His argument is considerably strengthened by his bringing on record the little known fact that ten years after Rajiv Gandhi left this world, he was vindicated when a five judge bench of the Supreme Court in 2001 unanimously held that the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986 does not reverse the 1985 judgement but “the Act actually and in reality codifies what was stated in the Shah Bano case”, and further that it does not contravene the fundamental rights of Muslim women. He also pertinently asks why, if the Act was so harmful, it has been left untouched by all subsequent governments till today.
Similarly, the next few chapters take us through Rajiv’s foreign policy initiatives, innovative domestic initiatives, including Panchayati Raj, and a final chapter evaluating the man and his office. His conclusion bears quoting:
“He was intelligent, intellectually alive, tireless, and dedicated to improving the moral tone of our democracy. Essentially, a good man, a decent man, a trusting human being, honest with a high sense of probity and integrity.”
A Maverick in Politics: 1991-2024
Aiyar won his first Lok Sabha election in 1991 after Rajiv’s assassination in the course of the election campaign. His life as a politician began only after his patron, on whom he had banked for backing him in his new career, had departed from this world. This was in keeping with the dramatic tenor of his life, where nothing had ever come easy. It seemed as if fate was bent on dealing him a tough hand.
The last volume of his memoirs chronicles the time from the beginning of his first term as an MP in 1991 till the time the manuscript was completed in June 2024, a period of about 33 years. He shares with us his experiences as an MP keen to work for the welfare of his constituency and its inhabitants, and how many grand schemes fell flat and how he then learnt to ask people, especially the poor, what they wanted. And imagine his surprise when he learnt that the first priority of the poorest, who were the scheduled castes, was safe access to burial grounds, as they could not use the main roads of the village for fear of the upper castes. The next priority was a community hall where the people could meet to chat, welcome an important guest, or celebrate a wedding. This was followed by ‘pattas’ for house-sites and hand pumps for water. This experience strengthened his belief in the necessity for Panchayati Raj which would precisely enable people to decide their own priorities.
Another valuable account is of his engagement with the issue of the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi dispute. He recounts his strong stand against any capitulation to the BJP on the issue and gives us an inspiring account of a 44-day Ram-Rahim Yatra he undertook from Rameshwaram to Faizabad (he was prevented from proceeding to Ayodhya) beginning on Gandhi Jayanti on October 2, 1992 and culminating on Jawaharlal Nehru’s birthday on November 14. He was joined along the way by Congress workers, MLAs, MPs and chief ministers. He is very critical of Prime Minister Narasimha Rao’s handling of the issue and what he sees as his virtual surrender to the forces of Hindutva. And the consequences are the ascendancy of the very same forces that we are witnessing today.
After losing the next general election in 1996, he emerged in a new avatar as a columnist for Sunday and The Indian Express, and his syndicated column began to appear in many Indian languages. He was also a popular commentator on TV channels. These not only enabled him to earn a comfortable income but also kept him in the public eye in a politically lean period. Sitaram Kesari’s appointment as the Congress president made him leave the Congress, join and then leave the Trinamool Congress, fight and lose as an independent candidate in 1997 and then rejoin the Congress once Sonia Gandhi took on the mantle.
His passion for promoting Panchayati Raj has remained constant throughout his political life. He never tires of pointing out that it has reached “as many as 2.5 lakh village agglomerations in every nook and corner of the country” and to these elected bodies, rural and urban, have been elected “some 32 lakh individuals, including lakhs of OBCs, SC and ST candidates and an estimated 14-15 lakh women, a hundred thousand of whom have become sarpanches or upsarpanches”. He argues that if the Congress would set up the Rajiv Gandhi Panchayati Raj Sangathan as a frontal organisation like the Youth Congress or the Mahila Congress, it could mobilise large sections of these elected representatives as members who could be of great help during elections as well. An innovative idea, but he regrets he has been unable to persuade the party to adopt it.
He contested and succeeded in winning the 1999 Lok Sabha elections from his home constituency in Tamil Nadu, and functioned as an Opposition MP till 2004. He was active in party forums, as well as in parliamentary committees, gaining valuable political experience. The next round of elections in 2004 saw the Congress led by Sonia Gandhi coming back into office in a coalition government. However, Sonia refused to become the prime minister, as she was expected to do, and instead requested Dr Manmohan Singh to accept the position, which he did and remained prime minister for two full terms till 2014. Mani is critical of Sonia’s decision to step down, and is of the view that attacks on her for being a foreigner smacked of racism. He counters them by pointing out how Indians are assuming leadership positions in Western countries, witness Rishi Sunak in the UK, Leo Varadkar in Ireland, Kamala Harris as vice-president in the US, etc. He is also of the view that given his poor health Manmohan Singh should have been replaced by Pranab Mukherjee as PM in 2012 and Manmohan Singh made the president. This, he believes, would have ensured a Congress victory in 2014.
The years 2004-9 in many ways represent the peak of his political career. He was at different times minister for petroleum and natural gas, Panchayati Raj, youth affairs and sports, and development of the North-east region. He recounts at great length in this volume his initiatives and experiences as minister, and these accounts can be read with profit by those interested in understanding the dynamics of governance, including the relationship between the political party and the government, the bureaucracy and the political class, between the Union and the States, and associated issues.
He describes the multiple initiatives taken by him as petroleum and natural gas minister to improve energy security in the country. These included efforts to promote domestic exploration and production, secure new sources of supplies internationally, and a grand plan to build a pipeline from Iran through Pakistan to India as the beginning of a network of pipelines across Asia. However, to his great disappointment, the ministry was abruptly taken away from him and entrusted to Murli Deora, with the result that his 20 months of toil went waste and all the elaborate plans were buried. His experience shows how political considerations tend to override what might be considered more desirable choices from an objective, national point of view.
As minister for Panchayati Raj, his favourite subject, he had to contend with the tricky area of Centre-State relations as Panchayati Raj was on the State list, and some states were very prickly about what they saw as encroachments on their autonomy, even when they had no serious objection to the objectives of Panchayati Raj. Tamil Nadu was particularly sensitive on this score, and his ardent advocacy of Panchayati Raj cost him politically as he was an MP from Tamil Nadu and needed local support to win his seat in the next elections. The inevitable pulls and pressures in a federal, democratic structure, the delicate task of negotiation of a consensus, all these are in evidence in his detailed retelling.
Unfortunately, he lost the 2009 elections which were won by the Congress and its allies, largely due to local factors. But this meant him losing his Ministerial position, which he never got back, even though he was made a Rajya Sabha member in 2010. It appears from his own account that he lost political favour with the Congress leadership, partly at least due to his own inability to keep his sharp tongue in check, and partly due to misreporting and misinterpretation of his statements. It is also evident that survival in politics requires the ability to suffer fools without letting on that you know they are fools, an ability that he was congenitally bereft of! Intellectual arrogance, of which there are many hints in the memoirs, however justified by extraordinary brilliance, of which too there is much evidence, is not the route to political survival and longevity.
To sum up, Aiyar has, through his three highly readable volumes, given us an invaluable source for understanding many facets of our life and times. In the first volume, Memoirs of a Maverick, his account of his childhood and schooling, and then college and university, followed by his joining the Indian Foreign Service, bring to life the immediate pre- and post- independence years. This was followed by his experiences in various parts of the world as a diplomat, especially his stint in Pakistan, which made him into a lifelong activist in promoting Indo-Pak friendship. He then entered into what feels like among the most enjoyable part of his life, when he worked as a close aide of Rajiv Gandhi. The second volume, The Rajiv I Knew, will remain a unique testament to Rajiv Gandhi’s short-lived political career, and of Aiyar’s own role in it. Organised thematically, it documents and analyses all the important policy and governance initiatives undertaken during that period. Rajiv emerges from this telling as a capable, hands-on, sincere, hard-working leader, empathetic to the needs of the poor, but perhaps too trusting of friends and colleagues many of whom ended up betraying him.
The last volume, A Maverick in Politics, takes us through the ups and downs of his political career from 1991 till 2024. The peak was in the years 2004 to 2009, when he was a minister in Dr Manmohan Singh’s cabinet and served in various ministries, making distinct contributions. From 2009, after losing the Lok Sabha elections, he enters a period of political wilderness, despite being nominated to the Rajya Sabha in 2010. The story of his public life is throughout also woven with the story of his personal and family life, bringing to light his reliance on and pride in his wife Suneet and his three daughters. He ends by trying to convince us that he has no regrets, but the reader will go away with the feeling that, while he may have no regrets about his own decisions and actions, he does feel he did not get his full due in politics. And to his credit, he does not lay the blame for that on others, but on his being “a maverick in politics”.
Mridula Mukherjee taught history at JNU for over four decades. She was also Chairperson of the Centre for Historical Studies and Dean, School of Social Sciences, JNU. She was also Director of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.
