Thereafter I made it a point to call on him on all my visits to Delhi. I was then privileged to see him, on and off, for eighteen more years, through spells in office and out of it. I saw him as minister in two different ministries, as vice president, and finally as president. The surroundings changed, but as each receiving room became grander and more awe inspiring, the man himself did not change. It was as if his own humanity was so genuine that it could not be affected by its external trappings. Few people who have held high office are so profoundly anchored in themselves that they are immune to being swayed by the tall waves and high winds that buffet the ship of state. K. R. Narayanan was an exception. Through all the positions he held, it could truly be said of our tenth president, as it can of few others, that he remained himself.
Whenever we met, we conversed and argued; I was bowled over not only by the range and depth of his engaging intellect but by his humility and modesty, qualities that are so uncharacteristic of highly placed Indians. He was never a “typical politician,” but he survived politics while managing to stay above its worst aspects. That is what made him a worthy successor to the likes of Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Dr. Zakir Hussain.
President Narayanan had written and spoken enough — especially before his ascent to the rarefied levels where speechwriters churn out his words — for us to have a sense of where he stood on the vital issues confronting the nation. His vision of a multireligious and multilingual India was the national counterpart of his view of a multi-ideological, multicultural world. Behind the mild manner and the invariably courteous smile, his was an unusual and eclectic spirit, forthright and remarkably free of cant. Narayanan's writings and speeches revealed the unusual mind of a man who, despite spending most of his adult life in government — and an awful lot of it as a career diplomat — could cheerfully whisk the tail of many an officially blessed sacred cow. He once described the sanctified Belgrade non-aligned summit of 1961 as “a very decorous, high level, and rather unsuccessful attempt to run away with some of Nehru's clothes.” Krishna Menon he portrayed as a man thriving on “tea and antipathy.” After forty years of international experience he wrote that even the consensual national dogma of continuity in India's foreign policy was often based on no more than “easy and inglorious routine.” Even at the peak of our adherence to nonalignment as the be-all and endall of our foreign policy, Narayanan was one of the few senior diplomats capable of rising above the usual official tendency to treat it as some sort of magic mantra which needed only to be incanted to be understood.
Narayanan's view of the world was rooted very firmly in a vision of India. Not an idealized, propagandist's vision, but a vision of an India whose injustices and inequalities the president himself had keenly felt as a member of an underprivileged community; yet an India that offered, through a constitutional system of democracy authored principally by a member of that same community, the possibility of overcoming these injustices. As a Keralite, Narayanan hailed from the state that had done most to fulfill the human potential of its people, a state whose record of literacy, communal tolerance, gender equality, workers’ rights, and integrity in public life should be a model for the rest of the country. As a human being, he brought to the helm of our ship of state a rare intelligence, a broad education, and an identification with the downtrodden that both Ambedkar and Gandhiji would have been proud to see in the Rashtrapati Bhavan.
It was particularly fitting that, on the fiftieth year of our political independence, the presidency was won by one whose life had been shaped by the iniquities and the opportunities of India, and whose mind reflected this appreciation. India was lucky, for five years, that the highest office in the land was occupied by someone who was born among the lowest of the low: a man who was not only a Dalit but one born in a thatched hut with no running water, whose university refused to award him his degree at the same ceremony as his upper-caste classmates, and yet who rose above his lot to triumph without bitterness. The country learned about his Tata scholarship to England, the letter from Professor Harold Laski to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru urging him to take the young man into the Foreign Service, the illustrious career that followed in diplomacy, education, and politics, culminating in his assumption of the highest position his country could offer. Obituarists better qualified than I have written of his principled positions on political issues, his memorable assertion of his independent convictions at the state dinner for President Clinton, his courage in sending improper decisions back to the cabinet for reconsideration.
And yet none of that tells the whole story about K. R. Narayanan, about why he will be missed by those who had the privilege of encountering him in person. I salute K. R. Narayanan for what he did, but I write now to praise him for who he was. Decent, learned, unaffected, a gentleman through and through in a land — and a profession — where gentlemen seem a vanishing breed, K. R. Narayanan stood for an idea of India that appealed to the better angels in all of us Indians. As president he led an India whose injustices he had keenly felt but an India that offered, through its brave but flawed experiment in political democracy, the real prospect of change through affirmative action and the ballot box. In his five years as our rashtrapati, the man who did not change embodied the enduring values of a country that has changed profoundly. That is what we have lost with his passing, and it is a loss that touches every one of us.
29. Tea and Antipathy
I ONLY MET THE LEGENDARY V. K. KRISHNA MENON ONCE, and in hardly the most propitious of circumstances. My father, then only thirty-eight, had been hospitalized with a heart attack and I was in the ward, an anxious child of twelve, when his old friend came calling. Krishna Menon was out of office at the time, having been defeated the previous year in his attempt to be reelected to his seat in Parliament, and I did not quite know what to make of him. He arrived in his white mundu and shirt, the unruly shock of white hair distinctive above his hawklike nose, trailing a couple of hangers-on, and greeted my father with a bluff comment: “What's this about a heart attack? Chandran, I didn't know you had a heart.” That is all I remember about the great man, though I also recall being childishly offended by his remark, then growing up to think that his was a very witty comment, only to conclude a few years later that it was not witty enough. (My father was famed for his generosity of spirit, so Menon could easily have said, instead: “Chandran, we all know you have a heart. You didn't have to prove it this way.”)
Four years later, when I went to college in Delhi, Krishna Menon was back in Parliament and my father urged me to call on him. I never did, for reasons I can no longer explain; and before I had graduated, he had passed away. My father had helped him establish the India Club in London's The Strand, where masala dosas and tea could always be had at prices affordable to young Indian newsmen. I never learned whether Menon had been partial to dosas, but of tea he was a notorious addict, admitting to consuming thirty-eight cups a day. I will always regret never sharing one of those with him.