On May 3, 2007, the handful of people who still care marked V. K. Krishna Menon's 110th birthday. Or maybe it was his 111th; even on the subject of his date of birth, Menon could not shake off controversy. He was an extraordinary figure, one who attracted more opprobrium in his lifetime than any other Indian leader, certainly in the West, where the choice epithets about him ranged from “Mephistopheles in a Savile Row suit” to “the snake charmer with hooded eyes” and even, unimaginatively, “the devil incarnate.” Time put him on its cover, a snake hissing behind his head: it was an honor the magazine had been slow to accord the Mahatma, but Menon was a foreigner most Americans loved to hate.
He has also, paradoxically, been unjustly treated by the guardians of our historical memory. Krishna Menon is remembered in India largely for two things: delivering a record-setting marathon seven-hour-and-fifty-eight-minute speech on Kashmir in the Security Council fifty years ago, during the course of which he fainted, had to be revived, and carried on; and presiding over a Defense Ministry whose lack of preparedness for war in 1962 led to the humiliation of military defeat by China, a humiliation seen as having been brought about by Menon's own leftist illusions about the Communist giant. His abrasive personality, his reluctance to suffer fools gladly, his bluntness to those he did not judge intellectually worthy of his time — even Nehru's sister Vijaylakshmi Pandit, the first female president of the United Nations General Assembly, fell short of his standards and complained to the prime minister of his “rudeness” to her — meant that he had few genuine loyalists. In good times, his brilliance, his restless energy, his eloquence, and his astonishing reserves of stamina carried the day and won him admirers, if not fans; but when disaster came, he was left friendless and alone, abandoned by the party he had served without pay or thanks in the best years of his life. He died a forgotten backbencher, without even a political party to call his own.
His had been an unusual life. Much of it had been spent in London, where he devoted himself to fighting the battle for India's independence on Britain's home turf, against men “who draw their incomes from India and spend the evenings of their life in maligning India and her people.” He enjoyed the cut and thrust of debate, serving as a Labor Party councillor for the London borough of St. Pancras, where he established libraries and started a literary festival (Menon had been an early consulting editor for Penguin Books, tricking Allen Lane into publishing A Passage to India by implying it was a travel book). Nehru, who had admired Menon's record in the U.K., rewarded him by making him independent India's first High Commissioner in London, a position he used to put the former colonial masters firmly in their place. That acerbic wit rarely failed him: when the hapless Brigid Brophy complimented him on his English, Menon retorted scathingly, “My English, Madam, is much better than yours. You merely picked it up; I learned it.”
It was not an approach calculated to win friends, but it did influence people. I have read no more remarkable exposition of the mind-set of the first generation of India's nationalist leaders than Krishna Menon's magisterial interviews with the Canadian political scientist Michael Brecher, published in 1968 as a book titled India and World Politics: Krishna Menon's View of the World. It is difficult to think of an Indian leader other than Nehru who would have been capable of the extensive discourse on world affairs, human history, and international politics that Menon so magisterially managed.
I did not agree with most of Krishna Menon's views — his socialism was imbibed directly from Harold Laski at the London School of Economics, and his anti-Americanism was visceral rather than rational — but I admired the way he expressed them. Unlike my father, Krishna Menon may not have had a heart, but he had a brain, and a tongue. In this golden jubilee year of his historic UN speech, they're both worth raising a toast to.
30. Smother India
OF THE DOZEN PRIME MINISTERS WHO HAVE RULED INDIA, the world's most populous democracy, since independence from Britain in 1947, none evokes the extremes of adulation and hatred that Indira Gandhi does. Shrewd politician, two-time prime minister (with a total of fifteen years in office), and autocrat, she is deified and despised in equal measure: like India herself, Indira leaves no one indifferent.
Her life can clearly be divided into two phases: a modest, even unremarkable youth and early adulthood, followed by a formidable middle age. Surviving childhood frailty and a brush with the tuberculosis that had killed her mother, Indira was a sickly and often bedridden young woman with a penchant for silence. Even her famous childhood identification with Joan of Arc was a fabricated piece of adult self-mythologizing. She made little impression on family and friends until she dropped out of college in Oxford and married a young Congress Party worker, Feroze Gandhi. (Feroze was no relation to the Mahatma, but a member of the tiny Parsi minority.) The marriage soon foundered, however, over the conflicting demands of father and husband, or as Indira saw it, her duty to the nation over her loyalty to her marriage. Feroze, a fiercely independent Congress MP and anticorruption crusader, felt politically and personally stifled, turned to drink and infidelity, and died young in 1960.
When Nehru's successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri, died at the age of sixty-two of a sudden heart attack after peace talks with Pakistan in Tashkent in 1966, the Congress Party stalwarts known as the “Syndicate” picked her as someone who enjoyed national recognition but could be counted upon to take instructions from the party. They mistakenly saw her, in the words of opposition Socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia, as a gungi gudiya, or “dumb doll.” Initially, Indira, inarticulate and tentative, overreliant on advisers of dubious competence, stumbled badly in office. The party paid the price in the elections of 1967, losing seats around the country, and seeing motley opposition governments come to power in several states.
At the brink of the abyss, Indira fought back. Sidelining the Syndicate, finding allies among Socialists and ex-Communists, she engineered a split in Congress in 1969 on “ideological” grounds. Having established a populist image and expelled the old bosses, she led her wing of Congress to a resounding victory in 1971, campaigning on the slogan “Garibi Hatao” (Remove Poverty). This was swiftly followed by the decisive defeat of Pakistan in the war that created Bangladesh later that year. Her popularity soared; she had reinvented her party, upstaged the older generation of political leaders, and won a decisive war against the country that had, in 1947, vivisected the motherland. India's leading modern painter, the Muslim M. F. Husain, depicted her as a Hindu mother goddess. The imagery was appropriate: indeed, at her peak, Indira Gandhi was both worshiped and maternalized.
But what did she stand for? As Nehru's daughter and political heir, Indira Gandhi had imbibed his vision, but it was distorted by her own proclivities. She took great pride in the fact that she was born in November 1917, at the time of the Russian Revolution. From her father and his friends she had learned to be skeptical of Western claims to stand for freedom and democracy when India's historical experience of colonial oppression and exploitation appeared to bear out the opposite. These convictions fitted in with her domestic left-wing political strategy, her need for Soviet support on the subcontinent against a U.S.-backed Pakistan-China axis, and her dark suspicion, born more out of personal insecurity than of any hard evidence, that the CIA was out to destabilize her government as it had done Allende's.