And Why He Was India’s Most Misunderstood Prime Minister’ is the nine-words-too-long subordinate title to Mani Shankar Aiyar’s book The Rajiv I Knew. It makes the book sound like what it is not — a defence of the man Aiyar adores, misses, recalls to his and his reader’s mind with a zest amounting to a passion.
Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar at a meeting remembering the late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
From its opening to its concluding page, Aiyar’s narration is about a bond between the author three years and four months older than his subject and who, by the play of an impish fate, was his school-time junior, later his friend, still later his boss, and then hero for ever after. So, is the book about unqualified admiration?
Mani Shankar Aiyar | Photo Credit: Getty Images
As one who regards ‘unqualified admiration’ as a spur for writing no less valid than ‘unqualified dislike’ let me say that, yes, absolutely, it is so. Aiyar’s Rajiv is about a bond of sheer admiration. And good that it is so, for admiration has an emotion so bereft of authorial ego, so free of the bilious acids of scepticism passing for objectivity that it goes beyond the person being admired to the nature of admiration itself.
Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi campaigning in Amethi constituency, Uttar Pradesh, for Lok Sabha elections in May 1991 shortly before he was assassinated. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
But as one who also has a spoonful of dispassion within the jar of his emotions, let me also say that Aiyar’s admiration for Rajiv does not fall for the error of devotion. He adores (as I said) Rajiv, he does not worship him. Big deal? Again, yes, that is a big deal because the assassinated former Prime Minister does have his worshippers, and his worshippers have their own of the same. And Rajiv’s wife and his children have their worshippers too, all joined together by politics and the science and art of survival in politics.
Rajiv Gandhi | Photo Credit: Getty Images
Pocket diary
The Rajiv I Knew has been written by a politician about a politician without being about politics. And without being also anti-politics or counter-politics. It is about a person as human in his vulnerabilities as he was strong in his determination as Prime Minister to not let those vulnerabilities get the better of him.
Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi (1944 - 1991) addressing the Congress Parliamentary Party in the Central Hall of Parliament after he was chosen the leader of the House; Rajiv took oath as the youngest Prime Minister of India on December 31, 1984. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
The book is about a closeness that never becomes that awful thing in such books — chummy. It is about a bond that never morphs into that biographical horror — an ‘insider’s revelation’. It is also an account by a friend who does not cross the door of the subject’s homestead. It has a word Vajpayee used to effect: maryada (honour). Being both autobiographical and a biography, the book’s six chapters in a little under 350 pages, read like a pocket diary.
One may learn through this book what ‘knowing’ means. It is not what ‘owning’ means. Aiyar is not filing an affidavit for title. He is telling us that to ‘know’ means to understand, to appreciate and withal to admire in the intricate recesses of the empathetic mind. Rajiv Gandhi steps into and out of the pages of the book as lithely as he does into and from aircraft in good or foul weather. We glimpse his humour, his temper spikes, his calm, his rages. But more than these traits of personality, we see his thought-patterns as one descended from a great man, his grandfather Nehru who too Aiyar has ‘known’. And never more vitally than in his commitment to a world free of nuclear weapons. Not as a concept but a working plan, a step-by-step programme in practical idealism.
Supporters of the Congress (l) in Bengaluru express their solidarity, seeking the removal of Rajiv Gandhi’s name from the Bofors chargesheet. | Photo Credit: The Hindu photo archives
‘Bofors: the gun does not fire’
Aiyar’s knowing Rajiv is also about those who caused him trouble. Aiyar’s portrayal of Arun Nehru in the diary’s pages is written in a blend of all the inks that may make the chemical equivalent of disgust. The book has its share of missed expectations. As in the pages on Bofors, where Aiyar’s distance from the scene of action befogs the picture. His sum-up of Rajiv in the Bofors matter : (Rajiv was) ‘consistently honest, straightforward, upright’ comes not from Aiyar’s acclaimed vocabulary but that of a Who’s Who. Aiyar says Rajiv did no wrong. He does not explain how the perception of wrong-doing entangled him. Vishwanath Pratap Singh calls for more analysis than Aiyar spares for the man who dislodged Rajiv from power. The nearly 60-odd pages on ‘the Bofors story’, read like a strong ‘counter’ for M’Lord in a packed courtroom. And his account of Rajiv’s withdrawal of support to the Chandra Shekhar government, after two men in uniform were spotted near his precincts, begs elucidation. Was pique good enough cause for going back on a word given to a Prime Minister? The book could have done with another hundred pages. Without those, its story asks ‘...and then....?’.
I found the book instructive and engaging but above all, deeply moving. In our times when friendships are about transactions, loyalties skin-deep, The Rajiv I Knew, is, at the end of a plangent day, about loss. Like Tennyson’s In Memoriam, it is about grief, over the loss of a man of honest intent not unmixed with honest mistakes. The escape for Aiyar from that grief is the faith — fragile, perhaps — in what Tennyson described with these words:
Forgive my grief for one removed,/ Thy creature, whom I found so fair./ I trust he lives in thee, and there/I find him worthier to be loved.
The Rajiv I Knew; Mani Shankar Aiyar, Juggernaut, ₹595.
The reviewer is a former administrator, diplomat and Governor.
