[This is an excerpt from an article in The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs.]
This is the second volume of Mani Shankar Aiyar’s memoirs, the first of which was reviewed in the December 2023 issue of this journal. Purists will complain this companion volume sits uneasily within the genre of autobiography, and the author himself concedes that point in a prefatorial note where he also explains the reasons for its independent publication:
The book was an integral part of the first volume of my Memoirs. However, as I was not personally witness to, or personally involved with, much of Rajiv Gandhi’s thoughts and actions in the political field, it read more like a political biography than an autobiography, especially as a great deal of the source material for this volume emerged in the public domain after his assassination on 21 May 1991, in some key cases a decade or even longer after his death. This meant the mode of my Memoirs suddenly changed from ‘autobiographical’ to ‘biographical’, which my publishers felt – and I agreed with them – wrecked the integrity and consistency of the work. It was, therefore, decided, with my concurrence, that these pages should be separated from the first volume and, after due editing, published as a separate standalone work. (preface, unnumbered page)
Aiyar is, not to put too fine a point on it, a steadfast and almost unqualified admirer of Rajiv Gandhi. He insists, however, that he was never an ‘insider’ during the time he worked in the Prime Minister’s Office, and ‘therefore, knew only as much as any newspaper reader about almost all that is recounted in these pages’ (p. 4). He attempts to answer many questions about Gandhi and his premiership that have intrigued observers and political analysts, the foremost of which is: was Gandhi really in charge when he steered the ship of state for the five years immediately following the death of his mother? No direct answer is provided to that question but Aiyar argues that Gandhi trusted his friends and colleagues too much and they betrayed that trust:
Prime ministers can either be suspicious, secretive, even paranoiac, like RG’s mother was, or transparent and trusting as he was. Even as he would never have betrayed a benefactor, he assumed that others shared his values. Not being duplicitous himself, he did not understand that others may betray him for a host of reasons. Not having striven for power, he did not quite understand what made others power-hungry. Because he trusted those to whom he gave responsibility, he assumed they would not violate his trust. Because he was a good man, he thought others would be the same (p. 6).
Not an entirely implausible explanation, perhaps, but that would beg another important question: was he really up to the job if he was, to put it bluntly, so naïve? Should he not have turned down the prime ministership when it was offered to him in circumstances which, in more mature democracies, would have raised eyebrows? All that Aiyar would say in this context is that, recognising the undemocratic nature of his anointment to that high office, Gandhi ‘called an election within a few weeks of his becoming prime minister’ (p. 8) – which, of course, was creditworthy and which saw him acquire legitimacy with a sweeping parliamentary majority on the back of a sympathy wave. Aiyar adds that Gandhi was not power-hungry himself: ‘I underline that until his mother’s assassination, Rajiv Gandhi was not preparing himself for high office’ (p. 9).
Book review: Memoirs of a maverick
The book traverses a huge arc of events, including the many controversies that had beset Rajiv Gandhi’s premiership (the Shah Bano incident, the Bofors scandal, the events leading up to the Babri mosque demolition, the very public sacking of the head of the foreign service), his attempts at bringing peace to many troubled parts of India (Punjab, Assam, Mizoram, Jammu and Kashmir, West Bengal), his foray into international troubleshooting (Sri Lanka, nuclear disarmament, China, Maldives), and his government’s developmental initiatives aimed at lifting the Indian economy from the morass into which it had fallen, thanks to the dirigiste socialism that Gandhi’s mother and grandfather had inflicted upon the country.
On the issue of socialism, Aiyar has much to say which will, at the very least, be hotly contested and may even be dismissed as laughable by many observers of the Indian scene. The picture that he paints is of a Rajiv Gandhi who was a staunch votary of ‘Indian socialism’ and who had no intention ‘to drag India out of the socialist camp (and, incidentally, out of the Soviet embrace as well) and into the glorious world of free enterprise’ (p. 197). Even if that assessment is accurate, how does Aiyar account for the fact that, within less than two years after Gandhi had ceased to be prime minister, the Indian economy was on its knees and a successor government had to go with a begging bowl to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and pledge its gold reserves, to keep the economy afloat?
To argue, as Aiyar does, that Indian socialism is somehow to be praised because it is a wholly indigenous concept and was never influenced from outside is not only questionable but ignores the very deep, extensive and long-lasting damage that four decades of ‘permit-licence-quota’ raj had wrought, regardless of its origins, on the psyche of Indians who had to endure chronic shortages of essential commodities, get inured to corruption at all levels, and put up with bloodsucking middlemen and rent-seekers as a matter of course. There were other deeper wounds, too, which have yet to heal: perhaps the most egregious example being the grievous blow that Indira Gandhi dealt to the judiciary after it had begun to question the retrograde constitutional amendments that she – and her father earlier – foisted upon the nation in the name of egalitarianism and the much-publicised ‘socialist pattern of society’ to which Aiyar still seems proudly attached.
Aiyar’s analysis of Rajiv Gandhi’s convictions on the economic front has the potential to leave his readers confused. To say that Gandhi ‘saw no contradiction between advocating economic reform and “our [unshakeable] commitment to socialism”’ (p. 200) makes little sense unless the reform is in the direction of more state control. Even less convincing is his assessment that ‘As the memory of [Rajiv] drifts into a little-remembered past, his most enduring image will be that of the prime minister who prepared the nation for the economic reforms that followed in the aftermath of his sudden absence’ (p. 249). The credit for those bold – and, by the standards of the then economically-crippled India, revolutionary – reforms has, not unreasonably, gone to Gandhi’s successor, P.V. Narasimha Rao who has remained persona non grata among the partisans of the Nehru-Gandhi family and about whom Aiyar has expressed himself in decidedly unflattering terms elsewhere.
Rajiv Gandhi emerges from this book, as can be expected, as little less than a knight in shining armour who was, at every step of his way, let down badly by his colleagues and associates. Even his more obviously contentious policies and actions are sought to be glossed over or attributed to the machinations of people around him.
Venkat Iyer is the editor of The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs.
The Rajiv I knew by Mani Shankar Aiyar, New Delhi, Juggernaut Books, 2024.
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