memoirs of a maverick — the first fifty years (1941-91)
Mani Shankar Aiyar
Juggernaut
Rs.899
Pages 379
Autobiography of an effortlessly superior worthy who served in the IFS for 26 years prior to retiring and resurfacing with a new career in politics
There is an element of prankishness, reminiscent of the classic Tom Brown’s School Days in Mani Shankar Aiyar’s Memoirs of a Maverick which details the first 50 years (1941-91) of his privileged life.
One of four children of an upper caste Tamil Brahmin (Tambram) who after graduation in physics from Madras University was so annoyed about the lack of job opportunities to Tambrams because of reverse discrimination of the anti-Brahmin movement in Madras state, that he took “a train that would take him as far as he could get from Madras”. He joined a Tambram chartered accountancy firm in Lahore. Mani Shankar was born in that city, now in Pakistan. In Lahore, Aiyar senior prospered to the extent that he “took no time at all to become a living legend in his profession”. His mother Bhagyalakshmi was also well-qualified as a teacher in London, no less.
Mani confesses that his parents didn’t get along and his mother found excuses to live apart. Thus, Aiyar Amma (mother) and the children were in Simla on vacation on August 15, 1947 when Aiyar Appa (father) escaped the carnage of Partition by the skin of his teeth. Subsequently, the family lived in the outhouse of a relative in Delhi, prompting Amma and her three sons including renowned journalist Swaminathan Aiyar to move to Simla where the children schooled in Welham Prep for young boys preparing for admission into the prestigious The Doon School. This was funded by Aiyar Sr whose career as a chartered accountant by Partition, had revived in Delhi. As a result the family, stuck in a one-room apartment, was awarded a “commodious apartment” by Seth Ramkrishna Dalmia, one of Aiyar Sr’s principal clients, in Delhi.
As Aiyar tells it, he was never a shiny penny, but in his student years and later in his career, he always had a fairy godmother or godfather — the right connections — who helped him acquire a blue-chip education and rise in the foreign service and later in Indian politics. It’s this old boys network which in recent years has earned the description of Lutyen’s Delhi — a charmed circle of privileged English-fluent elite who constituted the Delhi establishment and dominated the bureaucracy, media and corporate India — that infuriated and united the political leadership of the Bharatiya Janata Party and bureaucracy from the hinterland and turned public opinion against Lutyen’s Delhi.
Mani Shankar, who graduated from Doon School, was admitted into the top-ranked St. Stephen’s College, Delhi and Cambridge University, UK and inducted in the Indian Foreign Service, personifies Lutyen’s Delhi. Well-travelled and ever well-equipped with Limey-style class and racial put-downs that pass for humour in Blighty, Mani Shankar embodies the smug caste, class, education and establishment elitism that infuriates the subaltern classes who have to struggle mightily for social upward mobility.
But while his effortless superiority largely worked to his benefit, it has often cost Mani and later the Congress party into which he was smoothly absorbed courtesy his shared background (Doon School and Cambridge) with prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, dear. There is no doubt that his eve-of-election quip that Narendra Modi — the son of a backward caste tea vendor at a railway station who had risen to the position of chief minister of Gujarat and president of the BJP — was more qualified to serve tea at Congress party headquarters in Delhi, than as prime minister of India, cost the Congress millions of votes in General Election 2014, when the Grand Old party’s tally of seats in the Lok Sabha plummeted from 206 in 2009 to 44 in 2014.
Memoirs of a Maverick — the First Fifty Years is the autobiography of this effortlessly superior worthy who served the country for 26 years in plush postings abroad starting with Brussels and Geneva, and in somewhat more testing assignments in Hanoi and Karachi, besides three ministries in Delhi prior to retiring and resurfacing with a new career in politics.
Although it recounts the ups and downs of an evidently upper class individual having to serve under various ambassadors and civil servants who took to him and others who were his educational and social inferiors, it’s difficult to empathise with an individual who in those difficult years when citizens venturing abroad were entitled to purchase $5, was enjoying well-paid foreign postings.
The travails Aiyar suffered under ill-informed and socially inferior bosses from whom he was always rescued in the nick of time by connections in Delhi, have an air of boarding school punishments such as occasional six-of-the-best or gating. And although Mani recounts the monumental work and effort he invested in various initiatives abroad including Pakistan, the plain truth is that diplomatic ties and relationships with these countries, rather than improving, have deteriorated. Of course that’s not his fault.
However, on the major issues of economic development — imposition of the inorganic socialist development model, India’s stagnant rate of economic growth through the 1960s-80s, the neglect of education and mass poverty and immiserisation of two generations of free India’s children under the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty — Aiyar, who married well and sired three children who are inevitably well-placed in India and abroad — has little to say. Ditto the Emergency (1975-77) which he “hated”, though he continued to faithfully serve and eulogise the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty.
Nevertheless on one count during his long career in government, Aiyar did make a notable contribution to the national development effort by conceptualising the Panchayat Raj and Nagarpalika — local self-government — Bills which eventually transformed into the 74th and 93rd Amendments to the Constitution. It’s a pity these Bills despite having been sanctified by inclusion in the Constitution, remain a dead letter because selfish state governments refuse to transfer property taxes collection and disbursement power to local governments in every civic ward countrywide. If these constitutional amendments are enacted in spirit and substance, under the principle that local communities best maintain their backyards, the country would be much better governed.
Be that as it may, although Memoirs of a Maverick reeks of unearned privilege, there’s no denying parallely, it’s an engaging social history of post-independence India recounted from an elite perspective. Almost all the men and women — especially the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and its genuflecting servitors — are named and a few shamed in this eminently readable account of life in the Indian Foreign Service and Lutyen’s Delhi. Perhaps the best is yet to come.
