Intertwined lives: PN Haksar & Indira Gandhi

Intertwined lives: PN Haksar & Indira Gandhi, Jairam Ramesh; Simon & Schuster; Rs.799, Pages 560 In his new book, Congress party politician Jairam Ramesh transports us to a time of remarkable consequence for contemporary India. While the author inserts a caveat that the book must be read as a biography of a committed and profoundly sagacious bureaucrat, the accompanying commentary on the times that produced this man can hardly be ignored. This is a man who spoke of secularism as a civic, worldly matter and distanced the idea from its present connotation as an anti-religious doctrine. Here is a man who doggedly harped on the role of science in a modern state and fashioned some of India’s best institutions committed to discovering the new. Ramesh’s biography is better characterised as a political biography. There is no disputing that. From the very title, Intertwined Lives, it is easy to see that the book is preoccupied with using Haksar as an alibi for the times when Indira Gandhi was a towering figure in Indian politics. To be sure, an alibi for the times, not Indira Gandhi herself. Ramesh dispenses with the early life of Haksar with pithy comments and reserves, for anyone interested, the information that Haksar did write a memoir on his early life. Meat is added to the bare bones of Haksar’s life from his time in England as a young student and the wide network of friends and ideological influences he imbibed. Haksar, in Ramesh’s telling, remained loyal to his friends and ideological leanings. The man who returned from London was a few shades pinker than some of his more illustrious ‘red’ friends of the time. Haksar briefly spent time with the then undivided Communist Party of India (CPI) in Nagpur, but was soon to be subsumed within the nascent bureaucracy of post-independent India under Nehru. Haksar was incorporated into the Indian Foreign Service, not without some reservations, but was soon to rise in rank and become, in the author’s words, Indira Gandhi’s “ideological compass and moral beacon”. In his deputation to the UK, he had shown genuine concern for India’s interests while also taking responsibility of Feroze and Indira Gandhi’s sons, having befriended the former two in his student days in London. There is an admixture of the personal and the professional, which looks suspect in our present times but the author does well never to leave any space for implying that Haksar benefitted from his personal proximity to the Gandhis. Instead, and this is more characteristic of the times, Haksar was part of a social milieu that enabled his somewhat meteoric rise in the government system. From here on Ramesh maps the trajectory of his subject’s life as a confidante but also the mind that presaged Indira Gandhi’s ‘socialistic turn’. Haksar was pivotal to all the major events in Indira’s political career after the death of her father, and her eventual accession as the undisputed leader of the Congress party in 1969. The transition was not smooth.…