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. Indira had to contend with a very powerful bloc of Congress leaders, the Syndicate, as well as more “left-wing adventurist” Young Turks while maintaining a precarious balancing act. At the risk of some simplification, what made the Gandhi-Haksar combine so powerful was while the latter had an academic approach to questions of national development, the former’s approach was political. These approaches can be best seen in the stray thoughts notes that shaped Indira’s early ideological approach to governance (and of which nationalisation of banks and checks on private corporate monopolies were integral). Haksar consulted different points of view, distilled opinions and dithered on the timing of converting them into policy but Indira deftly implemented them when she saw fit.

However, those were different days and we are talking about a different Indira Gandhi. Even after nationalising banks overnight, she had to still go back to party forums where she had to defend her position. And Haksar, alongside I.G. Patel, composed the documents of legitimacy for her. But Haksar’s intellectual candour, buoyed by his ability to articulate criticism freely, was also his undoing. In Ramesh’s retelling, the seeds of Haksar’s decline were sowed in those early days in London where he tried to correct the errant ways and ambitions of Sanjay Gandhi.
After helping to augment her political power, with machinations in which he willingly participated, Haksar was to realise that such forces could take a life of their own. And that life in politics, as elsewhere, was contingent on the moorings and motivations of many other individuals who may or may not fall in your orbit.

Sanjay Gandhi was one such individual and his political ambitions, fuelled by a sympathetic mother in power became too knotty for Haksar’s craft. It is here that Ramesh’s protagonist experienced a fall from lofty heights. Even though he served on the then powerful Planning Commission, Haksar’s family suffered greatly in the onslaught of the suspension of civil rights in India, known as the Emergency. Ramesh remains coy about these hardships, indicating a book penned by Urmila Haksar, which makes for “sordid reading”.

The problem with Ramesh remains that he cannot satisfactorily conclude how best to talk about Haksar. He repeatedly reminds us that Haksar had strong Leftist moorings, evinced easily from a huge set of evidence at the book’s disposal, but admires that the latter was never an ideologue. Ramesh finds Haksar’s complete faith in the commanding heights of the economy to be ‘antediluvian’ and separates the good in Haksar’s work from the bad.

The bad unsurprisingly, is Haksar’s reluctance to let private players have a free rein in the manufacture of certain items. While the book repeatedly reminds us that this was a different time and its pulls and pressures were intrinsically of that time, on the question of Congress socialism (far more Keynesian) Ramesh is ambivalent.

The other problem is that the idea of ‘intertwining’ allows Ramesh an easy metaphor that neither can be held responsible for their actions. Haksar, and this can be seen within the narrative of the book, played his part in centralising power in the Congress Party and promotion of a seemingly enclosed clique in Delhi’s bureaucratic circles. He did not do so with the intention as such, but his lament in later years of what happened is letting him off too generously. The influential and powerful, as Haksar was indeed, must be probed for all their follies.

Shatam Ray (The Book Review, December 2018)