The President's meandering memories

THE DRAMATIC DECADE
The Indira Gandhi Years
Pranab Mukherjee
Rupa
X+322 pages; Rs 595

“Old soldiers never die, they just fade away,” said General Douglas MacArthur in his farewell address in 1951.  But old high officials write books instead of fading away.  They often hit the jackpot of best-sellerdom, and sometimes, even act as valuable deus ex machina  explaining the labyrinths of politics and governance.  Henry Kissinger’s volumes are instructive not only about the foreign policy formulations of the United States leading to its China initiative, but also about the Machiavellian thinking of himself and his master, Richard Nixon.  Some become, or attempt to be, tell-all exposes, which category includes many post-Watergate disclosures and the much more serious effort by Robert M Gates, the former Pentagon boss under both George W Bush and Barack Obama.  (Our own M O Mathai, secretary to Jawaharlal Nehru, wrote a tell-all book, too scurrilous to be taken seriously).  Some others just amble along, saying nothing much but in a pleasing manner, as is the case of the memoirs of both Bill and Hillary Clinton.  Most Indian attempts are of the last category, with many not even being good reads.

We have been treated to a surfeit of these last lately.  The former foreign minister Natwar Singh leads the pack with his far from dramatic revelations barely camouflaging attempts at justification of acts of his heroine, Indira Gandhi (and en passant , himself).  Sanjaya Baru’s account of his years as former prime minister Manmohan Singh’s media advisor led to a short-lived debate, but added not much to what the reader already knew or suspected.

The president of the Republic, Pranab Mukherjee, is the latest entrant to this club, with his much-heralded account of the 1970s that coincides with Indira Gandhi’s ascendance in the Indian political firmament and her short but dramatic eclipse from it.  His latest book, The Dramatic Decade , is an uncritical hagiography of Indira Gandhi, and making us none the wiser.  

Mr Mukherjee sets out to cover “three epochal events - the war that led to the liberation of East Pakistan; the events leading up to, and following, the declaration of the Emergency in 1975; and the emergence of coalition politics in India with the formation and coming to power of the Janata Party in 1977.  Each of these events significantly shaped the political landscape and discourse of our country".  The first, he deals with in the opening chapter titled “Muktijuddho".  The Emergency and its backdrop are the subject of the next three chapters.  Together, they consume less than 100 of the 250 substantive pages of the book.  His main focus, thus, as revealed by the extent of space devoted in the book and nature of detail, is the last mentioned, the three years from 1977 to 1980.

That is not surprising, since Mr Mukherjee was a fringe player even in the internal politics of the Congress until after the Emergency was revoked in 1977.  His star was on the ascendant from that period onwards, though not continuously, since he suffered a major setback in the Rajiv Gandhi years and underwent a rather slow rehabilitation under Narasimha Rao.  He became the Congress’ go-to person only under Sonia Gandhi’s chequered leadership.

This is reflected in the discussion, if one may call what is presented as that, of the first two concerns of the book.  Blurbs of books are to be taken lightly, but it is difficult to digest even with a large helping of salt that “Mukherjee recounts brilliantly with a historian’s rigour and insight” the history of the War of Liberation of Bangladesh or the antecedents of the Emergency.  There is no new material, nor a critical examination of what is quoted.  The reason is obvious: the author had no first-hand exposure to or a ringside seat at these events.  Nor did he have the opportunity and resources to diligently research them later on (as Winston Churchill did in his brilliant histories of World War II and of English-speaking people), preoccupied as he was in being an active politician.  He is largely dependent on secondary sources, well-regarded accounts of Bengal and the Bengalis by Tapan Raychaudhuri and Nitish Sengupta and Janardan Thakur’s polemic on Indira Gandhi and the Emergency.  His one “revelation” of Siddhartha Shankar Ray being the Rasputinesque advisor to Mrs Gandhi is widely known and his one personal recollection of being hastily summoned back to Delhi on the morning of June 26, 1975, after the Emergency proclamation is too insignificant to matter.

These two events, which Mr Mukherjee rightly terms as "epochal" are by now extremely well-researched and documented.  Even in the popular press, veteran journalist Inder Malhotra has trawled deep into these waters to collect all the nuggets worth reporting.  Mr Mukherjee’s original reportage of personalities in the Congress, their predilections and pre-Emergency “tough” actions – mainly under his then charge of revenue in the finance ministry – are akin to dredging up sand now of little value.  In the process, he tends to downplay the real and widespread discontent in the country, starting from the Navnirman agitation in Gujarat from December 1973 onwards.  That harbinger of what eventually came to be called the Jaya Prakash Narayan movement does not find even a mention in the book.  It is also reflected in his attributing the Congress defeat in the Gujarat Assembly election to JP’s leadership.  This shows how oblivious the Congress and its leadership were to the disaffection at the grass roots.  A virtually leaderless movement of students and their spontaneous agitation forced out the Chimanbhai Patel government in Gujarat in 1974 and ensured the Congress defeat in 1975, a scenario that repeated itself all over north of the Vindhyas two years later.

The facileness of the first two segments of the narration is matched by the tediousness of the last, when Mr Mukherjee was indeed a witness to the momentous events of the Congress split and the return of Indira Gandhi.  But does bearing that witness mean exercising no judgement about the importance of the various happenings and individuals involved?  Page after page, we see names of people now completely off all radars (as one who was very much an observer then, I can vouch for their being of little significance even at that time).  We have long, repetitive excerpts from speeches and newspaper reports, and details (to the minute!) of Parliament discussions, disruptions and adjournments.  What is a listmaker’s delight is a reader’s headache, I discovered and not for the first time either.

Mr Mukherjee heaps scorn on the Janata Party and its leadership, many of whom were his former colleagues in the Congress.  He also excoriates many Congress leaders as being disloyal when they harshly criticised Indira Gandhi.  Disloyalty is a vice only when the object of it Indira Gandhi, or so it would seem.  The fractious nature of the Janata experiment was obvious even then, but 35 years later, it is the hallmark of all politics in India, not sparing even the dynasty-led parties (albeit sotto voce ).  What purpose does much wringing of hands serve now, except perhaps to provide some unnecessary ex post justification to long forgotten decisions and actions?

Mr Mukherjee stoutly refutes the arguments that the Congress (I) engineered defections to swell its ranks in the early days.  There is much evidence to the contrary.  I had been an inadvertent spectator to one such effort in Manipur in August 1978, involving the then Congress (I) in-charge for the Northeast, no prizes offered for guessing his identity (“Triumph of the survivor", Business Standard , June 20, 2012).  The Janata decision to dismiss the state Assemblies following its win in 1977 comes is questioned, including the reproduction of Congress resolutions and statements in full, but a similar decision of the Congress (I) in February 1980 is defended including the elaborate strategy used by the leader of the party in the Rajya Sabha (then in a minority), Pranab Mukherjee.  

But the most grievous shortcoming of the book is its jumbling of time.  Discontinuity of narration and jumping back and forth are artistic devices sparingly used in fiction and films lest the reader or viewer be discombobulated.  That, however, is the stock-in-trade of this book.  Mr Mukherjee often tells us the denouement and then walks us back through some earlier events, returning to the main one, and backtracking again until we are thoroughly confused.  We meet Sheikh Mujeebur Rahman first as the Bangabandhu, then as a memoirist, later as a student leader, Suhrawardy colleague and so on.  Perhaps the most confusing is the treatment of Devraj Urs, the Karnataka strongman in the 1970s.  He appears first as a Gandhi partisan in 1977, then a traitor to the Congress (I) with his own Congress (Urs) in 1979, yet again as the manager of Indira Gandhi’s 1978 Chikmaglur campaign and finally, back again as the Mir Jafer to Indira Gandhi’s Siraj-Ud-Daulah in 1979.  I must confess if I did not have the copious resources of Google and Wikipedia to buttress my memory, I would have abandoned further efforts to make sense of this train of events.  Clearly, a chronology would have helped the author even more than the reader.

Lazy copy-editing adds more blemishes to this opus.  The process of checking facts, dates and spellings is marked by glaring inconsistencies.  Margatham Chandrasekar, a Tamil Nadu Congress leader of the 1970s, is often referred to as Chandrasekar, making one wonder whether the reference was to the bearded erstwhile Young Turk, then the Janata Party president.  Among the many misspellings, one stands out: the Shah commission counsel is called repeatedly as Karl Khandelwal.  When did the gregarious art connoisseur-barrister abandon his Zoroastrian faith and entitlement to the hill resort near Mumbai, Khandala?  Among the many missed dates, one stands out: Charan Singh resigned from the Morarji Desai government in June 1978, only to be persuaded to rejoin the government in January 1978!  Did he have a time machine?

Among the many indexing and referencing errors, one stands out: we are informed in a footnote in chapter nine that a detailed discussion of the Urs imbroglio is in chapter 10, , but it appears at the very end of chapter 11.  Among the many obligatory photographs that serve no purpose, one stands out: it shows Indira Gandhi, Sanjay Gandhi, defence minister Bansi Lal and three others with no clue to its relevance.

Indian publications, especially those dealing with current events, suffer seriously for want of substantive and copy- editing.  The three Rupa publications I have reviewed are among the worst offenders, none more so than the present one.  Did the august office of the president of India not deserve more caring treatment?  Here is hoping that the next two volumes of the promised trilogy do not suffer this fate.

(A shorter version of this review appears in the print edition of December 22)