We are like that only!

Is it possible for even the greatest of Indians to discard the bonds of caste, class, clan or straightforward profit in favour of austere principles?

When the news exploded that four Supreme Court judges had held an unprecedented press conference, my immediate thought was that yet another ninepin had fallen. The last bastion of the impersonal governance of British times — the judiciary — had followed politicians, the bureaucracy, the media and the defence forces to elevate personal or group interests above the nation’s. Then I remembered Jawaharlal Nehru’s ambivalence over Sardar Partap Singh Kairon and wondered whether it’s possible for even the greatest of Indians to discard the bonds of caste, class, clan, affection, admiration or straightforward profit in favour of austere principle.

Paradoxically, while Nehru threatened to hang the corrupt from the nearest lamp post, he indulged some well-known reprobates. He also opposed public probes of scandals about his protégés. Devi Lal and others submitted two memorandums against Kairon to the Congress Party chief in 1958 and 1960 before sending the President of India a charge-sheet whose first paragraph read that “being highly aggrieved by the misdeeds and blatant acts of corruption and gross misrule” of the Punjab Chief Minister “and being further aggrieved by (Nehru’s) partisan handling” of the matter, they wanted “a public inquiry”. Nehru tried to fob them off with a Congress Party investigation which satisfied him but not the complainants. It wasn’t till 1963 — five years after the original complaint — and after the Supreme Court indicted Kairon for harassing an official that he reluctantly conceded the demand.

An eminent Indian barrister told me Nehru had then asked him to suggest someone who would investigate the memorandum without rocking the boat too much. The barrister claims to have proposed Sudhi Ranjan Das who had retired a few years earlier as chief justice. Even then, Nehru made his reluctance abundantly clear in Parliament. The Punjab government “is the topmost in India” he said, “the Punjab state is the topmost in India”. There was no need for an inquiry. Kairon was indispensable to Punjab. Only the direct approach to the President had forced the government’s hand. 

Das’s mandate in this first inquiry since independence into a minister’s conduct was “to inquire into the allegations” against Kairon “and his family”. Did that vital phrase mean Partap Singh Kairon’s family or his son Surinder’s? The memorialists complained Das didn’t conduct a probe. He didn’t “collect all available evidence by the exercise of its own powers” as they had wanted but converted his commission of inquiry into a court of law. All the same, his report, published in June 1964, would undoubtedly have distressed Nehru had he not died the previous month. Das exonerated Kairon, saying a father could not be held legally responsible for the actions of grown-up children. But a caveat — that a chief minister could not escape moral responsibility for his childrens’ actions — was indictment enough. “There is no getting away from the fact that S Partap Singh Kairon knew or had more than ample reason to think or suspect that his sons and relatives were allegedly exploiting his influence and powers” said the report. Kairon quit.

Nehru wasn’t unaware of Kairon’s failings. Privately, he warned the Chief Minister that even his supporters felt his son exploited his position and used undesirable methods. He also complained of Kairon transferring his development officers too frequently and waiving too many rural debts. But this was a fond father’s grumbling about a favourite son’s peccadilloes. Nehru couldn’t sufficiently praise Kairon “whose chief qualities”, if I may emphasise them, “are his fearlessness and his close contacts with the people of the Punjab. He appears to have grown out of the masses of the Punjab, and he is in tune with them; hence his popularity with them”.

Nehru admired Kairon’s administrative achievements. He let him remain chief minister while the inquiry was going on, no doubt expecting him to be cleared of all wrongdoing, not necessarily because he was innocent but for the far more relevant reason that in the Indian world — even for a highly Anglicised idealist like the first and greatest of our prime ministers — people matter more than principles. No wonder some suspect today’s judiciary of trying to predetermine the outcome of sensitive cases by farming them out to sympathetic judges.

It’s ironic to think that 25 years after Das’s report, the joke in Delhi was that when charged with promoting his son, Devi Lal, by then the powerful Tau of Jat politics, deputy prime minister and nursing dynastic ambitions, retorted. “If I don’t promote my son whose son will I promote? Yours?”