'Intertwined Lives': Biography of PN Haksar lacks an assessment of his role

Indira Gandhi’s frigid condolence call on P N Haksar when his mother died in April 1979 recalled my own last encounter with him on a not dissimilar occasion. Only, my visit wasn’t frigid. It was tragic. It was also revealing.

It was the day after his wife’s death in November 1989, and I was shocked to find the house empty but for Haksar and his daughter. She asked how long I could stay as she had some errands to run. Her near-blind father could not be left alone too long. Chatting with Haksar had always been a pleasure since our first meeting in London more than 30 years before, and I welcomed the opportunity of an extended session. 

All the same, it seemed bizarre. A house of mourning in Calcutta (today’s Kolkata) bustles with supportive friends and relatives whose attentions can sometimes be emotionally trying and financially burdensome. Indian ritual wisely tries to relieve the second problem by including wads of banknotes in the customary offering of fruit and flowers. But no one called at Haksar’s house while I was there even though he had been a power in the land. Only the egg seller arrived and it was painful to watch Haksar hold a twenty-rupee note up to a corner of his good eye to tell its value from the colour. 

“Delhi is a cruel city,” he wrote to Mulk Raj Anand. “Unless one has power, pelf and ‘influence’, one is condemned to live without experiencing the sensation of friendship.” 

The extent of his authority was revealed to me during the 1969 Commonwealth summit (the ugly CHOGM acronym wasn’t used then) in London. Being one of the few members of the Indian Journalists Association actually to file copy, I was worried that, given the time difference with India, it would be too late in Calcutta by the time Indira finished speaking to make the next day’s paper. Haksar invited me to his suite at the Claridges in the early afternoon. He was in his shirtsleeves, typing Indira’s speech with two fingers. He took page by page to her next door and then showed it to me. When I wondered if the speech would be delivered as written, he looked at me over his half-moon glasses and said, “If we had worked together in Delhi, you would have known that I never let down my friends.” 

If he was ignored later, it was because he no longer mattered. The Delhi milieu hasn’t changed. Opportunism and sycophancy are two sides of the same coin. Even posthumous praise can be the currency of homage to those whom the deceased served. Indira is dead, but her heirs can still dispense patronage. Indrajit Gupta is mentioned in awestruck tones as “the home minister of India, no less”. Not because of qualities of head and heart or because he sacrificed his life to a cause.

There’s a wealth of material in this book but no explanation of how someone whom the IFS interview board judged was no more than “of average ability but had capacity for hard work” rose so high. Nor of why so little of Haksar’s legacy — bank nationalisation or urban land ceiling — is valued today.

Haksar was a child of his time, witness his Communist party links. The causes he supported owed as much to ideology as to expediency. He lectured me roundly in 1970 on my return from London via Tel Aviv on the iniquities of the Israelis. “Listen to the accents of Israel’s leaders,” he thundered because I had dared to call Israel an Asian state. “They are not Asians. They are European colonists!” Yet India was then renewing its surreptitious military links with Israel.

Indira Gandhi flanked by Aziz Ahmed (left) and P N Haksar (far right), New Delhi, August 1973. Between Indira Gandhi and Haksar are P N Dhar and Foreign Secretary Kewal Singh

At a personal level, Haksar might almost have echoed E M Forster’s “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” He would never betray his country, of course, but he would pull strings and go to great lengths to fix things for a friend. Officiousness — predictably, a word for which there is no precise equivalent in any Indian language — was his other typically Indian characteristic. Long after laying down all official responsibilities, he was still sending notes and messages on policy matters to all and sundry. This obsession with having a finger in every pie must have made the isolation in which I last met him even more unbearable.

If this is the unputdownable Indian side of Haksar’s personality, he will be quite at home with the Indianisms of this mammoth 518-page biography. The most glaring right at the outset is the common Indian solecism of saying “fascination for” when “fascinated by” is meant. A more important flaw is the suppression of uncomfortable facts (like Rajiv Gandhi’s academic record) and his advice, as noted by observers without a political axe to grind, that the best way to vanquish the Congress Syndicate was to convert the struggle for personal power into an ideological one. At another level, italicising chunks of other people’s notes and letters is irritating and misleading since the italicised portions are not necessarily the most significant but only the author’s personal preference. 

The real drawback is the absence of analysis. The author claims to “have deliberately eschewed the temptation to be judgmental”. The temptation can’t have been very strong in unabashed hagiography. References to Haksar’s “future greatness” when he was a junior diplomat, Indira’s “huge respect” for him and his “high-minded sense of values” are some of the encomiums that pepper the book together with comments about Rajiv that are predictably even more flattering. This obsequiousness says much about the writer but rules out any serious assessment of the subject. Haksar deserves better.