Book review: Jairam Ramesh,Intertwined Lives—P. N. Haksar and Indira Gandhi

In India, it is a hazardous exercise for a public person to undertake to write books on political matters because even the most nuanced reflection gets reduced to a five-second ‘bite’, and there is a controversy instead of reasoned debate or enlightenment. Such an enterprise becomes many times riskier for a Congressman because the ‘deep state’ within the ‘official’ Congress zealously guards its history and takes a dim view of any departure from the prescribed orthodoxy.

Jairam Ramesh is a card-carrying Congress functionary and generally referred to in the media as ‘a senior Congress leader.’ He has produced this marvellous book about Indira Gandhi and P. N. Haksar. It is more about Haksar than about Indira Gandhi, and in writing this book, he has walked a careful middle path, as he attended to the much-neglected task of writing about Haksar, probably the most influential civil servant since Independence. ‘He was a legend once upon a time. He is all but forgotten today,’ and Ramesh has attempted to rescue this great public servant ‘from growing obscurity and oblivion.’

By the time Haksar arrived at Indira Gandhi’s prime ministerial doorsteps on 6 May, 1967, a debilitating kind of immobilisme had manoeuvred itself at the heart of the Indian state: two wars (with China in 1962; with Pakistan in 1965) had exhausted the nation, economically and emotionally; two successions (1964, 1966) at the national level did reaffirm the success of the Nehruvian democratic legacy, but the anti-Hindi agitation in southern India in January 1965 had underlined the Selig Harrisonian centrifugal fears; the rupee devaluation in 1966 did not work its magic; food shortages, rationing and PL-480 food shipments on a weekly basis brought to every home an idea of a kind of failure on a grand scale; and the fourth General Elections had advertised the electorate’s fatigue with the Indian National Congress and vice-versa, as well as announced the rise of regional forces and voices. Not to be ignored were the demands made on India and Indian political system and its operatives by the Cold War and its cold-blooded practitioners in Washington and Moscow. The bottom line was unmistakable: the ruling political establishment had run dry––depleted of ideas, drained of imagination, and, more manifestly lacking the requisite will power to discharge the vital and inescapable duty to carry on the Indian state show.

It is in this context of the crippling immobilisme that Haksar arrived to take his place as Indira Gandhi’s counsellor, conscience-keeper, and at times, a consigliere. He offered Indira Gandhi his ‘non-negotiable loyalty to you and what you stand for and suffer for.’ The commitment to her was both personal and intellectual, manifestly much more than what a conventional bureaucrat owes to a minister or a prime minister.

Haksar arrived at the Prime Minister’s Secretariat wearing an armour, steel-plated with three certainties and convictions: first, if the Indian state had to dig its way out of the engulfing immobilisme, then it had to discover new energy and stamina to renew itself. A renewal meant there had to be a new, energised national purpose. That meant that the state could no longer be content to be the custodian of the status quo. Jawaharlal Nehru had seen to it that India had the making of a modern, industrial, scientific order; now was the time for the Indian state to take the next step––transform itself, expand itself, arm itself with new instruments, acquire new competencies and capacities.

Second, the Prime Minister’s Secretariat would need to be the fulcrum of this new national undertaking, if the nation’s resources, talent and aspirations were to be marshalled coherently and urgently. That meant that not only prime ministerial authority must be re-validated but also that disparate forces and confused leaders––both inside and outside the Congress––needed to be made to understand that the Prime Minister Secretariat’s guiding hand was a necessary condition. This prime ministerial centrality would, of course, be dependent on the reassertion of the fundamental feature of parliamentary democracy––the Prime Minister’s authority would be unfettered as long as s/he commanded the legislature’s confidence.

A confident Prime Minister backed by a competent secretariat would do the trick. But Haksar was not seeking any glory or limelight for himself. He would pithily tell his colleagues, ‘The Prime Minister’s Secretariat should be seen to be not existing, only the PM exists.’ What he was envisaging was a subtle shift from the cabinet system of government to a prime ministerial arrangement. After the 1971 mandate, he felt confirmed in this certainty and would tell Indira Gandhi: ‘PM, accountability will be total and absolute’ and ‘…it is, in my submission, essential to impress upon the Ministers that hereafter their performance will be judged.’ This was an institutional prescription, not merely tailored out to prettify a maximalist brief for the Prime Minister and her secretariat. He remained firm on this understanding; even as late as March 20, 1984, Haksar was incorrigibly arguing that ‘Prime Minister, in her person, is still the cornerstone of our national edifice.’

Third, all that was predicated on Indira Gandhi acquiring a political predominance, commensurate with the need to craft a new national consensus as to who we are and what we want to be and where we want to go as a nation.

Within a few weeks of his arrival in Delhi, Haksar must have understood insightfully that the Congress, and, by extension, national politics, was violently out of sync with the requirements of the Indian state. It must have also become clear to him that political temper, equations and aspirations had to be re-crafted to meet the requirements of the Indian state and its transformation. As Haksar saw it, it was to be Indira Gandhi—over and above the Congress, which was hopelessly in the grip of political bosses––who was to be the voice and source of this transformation.

Haksar remained clear what it would take to undertake this task, and to a large extent, he was able to set the course in terms of policies, priorities and instruments for the Indian state. Was Haksar unmindful of the dangers of a prime ministerial overload? For now, his answer would be: if it meant the rise of a personality cult, so be it.

As long as Indira Gandhi was willing to heed his advice and follow his counsel, Haksar was rather sanguine about the personality quirks. But once she received a massive mandate, the relationship between the Prime Minister and her counsellor was bound to get affected. Popular adulation and votes tend to turn the winner’s head. Indira Gandhi’s personality and predilections would mar this Indira-Haksar juggalbandi.

The author suggests that Haksar must have sensed that his juggalbandi now had a different tone: ‘By mid-1971 he had made up his mind to leave. The main reason could well have been the political ascendency of Sanjay Gandhi. Indira Gandhi still depended heavily on Haksar but it would have been natural for equations to have changed subtly after her stupendous electoral victory that would have given her enormous self-confidence.’

Almost from the day he arrived at the Prime Minister’s Secretariat, Haksar opted for the format of notes/missives to communicate with Indira Gandhi. It was as if Haksar was writing a manual for practitioners of statecraft. Ramesh overwhelms the reader with Haksar’s expressions and exhortations. He wrote passionately, animatedly, spiritedly and even angrily. Themes and formulations are ancient, but Haksar’s task was to tutor the Prime Minister in their contemporary usefulness:

The primary task of leadership was to produce political stability and orderly economic growth. The ruler must be ‘working single-mindedly for transforming this beautiful country of ours into a united, secular, socialist state.’

The portrait of Haksar that emerges from Ramesh is that of the ultimate bureaucrat who would oversee the conception and birth of new agencies and instruments of the Indian state––a new external intelligence agency (RAW); a new department of Banking in the Finance Ministry; Indian Petrochemicals Corporations; the Space Commission; the Electronics Commission; the Space Commission; the Steel Authority of India; and the Indian Council of Historical Research. Within a few years of his arrival at the Prime Ministerial Secretariat, the old rickety Indian state had the acquired trappings of a purposeful arrangement and was chugging along at a good pace.

As Ramesh tells it, Haksar not only thought in grand strategic terms but also had an appetite for micromanagement. For example, on the question of how the announcement of the dissolution of the Lok Sabha (in 1970) was to be choreographed, his advice is staggeringly detailed. Short of suggesting what snacks are to be served at the press conference the Prime Minister would be addressing, he had a stage director’s eye for step-by-step suggestions.

Within a year or so of his arrival at the Prime Minister’s Secretariat, Haksar must have realised that a split in the Congress could no longer be avoided. Haksar was more than eager to nudge Indira Gandhi to throw out, if she could, the tired old men of the Syndicate; he was also overeager to help Indira Gandhi redesign the party as an ideologically committed instrument for operationalising her (mostly, his) ideas.

Haksar understood clearly that an Indian Prime Minister, very much like an American President, had ‘a prior’ power: the power to frame issues on which he would do battle with the opposition. ¹ He was brilliant in helping Indira Gandhi out-think and out-argue her rivals. One man’s intellect made all the difference. Indira Gandhi would mesmerise the nation with ideas and slogans borrowed from Haksar.

Ramesh writes: ‘Between June 1967 and January 1973, no resolution on political, economic and foreign policy matters would be passed in any convention or meeting of the Congress Party that did not have Haksar’s imprimatur. And, of course, Indira Gandhi’s speeches at these meetings were his handiwork.’

All this must have been, as Ramesh says, enormously satisfying to Haksar, but it was a bit like forcing the peasants to appreciate the subtleties of single malt scotch whisky. Haksar, indeed, felt comfortable in undertaking all these exercises in democratic centralism. It would appear that Congress senior leaders, let alone the rank and file, felt no involvement in this ideologification of the Congress; they heard in silence with respect for the Prime Minister; they dutifully raised their hands when the Haksar-drafted resolutions were put to vote; and they felt no qualms in carrying on with their expeditious pursuit of power and patronage. Haksar probably made the mistake of convincing himself that the endorsement of those resolutions at the AICC sessions meant a conversion to his ideas and arguments. Sadly, he had vastly underestimated the incorrigibility of those Congressmen. This was one of the sources of his frustrations.

In retrospect, Haksar’s great failure was a failure to understand the nature of the Congress party; he continued to remain firm in his belief that the Congressmen could be goaded into a new enlightenment and recruited as new soldiers in the great cause of national renewal. He himself advised Indira Gandhi to make an appeal to all Congressmen (of the Syndicate variety) to return; he seems to have had the same supreme faith in Indira Gandhi’s capacity to heal the Congressmen of their sins. These discredited Congressmen were only too happy to come back to take their places in the dharamsala ² that Indira Gandhi and Haksar had just disinfected with new slogans and resolutions.

Even after he had found himself having had to leave the Prime Minister secretariat, he remained with it again. In July 16, 1973, after bemoaning the ‘moral depravity and corruption’ among some Congressmen, he goes on to urge’, ‘…he wanted the PM to summon all her resources and energies to cry a halt. Thus far and no further…’

Haksar remained convinced of the potency of the magic wand he had devised for Indira Gandhi to transform Congressmen into foot soldiers. He failed to detect that Indira Gandhi and the Congressmen had worked out a new compact: she will get the votes for them, and they, in turn, would offer unquestioned loyalty and allegiance; neither the leader nor the led would themselves to be slowed by Haksarian notions of ethics, integrity, values, norms, commitments, and so on. Only Haksar failed to understand that he not only stood isolated but also pretty much disowned.

As a man of formidable intellect, Haksar clearly knew that ideas and ideological formulations had consequences; but it is far from clear if the Congressmen understood that or, for that matter, whether even Indira Gandhi was committed to carrying out those Haksar-drafted resolutions to their logical end. Her rivals, nonetheless, took the Congress protestations and resolutions of new direction and new commitments on face value and ratcheted up opposition to Indira Gandhi.

Not only did Haksar preside over the transformation of the Indian state, but he also helped Indira Gandhi make the transition from an unsteady, uncertain incumbent to a dominant and domineering Prime Minister. Yet he remained a faceless mandarin for most outside the Lutyens’ Beltway; but among his peers, he was a respected figure. I. G. Patel, not always very generous with his praise of men and matters, had this assessment to make of Haksar:

What was not in doubt is that Haksar managed to concentrate enormous powers in the PM’s Secretariat and that his intellect contributed much to Mrs. Gandhi’s tactics and strategies. He was accepted Mrs Gandhi’s alter ego, and by most as Mrs. Gandhi’s tutor, mentor and sole confidant. He may have been all that is rumoured. But he was very able, and in my experience mostly fair and judicious and patriotic. I also found no ideological obsessions with him.’

The author is determined to be impressed with Haksar, and there is much to impressed with. It is this admiration that eludes him in helping the reader understand a few inexplicable issues: how, with a dedicated, loyal, able, urbane, counsellor by her side, was Indira Gandhi unable to anticipate, stop and reverse the onslaught of her opponents, a failure that heralded the collapse of her regime, degenerating into the Emergency and all its excesses (including indignities heaped on Haksar himself)? How did Haksar lose out to Sanjay Gandhi in the battle for Indira Gandhi’s heart and mind?

To be fair to Ramesh, he makes it clear at the very beginning that this is a ‘not a book on India’s recent political and economic history.’ This self-imposed brief makes it a somewhat limited enterprise in explaining Haksar’s waning influence after 1972. There is very little hint to the reader of the context of the Haksar-Indira Gandhi juggalbandi.

There is no mention of global events, like the 1973 Israel–Egypt war and the Oil Shock that simply suborned the Indian economy. No talk of the great railways strike and George Fernandes. The reader is also not let on about that disruptive movement called the Total Revolution led by Jaya Prakash Narain. Above all, Ramesh simply refuses to smell the pungent aroma of intrigue, arrogance and ineptitude that was being cooked by the Sanjay Gandhi gang at the Prime Minister’s house.

While this volume depicts Haksar as a noble savant, others in Delhi were not so impressed. He was seen as part of a ‘Kashmiri Ensemble’ and was seen as punching way above his weight. ³ In a democracy, legitimacy accrues only to the ‘elected’ politicians; the bureaucrat must always remain content to stay in the background.

Then, there is this almost bizarre fixation in Haksar’s mind on his retirement. In the midst of the gathering Bangladesh crisis, he goes on leave preparatory to retirement and is spotted holidaying in European capitals. The sheer absurdity of it is inexplicable––Pakistan attacks India on 3 December, and somewhere senior bureaucratic energy is being wasted on finding a way of bringing Haksar back to work: sublime to the ridiculous. Why could the Prime Minister and her principal aide not work out an exit/re-employment strategy? Haksar was not just a faceless, nameless, obscure babu; he was the most powerful aide to a powerful prime minister. The man and the woman who could produce great synergy on geopolitical stage now come across as pathetically clumsy and untidy on this count. Had the estrangement already set in?

Was Haksar a failure? Well, the man certainly got beaten at the game by the Dhawan-led coterie. So what is the singlemost important lesson from this entwined, entangled relationship? Beware of the romantic notions of an enlightened despot and stay away from prescribing any kind of prime ministerial overload.