KRISHNA MENON BY JAIRAM RAMESH

A Chequered Brilliance --- The Many Lives of V.K. Krishna Menon by Jairam Ramesh ; Published by Penguin-Viking ; Pages 725 ;Price Rs.999/-

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It is an axiom that one Mehta does not like another Mehta; one Ganguly detests another Ganguly ;one Singh excoriates another Singh!.

So is the case with two Menons. K.P.S.Menon wrote of V.K.Krishna Menon--“ Krishna Menon could not suffer fools gladly. One cannot quarrel with that. But he saw more fools than there are in this world”.

Now we have a full-fledged biography of Krishna Menon by Jairam Ramesh, Rajya Sabha MP, ex-Minister and author of the remarkable book “Intertwined Lives: P.N.Haksar and Indira Gandhi”.

This monumental biography covers Menon’s life, from birth into a wealthy Malayali family, to early association with the Theosophical Society , to his long sojourn in London. He was a formidable man, soaring in the political life in England. A great contribution is the establishment of Penguin Books. There is no gainsaying the fact that he worked night and day for India’s Independence. He fought for it in the Lion’s den.

The book under review is a heavyweight—750 pages long and jam packed with information hitherto unavailable. Ramesh has traced, mostly through letters and personal notes the thought-process of a complicated personality. He had access to a fantastic wealth of material on Menon.

Menon emerges as a man enveloped in eternal conflict and covered in loneliness within him, despite permanently being under public glare .

According to Ramesh ,"Krishna Menon's achievements were gigantic, his failures monumental. His intellectual strengths were awesome, his emotional equilibrium pathetic. He was the delight of his crisis, the despair of his admirers. He reached dizzying heights of fame, plumbed to depths of notoriety. It is very easy to judge Krishna Menon. He has a long record of pluses and minuses. On what he accomplished, he commands plaudits. On what he blotched up, he deserves strictures."

More than the Chinese debacle that cost him his job, what Menon will be remembered for was his special relationship with India''s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.

"That Nehru opened up to him like no one else was evident. He went out of his way to protect Krishna Menon from his own foibles and ultimately paid the price for it. This is part of Indian political history. But why Nehru continued to be loyal after accounting for their remarkable and intense friendship of almost thirty years is puzzling”.

That Menon almost single-handedly kept the flame of Indian freedom burning across the UK in the 1930s and 1940s is without question. That he played a crucial role in the transfer-of-power negotiations in the months leading up to the end of British rule in India is evident.

That he was a hugely impactful envoy for India in the UK between 1947 and 1950 can stand up to scrutiny. That he unravelled many knotty issues at the UN especially between 1952 and 1957 is also clear.

According to Ramesh , Menon did India proud at the height of the Cold War. "He argued India''s case with passion and eloquence. At a time when the Western powers were ruling the roost, he had the temerity and courage to take them on on his terms. But after 1957 or so, his tongue and his manner, barring occasional flashes of constructive engagement, created a negative global image for Nehru and India.

For years thereafter, the ghost of Krishna Menon lingered over both the substance and style of Indian democracy - needlessly argumentative and combative. And that ghost still lingers.

Menon’s years of glory were during the struggle for Indian independence when he mobilised support for the freedom movement in London. By the 1950s, he became a force to reckon with in international affairs with his solutions to the disputes in Cyprus, Korea and Suez.

Unfortunately his name is interlinked with one disaster -- India’s war with China in 1962. He was the one who lost us that war. This ignominous defeat led to his resignation from the Nehru cabinet. Thereafter he could never be an acceptable figure for most Indians.

Some of his negative aspects proved overwhelming factors. He was arrogant, acerbic, needlessly rude and for ever on the brink of a nervous breakdown. He was very close to Jawaharlal Nehru who trusted him and confided his innermost fears and doubts.

On the substantive issue of the 1962 debacle, the case against Menon is far from clear-cut. Within the army, the caricature view of him is that, he had come to power on the basis of a non-violent movement and therefore displayed utter contempt for the military. He mistreated generals, denied the army the resources and relied chiefly on diplomacy. He doubted the army’s continued British ethos . Ramesh proves that this is a massive oversimplification.

He was no enemy of the army . Ramesh quotes Field Marshal Cariappa who got along with Menon and there is no doubt that Menon was more comfortable with Earl Mountbatten (they were lifelong friends) and other important British figures than he was with most Indian politicians.

The Liberation of Goa was Menon’s operation, boldly carried out in the face of international opposition to a military action against the Portuguese.

The author highlights two key contributions of Krishna Menon during his tenure as Defence Minister. The first is that he "was the only person consistently arguing for a ''deal'' with the Chinese to resolve the border dispute", a task in which the two countries have been engaged for 17 years now and which was initiated during then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's historic visit to Beijing in 2003.

The other is his accomplishments in defence research and production that have endured and given India a great degree of self-reliance. Ramesh quotes Menon arguing for increasing defence spending and fighting to get the forces the equipment they needed: the INS Vikrant was purchased on his watch as were the MIGs that became so important to the air force.

The negative points. Menon was rude and arrogant with everyone, not just generals. He spent too much time on foreign policy when he should have focused on defence. Menon liked cliques and played favourites. Along with Nehru, he vastly over estimated flatterers such as General BM Kaul and could not handle proud and complex figures like General Thimayya. The action the army took against such officers as Thimayya and General Sam Manekshaw during his time is a low spot in the history of our defence forces.

Ramesh believes that if India had followed Menon’s strategy for handling the Chinese there may have been no war at all. He quotes Indira Gandhi holding this view.

The Chinese sincerely believed that their territorial claims were valid. We disputed this but the evidence provided by both sides was not conclusive. Menon suggested that the solution was a deal. The Chinese could build roads in disputed territories (perhaps through some lease arrangement) and India could gain access to disputed territory that China controlled.

This proposal was never officially minuted but most people concede that it existed. When Menon died, Indira Gandhi said, “Had the solution which he had proposed on behalf of India in the 50s for the India-China situation been accepted, a great deal of hardship, waste and suffering would have been avoided.”

Nehru provoked the Chinese by announcing that they would be thrown out; this, at a time when our army was not yet ready for a high altitude conflict.

However,there is no doubt that our forces were woefully under prepared and poorly led by generals, many of whom Menon had appointed. The generals themselves were badly divided and these divisions and a command failure contributed to the defeat.

The book is replete with anecdotes that join certain events in the history with certain personalities— all richly woven into the narrative without diverging from the story.The most pathetic portions of the book relate to the suicidal tendencies of Menon.

The book adds valuable insight into the available material on Krishna Menon.This is an important book and one that enhances the standing of Jairam Ramesh’s as one of the respected political biographers of our country.

P.P.Ramachandran.

15/03/2020.