A Maverick in Politics 1991–2004
By Mani Shankar Aiyar
Juggernaut
ISBN: 978-9353457679
495pp.

Mani Shankar Aiyar is a human Wagah/Attari gateway, a tangible point of contact between two irascible neighbours — India and Pakistan. No one has done more than him to ensure that there is “an uninterrupted, uninterruptible dialogue” between the two, and no one has failed with such fraternal finesse.

Mani’s third and final volume of memoirs — A Maverick in Politics 1991-2004 — is more than a premature epitaph by himself, of himself. It could be read as an updated Machiavellian manual of modern politics.

Mani begins by telling “young people who wonder whether they should come into politics that they must first embark on a well-paid professional career to build up some personal capital, for otherwise they will have no alternative to making a commerce of politics.”

He then warns them that they should be prepared for that “moment of such total rejection by your own party and political patrons that you are left staring at darkness with no light at the end of any tunnel, ‘unwept, unhonoured and unsung.’ That is not the fate that overtakes everybody in politics, but only those, like me, who are non-conformists, those who are mavericks.”

The third and final part of politician Mani Shankar Aiyar’s memoirs reinforce his voice as one of secular reason, multi-faith coexistence and good neighbourly bonhomie, which stands increasingly isolated in contemporary India

The beau ideal in Mani’s long life (he is now 83 years old) was Pandit Nehru. His loyalty to the Nehru family remained a leitmotif of politics, reaching an apogee during his association with Nehru’s grandson Rajiv Gandhi. With a Nehruvian turn of phrase, Mani recalled Ranjiv’s assassination in 1991: “For all the six years that I knew Rajiv Gandhi, he walked in the shadow of death, and I walked in his shadow. Now, death has taken him away and I am left in the shadows.”

Neither shadows nor darkness ever daunted Mani. He was elected to the Lok Sabha thrice (1991, 1999 and 2004), representing Mayiladuthurai in Tamil Nadu. Later, nominated to the Rajya Sabha in 2010, he accumulated an impressive 21 years of service as a parliamentarian.

Avowedly a Congressite, Mani frequently felt constrained to speak out boldly against his government’s policy. He believed in the tradition of “dissidence within the party”, which in the early days had given India “the likes of Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Chandra Bose and Jayaprakash Narayan.” He believed even more firmly that “without fierce internal disputation on policies and people, political parties in democracies become personality cults, which ultimately dooms the party.” Mani has lived to see his beloved Congress and his nemesis, the BJP, both degenerate similarly.

In his first term in India’s parliament (1991-96), Mani defined for himself tackling three priorities: the demolition of the 16th-century Babri Masjid (L.K. Advani tarred him as a “pseudo-secularist”), the Harshad Mehta stock market scam, and Panchayati Raj (local self-government in rural India). He put a fourth, Jammu and Kashmir, on the side burner.

Mani’s concept of his homeland is a secular India, which he believes is “why the Constitution rejected the concept of India as a ‘Hindu rashtra’ (a Hindu nation-state) and opted for a secular India.” Narasimha Rao (despite being a Congress prime minister, 1991-96) disabused him of this. Contradicting Mani’s perception of secularism, Rao told him bluntly: “You don’t seem to understand, Mani, that this is a Hindu country!”

The demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992 for Mani became “the most shameful day in the history of independent India.” PM Rao in New Delhi did nothing. Mani, in another Nehruvian turn of phrase, said of him at the time: “Narasimha Rao has proved that death is not a necessary precondition for rigor mortis to set in.”

In 1996, Mani stood for elections. Despite being “sincere and honest, free of any caste considerations, above communal prejudices and beyond party politics”, and notwithstanding all the good work he had done in his constituency, he lost. He learned another rule in Indian politics: voters are not concerned with who their local MP is. They vote for Delhi.

By now 55 years old, Mani had to confront reality. To support himself and his family, Mani turned to journalism and television appearances, jousting with ideological opposites. To his surprise, he found himself “far better off than he had ever been as a government officer or parliamentarian.”

Mani was re-elected to the Lok Sabha in 1999. His return to parliament with a diminished majority “coincided almost to the day with the tenth anniversary” of his retirement from the foreign service.

In 2001, Mani witnessed the ENRON debacle. ENRON had entered into an agreement loaded in its favour with the Maharashtra State Electricity Board (MSEB), until then one of India’s best-performing state electricity boards. MSEB undertook to pay ENRON “an exorbitant Rs8 per unit tariff for power when MSEB was paying less than Re1 per unit for hydroelectricity and around Rs2 per unit for coal-based thermal power.” MSEB, losing INR 1,600 crore annually, sank under the burden.

India had been encouraged by the World Bank to follow Pakistan’s ‘successful’ IPP policy. Twenty years later, Pakistan is trying to extricate itself from that mess.

Gradually, Mani found himself at odds with his Congress party. In 2002, moved by the horrors of the massacres of Muslims in Gujarat under Modi’s CM-ship, Mani visited Ahmedabad. His activist host asked him to tell the Muslim Congressite ladies to go home because they were not wearing bindis. That, for Mani, was the final straw. “The Congress in Gujarat had aligned itself with Modi’s view of a ‘Hindu India’.” In despair, Mani recalled Rajiv Gandhi’s remark that “an India that is not secular does not deserve to survive.”

In the early 2000s, Mani made the rural panchayats [village councils] his mission. He attended all 40 of the panchayat conventions across the country, consolidating his findings in a comprehensive report in August 2003. Mani recalls his accomplishment:

“All this led, in due course, to the All-India Congress Committee (AICC) adopting the charter through an annexe to its political resolution in 2004, the establishment of the AICC Rajiv Gandhi Panchayati Raj Sangathan (RGPRS) and my own elevation to the cabinet as India’s first ever union minister of Panchayati Raj (2004–09).”

Had Mani been in the BJP, he would surely have accompanied the then PM Atal Behari Vajpayee on his bus yatra to Lahore in February 1999. Interestingly, Mani, who spent his life practising a heightened form of personal diplomacy, chided Vajpayee for making a “sudden grand gesture” instead of sending first “sherpas before ascending the summit.”

Now in his 80s, Mani’s career-long affair with Pakistan has not cooled. Ever since his days as India’s consul-general in Karachi (1978-82), Pakistan has remained Mani’s “magnificent obsession.” As minister of petroleum, he seized the opportunity of sponsoring the Iran-Pakistan pipeline by extending it to include India. The Ministry of External Affairs had its own ideas. Mani’s brainchild died stillborn, without a whimper.

Undeterred, Mani has continued to argue that India cannot preserve its nationhood unless it ‘seamlessly’ absorbs 200 million Indian Muslims into its body politic. “Peace is an imperative now,” Mani insists, “not a consummation to be postponed indefinitely.”

Tragically, Mani’s voice of secular reason, multi-faith coexistence and good neighbourly bonhomie now find no resonance in either his own Congress under Rajiv’s son Rahul Gandhi nor in Modi’s Hindutva-heavy BJP.

Time, tide and political machinations have left him isolated among one and a half billion lesser minds. Mani’s final epitaph will lie beyond this book. It will be found in Mahatma Gandhi’s words: “It’s easy to stand in the crowd but it takes courage to stand alone.”

The reviewer is an art historian and columnist for Dawn

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, January 5th, 2025