Jairam Rameshs new biography of Krishna Menon is a lucid, well-researched and, to tell the truth, depressing biography of an extraordinary figure in Indian politics. It runs to just over 700 pages, exceeding even the length of his last years book on P.N. Haksar and Indira Gandhi, Intertwined Lives. But unlike the Haksar book, this one depends very largely on letters, especially the voluminous correspondence that developed over the years between Menon and Nehru. Indeed, Nehru is as pivotal to this story as Menon himself, showing that politics is as much about friendships as about ideas, struggle and political activity.

Their deepest joint commitment of course was to the pressing need for Indias emancipation from British rule. Nehru spent almost ten years in British jails in India at various times in the 1930s and 1940s. Menon was never jailed, but that is because he spent all of the years of the struggle for independence in Britain, almost single-handedly running the campaigns associated with the India League, spawning a prodigious amount of political work, and deftly constructing alliances that repeatedly pushed the question of Indian freedom to the heart of British politics. And it is a fact that after 29 years of residence in the UK he was reluctant to return to India.

Jairam RameshA Chequered Brilliance: The Many Lives of V.K. Krishna MenonPenguin Viking, 2019

When he finally did, in 1953, after his spell as Indias first high commissioner there, he would always remain an outsider, even a misfit, and an easy target for those sectors of Congress and of the nascent opposition to Congress (read: to Nehru) that never ceased to regard him as a subversive of sorts.

Menon himself would tell then-socialist Minoo Masani in 1934, My own position is that while I am a left-wing socialist, a believer in the almost immediate establishment of a socialist society I have little use for the C.P. here or in India. His reaction in 1937 to reports coming out of Russia of the notorious Moscow Trials exemplifies the starry-eyed navety typical of all fellow-travellers in the 1930s.

At least Nehru had misgivings, referred to the unhealthy background reflected in Stalins repression, and asked Menon, Why should there be this background more than twenty years after the revolution? In fact, by the end of the 30s Menon had what Ramesh describes as exceedingly warm relations with the top leaders of the CPGB. All the same, as an India Office note pointed out, Menon has no genuine Party loyaltiesHe is not a Marxian Communistnor the type of character which would enable him to accept spoon-feeding.

Although a great deal is said about Menons diplomatic feats at the UN in the mid-1950s, the most interesting chapters of the book are those dealing with his chequered career following his return to India. He arrived in Bombay in March 1957 to a rousing reception following his marathon intervention on Kashmir at the Security Council earlier that year.

But Nehrus decision to give him Defence would prove to be singularly ill-starred and spelled the end of Menons career, with Chinas full-scale invasion of the NEFA border on October 20, 1962. Menon would resign barely ten days later. In the midst of this crisis, he complained bitterly to the Canadian high commissioner Chester Ronning about being attacked from all sides including my own Cabinet, and about the political activities of Americans in India to force him out. (J.K. Galbraith played a major role in his ouster.) These, he claimed, were increasingly successful with all those who want India to be in the American pocket.

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The Chinese have set back the progress of socialism in India for at least 15 years, he said, meaning that India would now have to pour resources into defence expenditure that might have gone into raising the standard of living of its people. Meanwhile, before this crisis exploded, all sorts of absurd speculation had been rife, the UK high commissioner fantasizing about Menon building up his popularity with the Armed Services in order to be able to engineer a military coup(!).

With Nehru gone (he died on May 27, 1964) and the Bombay Congress denying Krishna Menon the Bombay North-East ticket for the upcoming election of 1967, Menon saw no option but to quit the party, which he did in December 1966. Ramesh notes that Congress and the Shiv Sena worked assiduously to ensure his defeat.

Jairam Ramesh.

In the previous Lok Sabha election in the early 60s, a high-pitched campaign designed to deny him a ticket for Parliament had been led by the industrialist Ramakrishna Bajaj, who had the absolute gall to produce a ten-point chargesheet against Menon, which included calling into serious doubt his role in the freedom movement. On that occasion, at the end of 1961, Nehru had been the only big name batting for Krishna Menon, showing how isolated the latter was within the spectrum of Indian politics. (Its worth noting that though he strenuously denied he was a communist of any sort, Menon would go on to win two elections with the CPMs backing, the first in May 1969 from Midnapur, the second in March 1971 from Trivandrum.)

A major leitmotif of the biography is the extent to which Krishna Menon suffered from repeated spells of depression and what can only be described as anguish. For example, even at the height of his political career, in 1957, he was tortured by self-doubt. In May that year Marie Seton reported, He is in a more desperate state than he has ever been, saying he was haunted by a phantasmagoria of hostility. Of course, the hostility was real, with foreign intelligence agencies, first MI5 and then the Americans, keeping close tabs on him and seriously unable to fathom the nature of his socialist politics. But worse than that was probably the deep sense of isolation Menon felt within India itself, with a strong right-wing faction in Congress and a galaxy of right-wingers outside it (Masani, J.P., etc.) determined to destroy him politically.

Watch: Nehru Shouldve Never Made V.K. Krishna Menon Defence Minister, Says Jairam Ramesh

For a book that misses almost nothing, it may interest the author to know that among the many famous personalities Menon interacted with over the years was Che Guevara. Guevara was impressed by his learning and referred to him with considerable admiration. At the end of June 1959 when Che visited India, he was first welcomed by Nehru at his home in Teen Murti (on July 1), and then flew to Calcutta where he met someone he would later refer to simply as Krishna.

Heres what Che said about this meeting: While talking with Krishna, the learned Indian, we became aware of the evils of the means of mass destruction. It is saying quite something that the Cuban revolutionaries should have received their first lessons in nuclear disarmament from an Indian political leader! We have a photograph of this meeting which seems to have taken place on July 3.

Che and Menon.

Krishna Menon made 13 major speeches on disarmament at the UN, between 1954 and 1962. In this sense he was the countrys first major campaigner for the abolition of nuclear weapons. And despite his obvious abrasiveness, as a diplomat he was remarkably effective in securing negotiated settlements in the toughest of situations. It was his five-point formula that was the basis on which the Suez crisis was finally resolved in 1956, not least because of the rapport he was able to establish with Nasser. All Dag Hammarskjold did was add a sixth point about arbitration.

This is a fine biography and well worth reading by anyone even vaguely interested in knowing about the sort of personalities that contributed to Indias struggle for independence and what became of at least one of them in the dismal aftermath that engulfed the country from the 1960s.

Menon died on 10 October, 1974. In his own tribute to him, P.N. Haksar referred to the vastness of his intellectual perception. Given the mediocrity that has characterised Indian political leaders, certainly since Nehrus day, Menon was a veritable intellectual powerhouse and always highly regarded in these terms. (In 1951 Nehru told his finance minister C.D. Deshmukh, From a purely intellectual point of view, I cannot remember having met any person with a keener intellect.)

This makes it all the more tragic that his interactions with the Indian left, such as they were, failed to produce any major vision for what a socialist India might look like beyond the statist elements that defined his own agenda for socialism at the Bhubaneswar session of the Congress in January 1964.

Schooled in Fabian socialism by the likes of Harold Laski and profoundly impressed by what he saw as the progress of the USSR, it may never have occurred to Krishna Menon that socialism has less to do with the state as such and everything to do the capacities for self-organisation, the self-activity, and the intrinsic creativity of organised masses, that is, of the vast mass of working people and their ability to bring about the kind of society that best suits the interests of humanity as a whole. Socialism from below was simply not part of the political imagination of the generation that fought for Indias independence.

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Krishna Menon, a Fighter for Indian Independence Who Was Isolated in His Party - The Wire