Much folklore has grown around V.K. Krishna Menon, India’s second-most powerful politician in the 1950-60 decade. He is a reviled and demonised figure, the ‘villain of 1962’, especially in the BJP-RSS worldview. It’s wonderful, therefore, that we now have a brilliantly researched biography of Menon by Congress leader Jairam Ramesh.
Was he an angel or demon? Neither, as Ramesh’s research in his aptly named 725-page tome ‘A Chequered Brilliance’ shows. He could be brilliant, as in the UN over Kashmir; eminently skillful, as in persuading Chinese premier Chou En-lai in 1955 to return American Air Force prisoners of the Korean War; and also display the “pettiest and meanest” mind in his dealings with Army generals as India’s most controversial defence minister yet.
That Krishna Menon — a case of extreme vanity, arrogance and insecurity laced with self-pity — became Jawaharlal Nehru’s kindred soul from the 1930s on is well-known.
It is also amazing how much they shared with each other. In 1939, for example, Nehru wrote a long, distraught letter to Menon complaining about his failing physical health. He added, however, that his constitution was strong and he may ride it out. But what worried him much more was the state of his mental health. Ramesh guesses that this must have been around time Indira would have told him she wanted to marry Feroze Gandhi.
However, for us children of the 1960s, the most fascinating, and for today’s generation the newsiest section of the book, is the five years Menon served as defence minister and second-most powerful man in Nehru’s Cabinet (1957-62).
Ramesh’s use of the description “pettiest and meanest” specifically refers to how Menon put up the second senior-most Army officer, Lt Gen. P.N. Thapar, into making allegations against his own chief K.M. Thimayya (13 charges, including leaking classified information, loose talk about the prime minister, and hobnobbing with arms dealers), and another five-point ‘charge-sheet’ on Lt Gen. S.P.P. Thorat, widely seen as Thimayya’s preferred choice as his successor.
In his letters to them, one his boss and the other his equal, Thapar mentioned that he was doing this with the prime minister’s knowledge, and he would greatly appreciate hearing their side of the story too. Ramesh concludes, and I think quite rightly, that Menon, who detested Thimayya, had put Thapar up to it, and also taken Nehru into confidence.
Wheels of fratricidal conspiracies were moving fast. Knowing Menon would veto his choice Thorat, Thimayya wrote his recommendation directly to President Rajendra Prasad as Supreme Commander. He promptly approved it too. The Republic was still settling down, and nobody quite understood the Rashtrapati’s powers. Not even Prasad himself. Nehru and Menon closed ranks to reject it.
If you think this wasn’t already a divided Army in the run-up to a war, more conspiracies emerged. First, Thimayya wrote a letter complaining he had information of some “smell” about another lieutenant general, S.D. Verma. Then, after Verma had been moved out punitively, Thimayya came to Menon to say that he had erred. The only ‘smell’ about Verma was that he wasn’t too popular. Menon recorded this in his notes to Nehru.
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Next was against another top officer, Sam Manekshaw, then commanding the Defence Services Staff College in Wellington, Tamil Nadu. It was again the charge of ‘loose talk’ and Anglophilia, to the extent that Manekshaw had “hanged portraits of Warren Hastings and Robert Clive” in his office. His career was nearly ruined too as Menon sidelined him and ordered an inquiry. It cleared him subsequently, or the history of 1971 may have been different.
One of the biggest stories of that period has morphed into much folklore as a Thimayya-versus-Nehru, Army-versus-politician saga over the decades, which Narendra Modi referred to in his last Karnataka campaign as Nehru’s humiliation of local hero Thimayya.
Ramesh’s documents throw up three surprises: One, that The Statesman scooped the story of Thimayya’s resignation in 1959. It was under Mahesh Chandra’s byline. Ramesh, however, establishes that Gen. J.N. Chaudhuri (who later became COAS), had moonlighted anonymously as military correspondent for more than a decade for the then-British owned The Statesman. He was on the inside track of this resignation, but could not have written the story himself and passed it on. Think, a serving top general working as a leading paper’s military correspondent incognito.
Second, there are stunning notes from the personal archives of then-British High Commissioner Malcolm MacDonald, detailing how Thimayya was sharing with him all his problems with Menon, Nehru, the resignation plans, and much classified information. Like how Thimayya thought Menon deliberately painted Pakistan as India’s main enemy and threat, and played down China. All of which MacDonald was dutifully reporting back to London.
And third, true to what’s come to be believed later, India would not have lost that war in 1962 if Nehru and Menon had listened to Thimayya. But not because he was so brilliant he would have won. But because he was prescient and insisted — even writing five months after his retirement — that there was no way the Army could protect India from the Chinese. And that this had to be done by politicians and diplomats.
All the stories of a bumbling Nehru led by a paranoid and compulsive conspiracy-theorist Menon are true. The notion that, left to the generals, India would have done much better in that war is shown up as an awful myth. The generals of that period were too busy and too good at fighting each other to have time left for the Chinese. And we haven’t even mentioned a Lt Gen. B.M. Kaul yet.
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