The Rajiv I Knew ₹799
Mani Shankar Aiyar shares the bond he had with his school friend whom fate enthroned as Prime Minister and Bofors de-throned The book is about a bond that never morphs into that biographical horror — an ‘insider’s revelation’. It is also an account by a
Gaze,
The Cobra’s
And Why He Was India’s Most Misunderstood Prime Minister’ is the ninewordstoolong subordinate title to Mani Shankar Aiyar’s book The Rajiv I Knew. It makes the book sound like what it is not — a defence of the man Aiyar adores, misses, recalls to his and his reader’s mind with a zest amounting to a passion.
From its opening to its concluding page, Aiyar’s narration is about a bond between the author three years and four months older than his subject and who, by the play of an impish fate, was his schooltime junior, later his friend, still later his boss, and then hero for ever after. So, is the book about unqualified admiration?
As one who regards ‘unqualified admiration’ as a spur for writing no less valid than ‘unqualified dislike’ let me say that, yes, absolutely, it is so. Aiyar’s Rajiv is about a bond of sheer admiration. And good that it is so, for admiration has an emotion so bereft of authorial ego, so free of the bilious acids of scepticism passing for objectivity that it goes beyond the person being admired to the nature of admiration itself.
But as one who also has a spoonful of dispassion within the jar of his emotions, let me also say that Aiyar’s admiration for Rajiv does not fall for the error of devotion. He adores (as I said) Rajiv, he does not worship him. Big deal? Again, yes, that is a big deal because the assassinated former consciousness.” How did the antelopelike animal perceive him? Alter’s description of that instant calls to mind artist and critic John Berger’s influential essay Why Look at Animals? in which he talks of the element of surprise when humans and animals consider each other across the “abyss of noncomprehension.” After tracing the historical relationship between humans and animals, Berger bemoans the physical and cultural marginalisation of animals in the modern era. Although he
Prime Minister does have his worshippers, and his worshippers have their own of the same. And Rajiv’s wife and his children have their worshippers too, all joined together by politics and the science and art of survival in politics.
Pocket diary
Mani Shankar Aiyar Juggernaut
The Rajiv I Knew has been written by a politician about a politician without being about politics. And without being also antipolitics or counterpolitics. It is about a person as human in his vulnerabilities as he was strong in his determination as Prime
Minister to not let those vulnerabilities get the better of him.
The book is about a closeness that never becomes that awful thing in such books — chummy. It is doesn’t specifically say so, Alter offers a way of looking at animals in the Anthropocene. In his encounters with a spectacled cobra and a dancing frog, he ruminates on how they sense him and perceive the world.
Using that springboard, he uncovers overlooked locations and underrated species, little known cultural and historical sites while also travelling to popular places in his quest to see charismatic animals. His vivid descriptions take readers to the cold heights of Ladakh, the arid plains of Tal Chhapar, and the murky swamps of Sunderbans, while exploring the broad theme of the book: what is our relationship with wild fauna and how do we engage with them.
Bookended by the cobra
The first and last chapters on Agumbe in Karnataka and the area’s most celebrated denizen, the king cobra, form bookends. (I had a small influence in nudging Alter to visit the place.) In the second chapter on Vrindavan, he explores the myth of Kaliya Mardan. The reviewer could be forgiven for thinking that this book was all about snakes. But then the author veers sharply to Dudhwa and its most famous resident, Billy Arjan Singh and his controversial rehabilitation of about a bond that never morphs into that biographical horror — an ‘insider’s revelation’. It is also an account by a friend who does not cross the door of the subject’s homestead. It has a word Vajpayee used to effect: maryada (honour). Being both autobiographical and a biography, the book’s six chapters in a little under 350 pages, read like a pocket diary.
One may learn through this book what ‘knowing’ means. It is not what ‘owning’ means. Aiyar is not filing an affidavit for title. He is telling us that to ‘know’ means to understand, to appreciate and withal to admire in the intricate recesses of the empathetic mind. Rajiv Gandhi steps into and out of the pages of the book as lithely as he does into and from aircraft in good or foul weather. We glimpse his humour, his temper spikes, his calm, his rages. But more than these traits of personality, we see his thoughtpatterns as one descended from a great man, his grandfather Nehru who too Aiyar has ‘known’. And never more vitally than in his commitment to a world free of nuclear weapons. Not as a concept but a working plan, a
Stephen Alter Aleph a handreared tiger.
The reintroduction of the cheetah in Kuno has been reported at length in the news. Transported by Alter, we get a sense of what the cheetahs and the people displaced to create the habitat are up against. When he cannot spot a large predator, he’s disappointed but selfaware enough to realise he’s falling into the same pitfall as the majority of tourists.
In another chapter, he analyses Jim Corbett’s story of the Mukteshwar tigress and wonders why the area produced so many maneaters. He suggested the combination of felling the lowland Terai forests and unregulated hunting sent the predators
The author explains the interesting relationship between humans and wild fauna. scrambling up into the hills, setting off a spree of tragedies for humans and tigers. He explores how the human imagination explains our encounters with wildlife by dipping into Radhika Govindarajan’s book Animal Intimacies. The essay on sacred groves illustrates a different aspect of the human interaction with nature. Restoration of degraded habitats, ecotourism, and nature writing are among the diverse other topics the author investigates.
Protecting wildlife
Although Alter does not preach conservation, the urgency to protect wildlife is an undercurrent of his book. He upholds Emperor Ashoka’s policies as “examples of benign authority, wisdom, and tolerance.” While it is true
‘Rajiv Gandhi was as human in his vulnerabilities as he was strong in his determination as Prime Minister to not let those vulnerabilities get the better of him.’ stepbystep programme in practical idealism.
‘Bofors: the gun does not fire’
Aiyar’s knowing Rajiv is also about those who caused him trouble. Aiyar’s portrayal of Arun Nehru in the diary’s pages is written in a blend of all the inks that may make the chemical equivalent of disgust. The book has its share of missed expectations. As in the pages on Bofors, where Aiyar’s distance from the scene of action befogs the picture. His sumup of Rajiv in the Bofors matter : (Rajiv was) ‘consistently honest, straightforward, upright’ comes not from Aiyar’s acclaimed vocabulary but that of a Who’s Who. Aiyar says Rajiv did no wrong. He does not explain how the perception of wrongdoing entangled him. Vishwanath Pratap Singh calls for more analysis than Aiyar spares for the man who dislodged Rajiv from power. The nearly 60odd pages on ‘the Bofors story’, read like a strong ‘counter’ for M’Lord in a packed courtroom. And his account of Rajiv’s withdrawal of support to the Chandra Shekhar government, after two men in uniform were spotted near his precincts, begs elucidation. Was pique good enough cause for going back on a word given to a Prime Minister? The book could have done with another hundred pages. Without those, its story asks ‘...and then .... ?’.
I found the book instructive and engaging but above all, deeply moving. In our times when friendships are about transactions, loyalties skindeep, The Rajiv I Knew, is, at the end of a plangent day, about loss. Like Tennyson’s In Memoriam, it is about grief, over the loss of a man of honest intent not unmixed with honest mistakes. The escape for Aiyar from that grief is the faith — fragile, perhaps — in what Tennyson described with these words:
Forgive my grief for one removed,/ Thy creature, whom I found so fair./ I trust he lives in thee, and there/I find him worthier to be loved.
The reviewer is a former administrator, diplomat and Governor. that the monarch bucked the trend of killing animals as a pleasurable pursuit, which was often wasteful, his ban on hunting and fishing left many forest dwelling and fishing communities without a livelihood. Those who disobeyed were expelled.
Two thousand years later, our current wildlife laws are hardly different. But the edification of Ashoka is a small quibble in an otherwise glorious tour de force which not only explores India’s natural heritage but also investigates uncomfortable practices, such as the use of lorises for black magic.
Besides the graphic portrayal, Alter’s delightful deployment of metaphor makes reading his book a pleasure. Sample this: ‘palm trees sway like drunk toddy drinkers,’ describing pit vipers as ‘a quiver of poisoned arrows’ and a snake ‘studies us with her tongue.’
Readers don’t have to shimmy down narrow tunnels to pay homage to India’s wildlife splendour. They just have to crack open Alter’s book to range widely across this land.
The reviewer is a coauthor of Snakes, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll, the first volume of Romulus Whitaker’s autobiography.