Few Indian politicians of the nationalist generation have been the object of as much revilement or fascination as V. K. Krishna Menon. Unquestionably erudite, widely believed to be irascible and a close confidante of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, he had an extraordinary career in public life. He had served as India's high commissioner (ambassador) to London, as its permanent representative to the United Nations, and then as India's defense minister. It was in his last position that he witnessed his fall from grace. During his tenure, the People's Liberation Army launched a well-orchestrated attack on India's northern borders. The Indian Army, which was wholly unprepared for this onslaught, put up a valiant resistance in particular areas but mostly collapsed in the wake of this invasion. Despite Menon's closeness to Nehru, he was forced to step down from office. After a brief hiatus, he was successfully elected to office once again. However, he never regained even a fraction of his earlier political standing.
In 1968, Michael Brecher, a noted Canadian political scientist, published an insightful book, India and World Politics: Krishna Menon's View of the World, based on extensive interviews that Brecher had conducted with Menon. Since then, there have been a number of biographies of Menon, but of varying quality. Some were hagiographic, others more critical. However, one important barrier hobbled all of them. None of them was based on access to his papers.
Jairam Ramesh's sweeping biography of Menon, A Chequered Brilliance, can be distinguished from all previous works because it relies heavily on the recently declassified papers now available at the Nehru Memorial Library and Museum in New Delhi. Access to these documents enabled Ramesh to write a sweeping and comprehensive account of his subject. To that end, this biography is likely to endure and will become a touchstone for any other accounts that follow in its wake.
That said, this work is not bereft of limitations. One of its principal shortcomings is Ramesh's inordinate reliance on the documents themselves. He leaves the reader to wallow in the minutiae of Menon's professional life and career without providing sufficient historical, social, and cultural context. As a consequence, substantial sections of the book have a bit of a catalogue-like quality.
This infelicitous feature aside, the book is nevertheless invaluable because of the sheer wealth of detail, some of which is wholly novel, that Ramesh has been able to unearth and amass in a single volume. Given the sheer breadth and scope of this book, it is necessary to focus on and highlight only a few turning points and incidents from the arc of Menon's long professional career.
In the early sections of the book, Ramesh recounts in considerable detail Menon's extended stint in London as a staunch Indian nationalist and his association with a number of prominent British activists who were sympathetic to India's quest for independence. In these sections, he recounts Menon's reliance on the Irish Theosophist and home rule activist Annie Besant, who played a formative role in his personal and professional lives. It is evident from their correspondence that Menon treated Besant with a degree of respect bordering on reverence. Sadly, this relationship, which contributed so much to Menon's time in the United Kingdom, concluded on a note of discord. She and Menon parted company on the issue of whether India should seek self-determination while remaining part of the British Empire.
For all his intense patriotism and erudition, Menon was not only crotchety but also quite disdainful of the significance of other key figures within the nascent Indian foreign policy elite. For example, he had little use for Nehru's sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit. When she was appointed as president of the United Nations General Assembly, she felt compelled to write to her brother about Menon's low opinion of her professional abilities.
Perhaps what is most curious about this book is the limited attention that Ramesh devotes to one of the most contentious and significant periods of Menon's professional career: his role leading up to the 1962 Sino-Indian border war. Much of the chapter is devoted to how the United States viewed Menon, his cantankerous relationship with much of the American political elite, and his reflexive anti-Americanism. Curiously enough, missing from this chapter is a focused discussion of Menon's interactions with Nehru as well as key members of the military and intelligence services about the threat from the People's Republic of China. As is well known to most scholars, Menon routinely downplayed the emergent threat and, in fact, presided over a shrinking of the Indian defense budget prior to the war. This lacuna in this otherwise comprehensive book is entirely puzzling.
What Ramesh does illuminate further is Menon's dubious role in promoting certain senior military officers with whom he enjoyed a rapport while attempting to sideline those he was at odds with in terms of policy. To that end, he provides a through discussion of Menon's connivance with one of his acolytes, B. N. Kaul, to harass at least four other senior military officers—S. H. F. J. Manekshaw, S. P. P. Thorat, K. S. Thimayya, and S. D. Verma—toward whom he harbored some animus.
The limitations of this work notwithstanding, there is little or no question that Ramesh has made exhaustive use of the declassified Menon papers. Both scholars and analysts who remain interested in the life and career of this complex if trying individual, who loomed so large before the creation of and after the emergence of the modern republic of India, will find much that is of use through a careful perusal of this work.
