Mani Shankar Aiyar on how a misquote and a misunderstanding ended his political career

Nemesis, however, was waiting around the corner (‘with lead piping in her stocking’, as P.G. Wodehouse might have said). It came down on me in a most unexpected manner. I had long been campaigning for the conscientious implementation of The Provisions of the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act (PESA) as the most effective and humane way of containing Naxalism. In the second week of April, the Naxal guerrillas in the forests of central India struck at a detachment of our security forces, killing as many as seventy-six of them.

I was most disturbed. So, I rang Digvijaya Singh, a former chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, when what is now Naxal-troubled Chhattisgarh was part of his domain. I poured my heart out to him and found in him a most sympathetic listener who believed, on the basis of his vast experience in tackling Naxalism, that the approach I was laying out was the optimum one.

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He added that he thought both Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi were inclined to my view, and I should, therefore, seek a meeting with them to explain alternative ways to the bullet to deal with the problem. I was pleased but a little surprised that Digvijaya had taken so much time off to discuss this with me as our conversation had lasted more than half an hour. It was only later that I learnt that he was at the bedside of his wife, Asha, a terminal cancer patient, in a hospital in faraway Houston and, therefore, not pressed for time.

The end of a personal relationship with Sonia Gandhi  

A day later, early in the morning, a reporter from NDTV turned up at my residence. He slapped on my table a copy of the Economic Times, which contained an interview given to a reporter by Digvijaya. Without naming me and taking the burden of the argument entirely on his shoulders, Digvijaya in the interview entirely endorsed my approach to tackling Naxalism. Towards the end, Digvijaya was asked whether he had brought his views to the attention of the home minister, P. Chidambaram. Digvijaya had replied by describing Chidambaram as ‘arrogant’ and unwilling to listen to advice.

The camera was then set up for the NDTV reporter to seek my reaction to the Digvijaya interview. I replied that I did not agree with Digvijaya a hundred per cent or even a thousand per cent, but ‘one lakh per cent’! Towards the end of the interview, the reporter asked whether I shared Digvijaya’s opinion of the Union home minister, P. Chidambaram. I cautiously replied that as PC was a senior colleague of mine from the same state of Tamil Nadu, I would not like to comment on him. Typical of television news broadcasts, when the interview was telecast, the ‘one lakh per cent’ comment was highlighted and the ‘no comment’ on Chidambaram was deleted.

A day after the telecast, The Indian Express front-paged the interview with a headline that burnished my ‘one lakh per cent’ remark. But the report attributed my remark to Digvijaya’s assessment of PC and not, as was my intention, his assessment of the Naxal problem.

This snafu seemed unimportant while I prepared for my swearing-in the following day, 15 April 2010, as a newly nominated member of the Rajya Sabha. About an hour before I was to leave for Parliament, the Congress president came on the line and gave me a furious tongue-lashing. I suspect (but do not know) that the home minister had got in touch with her to protest Digvijaya’s public criticism of him, apparently endorsed by me. I tried to get a word in edgewise, but she was in such a fury that I deemed it unwise to try to explain matters to her till she had calmed down. That moment never came — and marks my ‘Decline … Fade Out ... Fall’.

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Where I thought another opportunity would soon arise to clear the air, it never did. Instead, it signalled the end of a personal relationship with her that had its origins in my working with her husband from the mid-eighties.

The beginning of my political decline and fall

The other obvious proximate cause was my ferocious and adverse commenting on the Commonwealth Games. My further guess is that Congressmen who resented my being helicoptered into high places without putting in the grassroots efforts that had won them their spurs availed themselves of the opportunity to avenge themselves on me, especially given that I had lost my election at a time when Congress fortunes were spiralling upwards. That is my guess. I really do not know. But I recalled that Rajiv had warned me on my seeking voluntary retirement from the IFS that ‘the system would never accept’ me.

Do I regret having spoken out on the Games? In hindsight, I see that that was the beginning of my political decline and fall. So, of course, I am unhappy about the consequences, but I would be false to my maverick self if I were to regret having spoken out. Having seen what was going horribly wrong and having been warned against it, should I, as the minister responsible for it, have just ducked when everything I had apprehended was happening as I had feared, right on the eve of the Games, and ignored the damage this was doing to India and to our government in the eyes of our people and the world at large? Perhaps a clever politician would have done just that. I am not — and never was, nor aspired to be — a clever politician. But given that the Commonwealth Games springs to commentators’ tongues to explain the electoral disaster that was to overtake the Congress in 2014, perhaps it was just as well that I was not a clever politician. It is hard to be good.

Excerpted from A Maverick in Politics, 1991–2004 by Mani Shankar Aiyar, with permission from Juggernaut Books