Shekhar Gupta

Much folklore has grown around VK Krishna Menon, India’s second most powerful politician in the 1950-60 decade. He is a reviled and demonised figure, especially in the Bharatiya Janata Party-Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh worldview as the “villain of 1962”. It’s wonderful, therefore, that we now have a brilliantly-researched biography of Menon by Congress leader Jairam Ramesh.

Was he an angel or a demon? Neither, as Ramesh’s research in his aptly named 725-page tome A Chequered Brilliance shows. Menon could be brilliant, as in the United Nations over Kashmir, eminently skilful, as in persuading 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 the generals as India’s most controversial defence minister ever yet.

That Krishna Menon, a mix of extreme vanity and arrogance, and insecurity laced with self-pity at the same time, became Jawaharlal Nehru’s kindred soul from the 1930s on is well known. It is also amazing how much they confided in 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.

For us children of the 1960s, the most fascinating, and for today’s generation the newsiest section, however 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 “meanest and pettiest” specifically refers to how Menon put up the second senior-most Army officer, Lieutenant-General PN Thapar into making allegations against his own chief KM Thimayya (13 charges including leaking classified information, loose talk about the prime minister, and hobnobbing with arms dealers) to another five-point “charge-sheet” on Lt-Gen SPP 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 PM’s knowledge and he would greatly appreciate to hear 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. The president 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 Lt-Gen, SD Verma. And after the latter had been moved out punitively, 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. Next was against another top officer, Sam Manekshaw, then commanding the Defence Services Staff College in Wellington. It was again the charge of “loose talk”, and of being Anglophile to the extent that he 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.

Ramesh’s documents throw up three surprises on one of the biggest stories of that period, which has morphed into much folklore as a Thimayya versus Nehru, Army versus politician saga over the decades, and which Narendra Modi referred to in his last Karnataka campaign as Nehru’s humiliation of local hero Thimayya. One, that The Statesman scooped the story of his resignation in 1959. It was under another byline. Ramesh, however, establishes that Gen JN Chaudhri (who later became Chief of Army Staff), had moonlighted anonymously as The Statesman (then British-owned) military correspondent for more than a decade. He was on the inside track of this resignation but could not have written the story himself and passed it on. Think of a serving top general working as a leading paper’s military correspondent incognito.

Second, there are stunning notes from the personal archives of the then British High Commissioner Malcolm Macdonald detailing how Thimayya was sharing all his problems with Menon, Nehru, the resignation plans and much classified information with him — 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, that 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 no time left for the Chinese. And we haven’t even mentioned a Lt-Gen BM Kaul yet.

By special arrangement with ThePrint

Ranjan

ranjan.srivastava@hindustantimes.com

Sheopur : When Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination in New Delhi by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984 triggered anti-Sikh violence, the impact was felt as far away as Karahal in Madhya Pradesh’s Sheopur district. Around a dozen Sikh families were uprooted from Karahal in 1984 in the face of the violence. They returned a decade later to pick up the pieces and rebuild their lives. Many of them bought land.

Now, two-and-half decades later, 11 Sikh families in Karahal are back where they started, after authorities demolished their farmhouses and levelled their crops to the ground from December 21 to December 31, 2019) as part of an anti-encroachment drive. The families are accused of buying tribal land on the basis of forged papers and also encroaching upon forest and government land.

Government officials said tribal land in Karahal cannot be transferred to non-tribals according to the Madhya Pradesh Land Revenue Code. Even transfer of land between non-tribals in such areas is disallowed without permission. Officials said no outsider is allowed to buy land there to protect the tribal ecosystem.

The officials said the issue became a bone of contention only in the recent past when the tribals started demanding return of their land taken by Sikhs. During the Congress government came to power in December 2018, it started the process to check validity of the land documents, after which the demolition process started, said district collector Pratibha Pal.

Authorities accused of bias

The Sikh residents of Karahal have accused the authorities of bias. “The SDM [sub-divisional magistrate Rupesh Upadhya] and tehsildar [PN Parmar] called us rioters and militants and said ‘You [Sikhs] were driven out in 1984 but you returned’,” said Gurmeet Singh, a local resident.

He said eight to 10 Sikh families left Karahal and returned to their villages in Punjab and Haryana in 1984. They returned a decade later with more Sikh families, who also bought land.

Kehar Singh, 73, another resident, said they were served no notices. “They did not give us any time to even remove our belongings.”

He said he came to Karahal from Sirsa in Haryana in 1996 and built a farmhouse.

His neighbour, Surendra Singh, said that he, along with his wife and three daughters, were forced to spend a cold night under the open sky when their house was demolished. “The administration did not show any mercy to even my little daughters, who pleaded with them to stop the demolition.”

Pal said Karahal is a notified scheduled tribe area, where non-tribals are not allowed to own land. “They do not have any legal document to prove their rights over the land in their possession. We adopted a legal procedure to take action against encroachment…”

Pal denied allegations that the Sikhs were singled out. “Action was taken against 23 persons belonging to several castes. Over 326 acres of government land was freed from encroachers. The possession of the land was returned to 34 people belonging to the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities. In 12 villages, over 657 acres of land was identified to have been occupied with the help of fake papers.”

Harendra Singh Rajawat, a local businessman, said some Sikh families also had revenue, forest and tribal land under their possession. “In this, both [Sikhs and tribals] benefited,” he said. He added that the Sikhs gave tribals annual rent of up to Rs 6,000 per acre and also employed them in their farms for wages of about Rs 150 daily.

‘Sikhs made barren land cultivable’

Rajawat said the problem started about a decade ago when the Sikhs made barren land cultivable. “On the land on which only maize and barley would grow, they started producing wheat, paddy and mustard. It is then that some local elements provoked tribals to try getting back their land which is as good as gold now.”

Karahal sarpanch Nandkishore, a tribal, said the Sikhs say they taught the tribals farming and raised their living standard. “But they made fortunes while cultivating our land and we continue to be poor.”

Tribal leader Mukesh Malhotra, who was arrested for raising slogans like “Sardar bhagao Karahal bachao [throw out Sikhs, save Karahal)”, accused the Sikhs of occupying tribal land. Delegations of Sikh organisations including the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee, Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee (DSGMC) and SAD have visited the area.

DSGMC head Manjinder Singh Sirsa, who is a member of the Delhi assembly, accused the state Congress government of trying to throw Sikhs out of Madhya Pradesh. Akal Takht acting head, Giani Harpreet Singh, on Monday referred to Sikh eviction from Madhya Pradesh and said the community was unsafe in Pakistan as well as India.