The Significance of Krishna Menon

Hating V. K. Krishna Menon has now become a political pastime in the country. It seems to have also assumed the importance of an occasional parliamentary diversion. In a section of the Press the denigration of the man is almost a regular feature; in some political circles debunking him is nearer an occupation than a hobby.

Lest there should emerge, out of this engaging diversity of taste and tendency, a public image of Krishna Menon as one seeking to exploit his opportunities as Defence Minister, with vile designs stemming from pernicious doctrines, it is time that a serious attempt was made to clear the air of all miasma about the man who is neither a Machiavelli nor a Mephistopheles.

Krishna Menon is doubtless one of the most controversial figures on the Indian political scene, indeed on the international plane. But he is also one of the most challenging men in the contemporary annals. He is a man of strong views and fierce convictions. He does not believe in the Biblical virtue of meekness or in inheriting the earth within its terms.

He has little use and less patience for the soft word that turneth away wrath. He would rather love to be a bruiser in a heated controversy than to be an aspirant for the laurels of mellowed statesmanship. He would rather scoff at opponents and smite them than endure the strain of cultivating them leisurely for remote peace of mind.

By nature, he is temperamental; by temperament he is difficult. He has erected for himself a facade which is rather forbidding to the average politician who expects from a leader, a polite handshake, if not a warm hug. If, therefore, his brusqueness and overbearing make for unpopular­ity, Krishna Menon need hardly be surprised. He has, however, no regrets.

Not since the days of Lloyd George in British polities, has a politician suffered more on this account. And it was of Lloyd George that it was said at one time: “Hatred of him has become a frame of mind, a free masonry, a kind of eleventh commandment.....” It is so in the case of Krishna Menon, who shares Lloyd George’s courage and imagination.

If he had also Lloyd George’s sympathy, he would have been a far greater man. But we should be thankful, and it is the country’s good luck, that he is not without the Lloyd Georgian energy of mind as well as energy of action. It is now, however, possible to have those extraordinary qualities and yet avoid stirring up controversies, or evoking antagonisms.

Nobody on the Treasury Benches has been a readier target for slashing attacks on the floor of either house of Parliament. It was only recently that the veteran Acharya Kripalani descended on Krishna Menon very, very, very heavily and demanded his devoted head on a charger. From his isolated eminence, the Acharya summoned Burke to his aid in charge-sheeting the Defence Minister on various counts, which were separately serious and combinedly shattering. Short of saying or suggest­ing that the Chinese occupied Indian territory on Krishna Menon’s invitation, Kripalani left nothing unsaid to hold him up to public obloquy.

The Kripalani explosion brought Nehru on the scene, not so much because he had to rush to the rescue of Menon who could well protect himself but because he alone could, with the authority of a Prime Minister, present the constitutional position in a correct perspective and thus say the last word on the subject.

His ready assumption of responsibility for everything that happened at the Defence Ministry conclusively established that it was no one-man­-show and that much less was the Defence Minister the villain of the piece that he was made out to be on wholly wrong assumptions.

If Kripalani’s ‘impeachment’ of Krishna Menon was even fractionally warranted by facts, the later would not have sat in the House, with his withers unwrung. He listened to the debate, so much punctuated by diatribes against him, with an unconcern that startled the critics. For once, the redoubtable Krishna Menon whose mordant wit and marathon performances at the U.N. made the rafters ring, would not even retali­ate.

In replying to the debate he was argumentative rather than combat­ive, he even tried to be persuasive. And for once, he seemed to have departed from Joseph Chamberlainls rule he seems to have made his own: “I will not answer: I will never apologise; I will always attack”. He was content - strange in the circumstances - to combine an unknown suavvity of manner with a known firmness of stand.

There was nothing wrong with the morale of the armed forces; if anything, it stood higher because of their integration and cohesion as unknown before. For the rest, never before were the Defence establish­ments and Ordinance factories so much humming with life.

On an earlier occasion (in Rajya Sabha), even so sedate an elder statesman as Pandit Kunzru asked the Prime Minister to bundle Krishna Menon out of the Defence Ministry, just in the way in which asquith had thrown Haldane out of the War Office. Unluckily for Kunzru, the analogy was woefully wrong, for there was not a day for the rest of his when the Liberal Asquith did not repent for his action dropping Haldane from the Coalition Ministry under pressure from Bonar Law who had otherwise withheld Conservative partnership.

Luckily, for Krishna Menon, the right name was recalled, for, nobody at the War Office had done a more magnificent job than Haldane could not achieve or even attempt what he had set his heart upon, without incidentally disturbing the equanimity, or wounding the susceptibilities, of the “brass-hats” in the Army. There were conflicts of view inside the War Office; there were storms outside – “storms which are the common lot of Ministers.”

But then came a day when there was seen behind his words and work “a brain, a scheme and a system.” Maybe that Krishna Menon has to bide his time for a like recognition of his stupendous effort, at reorientation of India’s Defence system.

The trouble with Krishna Menon seems to be, not so much in doing a thing that either appeals to his mind or excites his fancy, as in the manner of doing it. He cannot help being ruthless to inefficiency or muddle-headedness. It need hardly surprise anyone if he has adopted as his motto Disraelsi dictum (as written by Disraeli in a private letter to Derby): “In great affairs, to succeed, you must not spare the feelings of mediocrities.”

Perhaps, it is not without significance that the defence Minister carries in his hand, not a Chamberlain’s umbrella but a hand-stick as a substitute for the Field-Marshal’s baton while Nature seems to have been partial to him in endowing him with a profile that is in harmony with “the aquiline supremacy or the Caesars.” I rather wish he had taken to the Roman toga to emphasise sartorial identity.

Domination has its draw. If it produces results, it also creates irritations. Krishna Menon’s fault lies (if it is a fault) in a certain master fulness of spirit which militates against one’s popularity. It is conceivable that in his zeal for reform he has elbowed out some men wrongly or done some wrong things otherwise too.

There may be some justification for saying that Krishna Menon had a way said of Cecil Rhodes In another context, done many things that could be called strong and perhaps some that could be called wrong.” But to attribute any secret plans or sinister motives to him on that account and seek to arraingnat the bar of a public tribunal or a parliamentary committee is to turn inalignant.             -

Bigger men than Krishna Menon have found it worthwhile to cultivate a friendly press in the country and a following in the party. But far from doing so, he seems to go to the other extreme. He is no favourite with the Press ‘barons’ he keeps them at a distance, from them he won’t accept even flattery. He would rather deal with them as Baldwin dealt with Rothermere. He has no use for the commercial magnates either. They do not belong still to his world. He would mulct them if he could.

He is not afraid of being a Leftist, with a capital L. Since he settled down in England amidst Fabian friends, he has been a Socialist, deepdyed. To him, as unlike to a vast majority of his present-day Congress colleagues, Socialism is not a mere political slogan but an article of faith. Above all, as a man of ideas under the handicap of brilliance, he is to much of an individualist to conform to the homelier standards of Congress orthodoxy or the still homelier requirements of Congress mediocrity.

Krishna Menon rather stands alone. He is perhaps even lonely. But it is the loneliness of a man who has a will of his own. He does not believe in any political make-up for hypnotising a crowd; he does not resort to an artifice for manipulating a party. He is incapable of arriving somewhere on the shoulders of a majority in the world of politics.

But given a hero who could stir his enthusiasm, he would follow him “through fire and flood, without asking why or whiter”. And this is precisely what we see since Destiny brought him and the Prime Minister together some now far-off day when friendship or collaboration with Nehru was wholly free from suggestions of political investment.

Not many know that Krishna Menon is one of the far too few men in the country who have no acquisitive instinct. He has no use for the stuff, quantitatively. He leads a simple life; his wants are few. He is a tee­totaller; he has tenaciously stuck to his vegetarianism, he does not smoke. He almost suffers from a Sarvodaya complex in his attitude to life.

When people inside the Congress or outside raise their hands at Krishna Menon or their voices over his lapses or limitations, if only with a view to hissing him off the stage, they seem to overlook the significance of Krishna Menon in our scheme of things. By the side of the Prime Minister there is no truer symbol of the Socialist pattern in the cabinet than Krishna Menon. Nor has Nehru a more trusted friend or loyal colleague, particularly in the matter of collaboration on the international plane, whether in evolving a policy or giving articulation to its tenets.

Mind goes to a fine morning when a high official at the Centre, with inside knowledge and with a certain objectivity, summed up Krishna Menon in their telling phrases; ‘outstanding grasp, outstanding ability, outstanding integrity.”

A man like that does not decorate a place; he fills it and faces the world. He is not the man to run away from his task; his purpose holds, let us leave him on the stage with the mists rolling away, active, alert, four square, in his full stature - and at the height of his form.