Before The Fall, A Giant

In the Indian public consciousness, it is difficult to divorce V.K. Krishna Menon, then defence minister, from the dark days of 1962, when the Indian Army suffered a catastrophic defeat at the hands of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA). But, as this biography brings out, he was much more—an agitator, pamphleteer, propagandist, editor and lawyer who single- handedly raised the flag of India’s freedom in London in the years 1924-1947.

Krishna Menon may not have faced jail like his contemporaries, but living and agitating for Indian Independence in a foreign land without a regular income was not easy. In that sense, the book brings out the fascinating world of the freedom struggle from the angle of an agitator living and working in the capital of the metropolitan colonial power.

The big watershed in Krishna Menon’s life was 1936, when he became close to Jawaharlal Nehru. He began as his publishing agent. But slowly, he became his man in London, liaising India’s freedom struggle with a cross-section of the British intellectual class ranging from economist and politician Harold Laski to the great philosopher, essayist and political activist Bertrand Russell and with politicians like Clement Attlee, Stafford Cripps, Nye Bevin, Ernest Bevin and Lord Mountbatten. This is where Krishna Menon developed key relationships with people who were to play such a significant role in post-Independence India from London—Vijayalakshmi Pandit, Feroze Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, P.N. Haksar and, above all, Pandit Nehru. Indeed, Francine Frankel, director, Center for the Advanced Study of India assesses that by the time of Independence, “Nehru had incurred a considerable personal and political debt to Menon”.

This propelled him to high offices in the first decade of freedom—high commissioner to the UK till 1952, member of the Indian delegation to the United Nations till 1961 and minister of defence from 1957-1962.

One problem with Ramesh’s account is that it is just too long. It is not as though a man as important as Krishna Menon lacked a complete biography. The book could have avoided using long quotes and along with some editing it could have been shorter by as much as one-third, and thus perhaps more readable.

That said, Ramesh has given us a rounded view of  Menon’s clearly flawed personality wherein he “demonstrated an uncanny knack of turning even friends and well-wishers into critics and enemies”. His brilliance was often overshadowed by his excesses. Nehru was not unfamiliar with them, yet he remained his mentor till the very end. The correspondence and the relationship that Ramesh recreates makes it clear that Menon, in addition to his other considerable talents, had become adept at emotional manipulation too.

Nehru’s attitude towards Menon was summed up in an incident described in the memoirs of K.P.S. Menon, the former foreign secretary who told the PM that Krishna Menon was “insufferable”. Panditji’s response was that “there were some men of great ability who suffered from a sense of frustration, that this frustration showed itself in various ways, and that if such men were entrusted with responsibility, they could be of great use to the country….”

Ramesh’s book brings out just how bright the Menon star shone in the firmament. He was, next to Nehru, the most recognisable Indian in the world in the 1950s, a cross section of the Bollywood stars were his friends, he was on the Time magazine cover and being spoken off as a potential successor to Nehru.

But that star came crashing down in October-November 1962, when China defeated India in a short border war. It is easy to argue that his flaws were responsible for India’s dismal 1962 showing. The reality is that the disaster at Se La or the rout in Bomdi La was wholly the army’s responsibility and not of Menon’s making. Neither was he the only guilty party in playing favourites in the military; the army itself was riven with factions. But someone had to shoulder the blame—either Nehru or Menon, and it was obvious who would do so.