Mani Shankar Aiyar's A Maverick in Politics is a memoir of a loner who belonged to no political faction

Indian Express

17-05-2025

With his characteristic bluntness, Mani Shankar Aiyar opens his political autobiography, A Maverick in Politics with a tense and self-deprecatory tone, telling us in the Introduction itself that this is a story of 'total rejection by your own party and political patrons'.
Though he says he doesn't regret anything — either his foray into politics or his ideological obsessions or his loyalty to his political patrons or, for that matter, his various verbal volleys that may have cost him dearly — the reader is left intrigued about the protagonist being left 'unwept, unhonoured and unsung'. Perhaps the unwritten question this part of his autobiography (the first being Memoirs of a Maverick, 2023 besides a semi-autobiography and also a valiant defence of Rajiv Gandhi in The Rajiv I Knew, 2024) presents is: how political players with less ideological firmness and much less personal loyalty (to the Gandhis — Rajiv, Sonia and Rahul) survive, even flourish, where Mani Shankar Aiyar ends up as an almost-outcast for the Congress party.
Frankly, having known the public outbursts by Aiyar that apparently caused him his position within the Congress party (these are chronicled in an aptly titled chapter, 'Decline… Fade Out… Fall), I read this autobiography to find out more about the decline of the party he belongs to. Much before the fall of Aiyar (from 'grace') occurred, circa 2016-2024, his party was on a downward spiral. Aiyar's entry into active politics in fact coincided with the decline of the Congress. It is not easy to imagine that he and his 'patron', Rajiv Gandhi, would have known this fact with clarity in the late 1980s but the defeat of the Congress in 1989 elections marked the most critical moment till then for the Congress party. Yet, Aiyar took the plunge in 1991 and began to swim with the party which was only just about managing to stay afloat.
At a personal level, he had an awkward relationship with Narasimha Rao; perhaps Aiyar was self-consciously the voice of Rajiv Gandhi (and therefore someone who was supposed to have proximity with Sonia Gandhi); he took his role as a representative seriously; cultivated the constituency (chapters two, three and four); worked hard on crucial committees; spoke passionately in the House; went on to become a minister holding various portfolios (chapters eight to 11) and also pursued his mission — that he undertook via the influence of Rajiv — to strengthen Panchayati Raj. He also occasionally sat on a party committee or two and held party positions of limited influence. But beyond these personal details of political career, one cannot but read this autobiography as a biography of the party — a party that had a sudden fall in 1989 and couldn't use the opportunities of 1991 and 2004 to rebuild or reimagine itself.
On the face of it, Aiyar does not give answers to this puzzle, though it is full of insights once you start reading between the lines. In 1991, Aiyar sided with Rao instead of Pawar. But we are offered no reason for this choice. He had an awkward relationship with Rao who probably entertained Aiyar only because of the latter's supposed proximity to Sonia. A similar complete lack of detail marks Aiyar's sketchy reporting of Sonia's takeover of Congress leadership in 1998 — the reader is left wondering what prompted Sonia to take the plunge after almost eight years. These gaps are partly due to the fact that Aiyar was a loner — he did not belong to any faction of the party. So, the first thing one learns — although this is not exactly anything new — is that running the Congress party meant conducting factionalism and palace-intrigues simultaneously.
The period that this book covers also includes both 1992 and 2002. While the former can be easily blamed on Rao's prevarications and the latter on the inability of Vajpayee to rein in Narendra Modi, at both these moments, the absence of Congress party was remarkable. Both these were telling moments about Congress's unwillingness to counter communal situations. Aiyar reports about his efforts to counter the Hindutva agenda prior to destruction of Babri mosque, but that narration clearly indicates the ideological paralysis of the party. Similarly, this autobiography includes his experience of Gujarat post-2002 which shows that Congress in Gujarat had already ceded all space to Hindutva by 2002 itself — what the reader is left to imagine is that the Congress had almost done the same all over the country. No wonder, when the Congress returned to power in 2004, it never tried to ideologically assert its anti-communal stance, whether led by Rao, Kesari or Sonia. It did not have the anti-communal agenda as its imagination. That is the second unstated insight from this autobiography.
Third, following the shock caused by sudden departure of its leader — the assassination of Rajiv — the party continued to be organisationally in disarray. All through the 1990s, leaders kept leaving the party and forming their own Congress parties, some of which have survived the test of time. But even after the rise of Sonia and later, the formation of a Congress-led government, the party continued to be organisationally bankrupt. Was this because of the convenience it accorded to some operators who were close to her? Aiyar's autobiography doesn't give an answer but leaves enough space to speculate on these lines.
Finally, this biography of Congress starkly brings forth the absence of politics with a capital P as far as the Congress during this period was concerned. There was politicking, but the approach of the party was almost apolitical. This is not about nominating Manmohan Singh as Prime Minister; it was evident even in Aiyar's mistaken inclination to have Pranab Mukherjee as a replacement to Dr Singh mid-way through the second term.
Aiyar's political memoirs are of interest because they have the potential to bring these issues to the forefront — and one suspects that Aiyar, the party loyalist, would like this unintended outcome of the story of his entry into and exit from political limelight.
Suhas Palshikar, based at Pune, taught Political Science