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Two great individualists

Premen Addy

SIR ROBIN Day, who died last week in London at the age of 76, was by common consent British television's foremost political interviewer. He was the Grand Inquisitor, a formidable national figure in a familiar bow tie, heavy spectacles and a full shock of hair. His mastery of detail came with a sound grasp of the whole; hence, his method of tackling the subject before him became a standard for those who have followed him in television or radio. He believed it was the democratic right of every citizen to know about matters, great and small, in the public domain and that it was the duty of every politician, ministers especially, to reveal and not conceal the truth.

Sir Robin had studied law at Oxford but decided early on that the bar was not for him. Television was taking off as the new mass communications medium in the mid and late 1950s and it was then that he started off into largely uncharted seas as an intervi ewer. The tried and tested legal profession was never short of aspiring talent but television had yet to come of age.

Sir Robin Day brought to this medium the forensic gift of a high class barrister, moulding this with others in an appropriate blend that made television presentation natural and credible to the public. He interviewed the mightiest figures in the land but was never in awe of their power or reputation. He was, therefore, relentless in the pursuit of answers, returning time and again to elisions and evasions and dissembling circumlocution with the persistence of a wasp and with the wasp's ability to sting.

Possessed of an abundance of wit and humour, often with a twinkle in his eye, unfailingly courteous, as those whom he had once harried were quick to acknowledge, leavening his audiences, over a whole generation and more, with a healthier appreciation of democracy and the democratic spirit, he educated them in the self-confident belief that the politically empowered were at all times accountable to the people who elected them.

The Day legacy was recently in evidence. When Jeremy Paxman, now the country's foremost interviewer, asked Henry Kissinger by what moral right he had accepted the Nobel Peace Prize when it was his policy that had resulted in Cambodia being bombed into th e stone age, the former UN national security adviser and, subsequently, secretary of state, walked out of the studio in high dudgeon.

The good doctor, humble in the presence of Chairman Mao's ``raw power'', in the manner of Moses before the burning bush, was outraged by this perceived loss of dignity, the insult that would question his mummified probity and expose it to fresh air and p ossible disintegration in full public view.

This clearly comes from what the late US Senator J. William Fulbright called the ``arrogance of power'' -- American power, as it happens, against which he warned his people with the ripe wisdom and learning of the true legislator. Human diversity and the future well-being of humankind require surely a multipolar and not a unipolar world. Yet, it is a unipolar world that US leaders are now hell bent on constructing. In such a global hothouse, monologue will prevail over dialogue; all men are equal, it wi ll be intoned, but some men, in practice, will be more equal than others.

And as Robin Day was no respecter of titles and offices, so Krishna Menon, in an earlier time, refused to kowtow as India's principal roving envoy, before those who would, by virtue of their military and economic strength, presume to lay down the law for the lesser breeds of this earth. It was the democratic spirit that governed the relations between states, great and small, for no nation possessed the copyright to enlightenment or a more prosaic wisdom. Reduced to its fundamentals, Nehru and Krishna Me non were arguing for a multipolar world against the bipolar advocates who took their cue from Washington or Moscow. Its resonance is with us still.

Menon's advocacy at the United Nations and elsewhere included a vigorous defence of Indian interests and aspirations. He played his role in the setting of the Cold War when the merit of an argument commanded a low premium and great were the rewards of lo yalty to one or the other Superpower. The USSR, for its reasons, was flexible in its relationship with India. The US was less so. John Foster Dulles, who epitomised American foreign policy at the time was ``a preacher in politics'', as Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary, later prime minister, scornfully remarked.

Menon's verbal jousts with the Americans -- he possessed an acerbic tongue and was often given to a cruel turn of phrase -- were wounding encounters, and the scars are still visible. Stephen Cohen, the American establishment specialist on South Asia, inv ariably brings up Menon's name when there is some aspect of Indian policy of which he disapproves. He sees Menon's ghost stalking the corridors of South Block in New Delhi.

The American biographer of Nehru, Stanley Wolport, saw Menon as his Svengali, an absurd judgment which tells us more about Wolport than it does of the Nehru-Menon relationship. One can perhaps count it a blessing that Menon has not been compared to Sadda m Hussain or Slobodan Milosevic. Indian foreign policy may have moved in a number of new directions since his day -- Menon would have had no difficulty in accepting this, for life goes on and the seasons change -- but his shade must take considerable sat isfaction that Indian foreign policy boasts the Indian brand name.

Dr. Suhash Chakravarty of Delhi University has written a scholarly multi-volume work, packed with fascinating detail of Menon's long years in Britain, where he studied at the London School of Economics and developed a life-long friendship with one its gr eatest teachers, Harold Laski. Krishna Menon, in his true context, remains an Indo-British figure. He first came to the notice of the remarkable Annie Besant, a person he revered, and his intellectual development in Britain owed much to English high cult ure, which set its seal on his socialism and radical outlook.

He was both nationalist and internationalist; as a St Pancras borough councillor, he fought for the rights of the British working man and woman to draw on the best possible library facilities; in editing the first Penguin classic on social and political thought, he helped revolutionise British publishing and brought the work of the leading writers of the day to ordinary people at prices they could afford. With Bernard Shaw, Krishna Menon was honoured as a Freeman of the Borough of St Pancras.

Menon's India League, which in the 1930s and 1940s, was devoted to Indian Independence, had a most distinguished array of British personalities, from Bertrand Russell and James Callaghan to Michael Foot. He designed it as a bridge between India and Brita in.

Of Menon's character, Harold Laski had this to say on the anniversary on Indian Independence, in London, in 1949: ``I do not know how many meetings I attended that I did not want to attend; I have made speeches that I did not want to make, have written a rticles that I had no time to write, because I was under the grim control of this irrepressible embodiment of the will of India to be free, and I look back and what I owe Krishna Menon for having me attend as a member of his army is a debt I can never re pay''.

Menon's return to India and Indian politics had its fraught passages. He was the outsider to his colleagues in government, yet an insider in his privileged communion with the prime minister.

Of Menon's record as minister it is difficult to pass judgment, his letters deposited with Indira Gandhi for safekeeping, remain closed to the public because Sonia Gandhi wills it so. An important chapter of Indian history will be shut off from the scrut iny of Indians, until decency and common sense prevail.

Menon, one suspects, bore the cross of Nehru's failed China policy. He was forward-looking in setting up a new base for defence production, but greviously deficient in man management within the armed forces.

He accepted his fall with the fortitude of a stoic and said not a word against his chief. He was true to Nehru to the last.

Shakespeare said, ``The evil that men do lives after them, The good is oft interred with their bones...''

As with Julius Caesar, so with Krishna Menon.

(The author, a visiting tutor in Modern Asian History at Kellog College, Oxford, is editor of the London-based India Weekly).