The art of fooling with power

Manohar Malgonkar, The Statesman, Asia News Network, Calcutta

All of us feel irritated by bores or fools. Nonetheless we put up with them because we don't want to hurt their feelings. But there are some who have no such inhibitions, and a few who seem to take pleasure in showing their resentment openly, particularly when they know that, because of their exalted positions, they themselves are immune from retaliation.

Perhaps the most glaring example of someone making his subordinates feel embarrassed in public was Krishna Menon, whom Jawaharlal Nehru had handpicked from obscurity in London to become the country's defense minister. A vivid pen-portrait of Menon is provided by Lt.Gen. BM Kaul, in his book, The Untold Story.

Menon, it seems, made almost a habit of sending for senior military and civil officers "on Sundays and at awkward times, to discuss urgent problems". One night Kaul was woken up from deep sleep at 3 a.m. by the ringing of his bedside telephone. "Menon speaking", the voice said: "Could you come to my house for a few minutes? At Menon's bungalow about a mile away, to find his minister sitting at his desk. He looked up and asked: "What is the exact position about the Polish horses?"

Kaul made so bold as to reply: "I haven't the foggiest idea, sir. I don't deal with the procurement of horses". He explained to Menon that the Polish horses were likely to be in the field of the Quarter Master General's purview.

Another Menon custom was to make sure that his routine conferences were packed with high-ranking military and civil- service officers, "on the pretext that some urgent matter needed immediate" resolution. When, after a whole lot of brass hats and secretaries had assembled in his conference room, he himself would show up, looking utterly bored, Kaul tells us that these meetings did not have any agendas, and that no one so much as kept a record of the proceedings, so that the impression they left on the minds of those who had been made to attend them was that they were merely an exercise in muscle-flexing on the part of their minister. Kaul describes how savagely Menon treated some of those who attended them.

Once when a senior general began his statement with the words, "Sir, I think..." Menon cut him short by interrupting, "Soldiers are incapable of thinking". But then sailors too, were even- handedly insulted. For instance when an admiral began his address by saying, "Sir, the navy..." Menon completed his sentence by pronouncing... "should be at the bottom of the sea".

These generals are admirals whom Krishna Menon made the targets of his derision and insults were responsible for keeping the nation's war machine in a high state of efficiency and readiness. The efficacy of that war-machine was soon to be put to the test when, in the winter of 1962, a shooting war broke out between India and China. The inglorious reverses suffered by our army and the repercussions that they generated brought about Krishna Menon's fall from power.

But at what a price? Heads rolled, one of them being that of Gen. Kaul himself who had been something of a rising star. The military hierarchy was given a violent shaking. Few among the new faces could have felt much sympathy for Menon's exit.

It is, of course, possible that Menon had good reason to feel dissatisfied with the "old-boy" network of the armed forces that had been a legacy of the Raj. But surely there were more civilized ways of registering boredom or even disdain?

Lord Salisbury, who became Britain's Prime Minister towards the end of the 19th century, employed subtler means of censure. Once, in the House of Lords, when a member was holding forth about something or the other, Salisbury was heard to inquire who the speaker was, and then, on the name being revealed, he was heard by his neighbors to exclaim: "Good God! -- but I thought he was dead!"

Another world leader who, too, could ooze charm at will but became more known for her quite devastating manner of dealing with those who opposed her politics, was Indira Gandhi, who, in the pursuit of this trait became altogether dictatorial. Her way of silencing them was to fling them into jail without trial.

Inevitably and, maybe to her secret pride, Indira Gandhi began to be spoken of as an avatar of Durga. When she was roused to anger, she certainly had nothing to learn from Krishna Menon. The quite monumental tantrum she threw to show her displeasure at something her youthful daughter-in-law, Maneka Gandhi, had done or failed to do, had all the crudeness of a street brawl.

And yet, in day-to-day dealings with public figures who differed with her policies, she had reduced the way of showing her remoteness from them to an art form. Studied indifference.

One such person was JRD Tata, who had also known Indira Gandhi from her childhood. Whenever he happened to be in Delhi, Tata asked to see Gandhi. At their meetings, while Tata was earnestly trying to put forward a point of view, Indira Gandhi, for her part, busied herself with some trivial activity such as slitting open a letter, or looking for something in her handbag. Tata could have been left under no illusion that she had absolutely no interest in whatever he was saying.

Lyndon Johnson who became America's president, may be said to fill the gap between Krishna Menon's bare-knuckled slights and Lord Salisbury's stamping of his feet to register boredom. He almost made a habit of baiting his Vice President, Hubert Humphrey. Johnson would call Humphrey to come and see him at odd hours on the pretext that there was something important that needed to be discussed, and generally treated him "as a staff sergeant might treat a private", as Humphrey himself put it.

Humphrey rather prided himself on his oratorical powers, and may have felt flattered when Johnson during one of their meetings, asked him to repeat an entire speech he had recently given, "as if before an audience". Then, when Humphrey was in the full flow of a thundering oration. Johnson went into the bathroom but left the door open, calling over his shoulders as he urinated, "Keep talking, Hubert. I'm listening!"