A Maverick in Politics 1991–2004
By Mani Shankar Aiyar
Juggernaut
ISBN: 978-9353457679
495pp.

Mani Shankar Aiyar is a human Wagah/Attari gateway, a tangible point of contact between two irascible neighbours — India and Pakistan. No one has done more than him to ensure that there is “an uninterrupted, uninterruptible dialogue” between the two, and no one has failed with such fraternal finesse.

Mani’s third and final volume of memoirs — A Maverick in Politics 1991-2004 — is more than a premature epitaph by himself, of himself. It could be read as an updated Machiavellian manual of modern politics.

Mani begins by telling “young people who wonder whether they should come into politics that they must first embark on a well-paid professional career to build up some personal capital, for otherwise they will have no alternative to making a commerce of politics.”

He then warns them that they should be prepared for that “moment of such total rejection by your own party and political patrons that you are left staring at darkness with no light at the end of any tunnel, ‘unwept, unhonoured and unsung.’ That is not the fate that overtakes everybody in politics, but only those, like me, who are non-conformists, those who are mavericks.”

The third and final part of politician Mani Shankar Aiyar’s memoirs reinforce his voice as one of secular reason, multi-faith coexistence and good neighbourly bonhomie, which stands increasingly isolated in contemporary India

The beau ideal in Mani’s long life (he is now 83 years old) was Pandit Nehru. His loyalty to the Nehru family remained a leitmotif of politics, reaching an apogee during his association with Nehru’s grandson Rajiv Gandhi. With a Nehruvian turn of phrase, Mani recalled Ranjiv’s assassination in 1991: “For all the six years that I knew Rajiv Gandhi, he walked in the shadow of death, and I walked in his shadow. Now, death has taken him away and I am left in the shadows.”

Neither shadows nor darkness ever daunted Mani. He was elected to the........

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