An individual for whom privilege came easily during the rock-bottom economic growth years of Nehruvian socialism — St. Stephen’s and Cambridge-educated foreign service diplomat, who just before retirement plunged into national politics and became the late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s strategic lieutenant and secretary — Mani Shankar Aiyar has been reduced to pathetic condition. Aiyar probably cost the Congress millions of votes in 2014 when on election eve he famously remarked that he looked forward to BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi, son of a tea vendor, serving him chai in the Parliament canteen after the General Election. Now denuded of all party positions, Aiyar has been reduced to gate-crashing Delhi’s perpetual rounds of seminars where as a self-confessed “loose canon”, he misses no opportunity to complain about his “abandonment”  by the Nehru-Gandhi parivar which rules the opposition Congress with iron hand. 

In an interview with PTI last December Aiyar lamented that Congress matriarch Sonia Gandhi has refused to meet him for over a decade, and Rahul Gandhi, leader of the Congress in Parliament, only once. Not that Aiyar, now put out to pasture, has taken his marginalization lying down. Speaking from the floor at a seminar, he has turned on his “sweet prince” mentor Rajiv Gandhi disparaging him as a “two-time academic failure” who tried and failed to get degrees from Cambridge University and Imperial College, London, wondering aloud how such a duffer was appointed prime minister.

Yet not one to let the grass grow under his feet, while in the political wilderness, Aiyar has written a voluminous self-exculpatory autobiography in three separate volumes, detailing at length the hard work and long hours he invested in furthering the national interest. But the national interest, My Dear Mani, is not served by inputs, but outcomes. And on that side of the ledger, because of Aiyar’s sustained commitment to bankrupt Nehruvian socialism, sycophancy to the dynasty and avid promotion of Indo-Pakistan rapprochement, there’s a negative balance. Sad but true.