Anchored in himself
By Shashi Tharoor
"The Hindu", Online edition of India's National Newspaper
December 04, 2005

Through all the positions he held, it could truly be said of our tenth President, as it can of few others, that K.R. Narayanan remained himself.

PHOTO: REUTERS

PREDICTING THE FUTURE: President K.R. Narayanan and British physicist Stephen Hawking during the latter's visit to India in 2001.

THE tyranny of deadlines sometimes trips up your peripatetic columnist. I was travelling when the sad news came through of the death of former President K.R. Narayanan. Ordinarily I would have dropped everything to pay him tribute in this space, but my schedule left me no time to replace the column I had already written. Now that I am writing after my readers have already digested the dozens of obituaries that have appeared about this fine human being, is there anything new to say?

Meeting K.R. Narayanan

The American politician Mo Udall, speaking at the end of a rather long list of orators, memorably quipped upon finally taking the floor: "everything has already been said, but not by everybody." I shall resist the temptation, however, to recycle what has already been said about K.R. Narayanan. We all know that the highest office in the land was occupied for five years by someone who was born amongst the lowest of the low: a man who was not only a Dalit but one born in a thatched hut with no running water, whose university refused to award him his degree at the same ceremony as his upper caste class-mates, and who yet rose above his lot to triumph without bitterness. We have read about his Tata scholarship to England, the letter from Prof. Harold Laski to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru urging him to take the young man into the Foreign Service, the illustrious career that followed in diplomacy, education, and politics, culminating in his assumption of the highest position his country could offer.

And yet none of that tells the whole story about K.R. Narayanan, about why he will be missed by those who had the privilege of encountering him in person. My own contact with him began in an unusual manner. I reviewed a book of his — a collection of essays and speeches written largely while he had served as India's Ambassador in Washington — for a national magazine. I had positive things to say about many things in the book, and sharp criticisms of some elements of the collection. I wrote the review under a pseudonym, so I was all the more surprised when the editor of the magazine forwarded to me a letter received in the name of my alias, from none other than K.R. Narayanan himself. It was an uncommonly gracious letter, thanking me not merely for my kinder words but for my criticisms, saying how much he had learned from my comments and expressing a desire to meet me. This was so exceptional an experience for me as a reviewer that I shed my anonymity and wrote back to the author — by then Vice-Chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University, a fitting position for an individual of such intellectual integrity. Our first meeting occurred a year or so later, when K.R. Narayanan, by then Minister of State for Science and Technology, was visiting Geneva, where I was living and working at the time. The Minister was as disarming in person as he had been in his correspondence: kind, soft-spoken, intellectually curious, morally engaging. A lifelong friendship was born.

Thereafter I made it a point to call on him on all my visits to Delhi. I saw him as Minister in two different Ministries, as Vice-President, and finally as President. The surroundings changed, but as each receiving-room became grander and more awe-inspiring, the man himself did not change. It was as if his own humanity was so genuine that it could not be affected by its external trappings. Few people who have held high office are so profoundly anchored in themselves that they are immune to being swayed by the tall waves and high winds that buffet the ship of state. K.R. Narayanan was an exception. Through all the positions he held, it could truly be said of our tenth President, as it can of few others, that he remained himself.

Principled decisions

Obituarists better qualified than I have written of his principled positions on political issues, his memorable assertion of his independent convictions at the State dinner for President Clinton, his courage in sending improper decisions back to the Cabinet for reconsideration. I salute K.R. Narayanan for what he did, but I write today to praise him for who he was. Decent, learned, unaffected, a gentleman through and through in a land — and a profession — where gentlemen seem a vanishing breed, K.R. Narayanan stood for an idea of India that appealed to the better angels in all of us Indians. As President he led an India whose injustices he had keenly felt, but an India which offered, through its brave but flawed experiment in political democracy, the real prospect of change through affirmative action and the ballot box. In his five years as our Rashtrapati, the man who did not change embodied the enduring values of a country that has changed profoundly. That is what we have lost with his passing, and it is a loss that touches every one of us.