The Dour Ascetic

Prologue: Ten years ago on April 10, former prime minister of India, Morarji Desai, died at the age of 99. It is unlikely that this date will be remembered. It would not have registered in my mind too had I not met the man. Interviewing Morarjibhai, I had been

told, wasn’t the most exciting thing. He was boring and notorious for posing counter-questions to your queries.

I tried to fix up an appointment and there were the usual delays. It wasn’t arrogance; nobody around him thought that he might have anything to say, and he was really quite obsolete in political terms. Besides, his health had been failing and he wasn’t giving interviews. I was not terribly interested in his political persona; his inching towards a century and what he did within this time was what fascinated me. I decided that it was best to just land up at his house; with a smile, I also planned to dress for the man – I wore khadi.

His son ushered me into his room. I apologised for showing up unannounced and gave a long-winded explanation for my impolite act. Accustomed as Morarjibhai had been to having people barging into his private space under the ruse of ‘darbars’, he looked genuinely amused. I cannot say he was delighted to see me, but after a few minutes of our casual chat, he said, “I am ready. Ask me what you want.”

A lone crow was cawing on the sill. That image is indelibly etched in memory even today.

* * *
Morarji Desai was living in the Mahatma-created bubble called Truth. It must be one hell of a task trying to prevent it from bursting.

He has been living a lie, in the larger sense of it being a negation of regular norms. That in his shop of principles, the wares lie dust-laden and forgotten, with only the man casting a loving glance once in a while, speaks for the weather-beaten hand of Time. “What is there to recover? What is the use of looking back? Can I reconstruct anything?” he wants to know.

The purpose was to prise open his bundle of self-righteousness and to find out what makes a non-violent person stick to his guns. Why must a man, who has seen the colours of life and captured them in his mind, promote a worldview as seen through the window frame?

He had to vacate his apartment at Marine Drive after a legal battle. It’s a different house now at Nariman Point, with four generations under one roof. It does not overlook the sea. His is the room at the end of a long corridor. As you enter the flat, on the right is his great-grand children’s room with bunk beds, dinky cars, plastic toys; the kids are wearing waterproof watches with changing dials. In the living room, there is a huge pink-and-white chandelier and light blue upholstery. The incongruities make it clear that the man of the house is not running the show anymore.

It is a little difficult to sit at the edge of the bed and raise one’s voice to ask a man who might be 100 about how much he has changed. But one does manage to get confirmation of his stridently-held beliefs and an insight into the flexibility beneath the rigidity.

He still exudes the confidence of a man who believes he is at the centre of things, relevant for all times. “Nothing is outdated. Everything is according to law…god’s law,” he says.

It was according to god’s law that Vajiayaben presented Ranchhod Desai of Bulsar with a son on February 29, 1896. He was the oldest of six children and has outlived them all. The child Morarji was “afraid of everything”. His father, a teacher, was a disciplinarian, but his mother stood out as a woman of silent strength. “She did not teach me anything, but one learns from people’s lives.”

At 15, with the death of his father and the responsibility of the family on his shoulders, he began giving private tuitions. He banished the word fear from his lexicon. Another thing that got the boot was emotions. “Nobody is without emotions, but I believed in not acting according to them.” Instead, he honed his instincts and experienced simulated love through the poetry of Sarojini Naidu. Was he capable of love for its own sake and not as another truth-seeking statement or institution-sanctioned bait? “There was no question of falling in love. I was married when I was 15. These love marriages are passion marriages. And passion dies. You indulge in it, and it is over. It is not instinct. These are things we create on account of our own actions. We pay the price. But if you are human you will also rise above it.”

He did. At 30, he became a celibate. By his own admission, 56 of his 71 years with his wife were spent “without married life”. It must undoubtedly have been a part of his Gandhian obsession. Though, while the father of the nation made bold to conduct his experiments under the gaze of public adulation (as is evident from this quote: “…according to my wont, I discussed my thoughts with my co-workers. It became my conviction that procreation and the consequent care of children were inconsistent with public life”), Morarjibhai, bereft of a mass following, merely gave up one more thing he could do without. His motto, he says, was always, “Who was there to prove anything to? I had to prove to myself that I was right.”

And in this search for the self, everything else became an appendage to be discarded, brushed aside, or polished and placed on a pedestal. The idea that a woman’s greatest triumph is the dissolution of desire was considered sacrosanct. Gandhi informed his wife about his decision when he had already made up his mind to take the vow of celibacy. Morarjibhai walked the same path and did not think it necessary to discuss it with his partner. Why? “No question of asking. She did not object. Silence is consent.”

He is an extremely selfish man. And he admits to it, giving a typically self-righteous explanation: “It is only to save myself that I am one. I want to improve myself.”

During the bump-and-grind of the journey, he took a peek into human nature and discovered that what could be made perfect could also be made vicious. There was a time when he used to step on people’s toes. But once, after being particularly rude to his secretary, he swallowed false pride and called up to apologise. “I could tell him he was stupid if he had been rude to me. This one-sided thing is not right. After that, I did not repeat the mistake. I believe that I must control my mind and the mind must not control me.”

‘Myself’ and ‘control’ are the key words to understand his persona. Unlikely as it may seem for a prominent person, in his case there is no clear demarcation between public figure and private face, inner man and outer mask. If at all there has been any split, it has left jagged edges struggling to become a whole. Morarjibhai’s tragedy has been that although he has always travelled on the road to asceticism, the man sometimes won over the sage.

Instances abound: His acceptance of a change in the Constitution to facilitate his appointment as leader of the Congress Party despite his defeat in the assembly elections; the linguistic controversy due to the Samyukta Maharashtra Andolan; his aspirations for the prime minister’s chair after Jawaharlal Nehru and Lal Bahadur Shastri; his rightist syndicate (with Atulya Ghosh, S. Nijalingapa, S.K. Patil) against nationalisation; his unceremonious dismissal during the Indira Gandhi regime; his hands finally full with the premiership at the age of 81; his acceptance of the Nishaan-e-Pakistan and then the Bharat Ratna. These actions have their own stories to tell.

His son, Kanti, thinks people are uncharitable. He finds a dichotomy in the stand taken by journalists when they wonder how a man can be both a ‘symbol of Pakistan’ and a ‘jewel of India’. “My father is a secularist, and he believes that we were one (country) and, in many ways, we still are. How can they question the principles of a man of his stature?” How can we, upstarts, sit in judgment over Them whose only fruits of labour are the beads of sweat, tears and toil? They, who have never had the opportunity of broadcasting their platitudes on television – do we snigger at them only because we have swept their beliefs under the carpet?

Kanti Desai is a patient spokesman, presenting his father in what he believes is the proper light. We are supposed to ignore the small details. Like, why would someone who believes in the larger truth need a PR man? Isn’t the fixation with reputation as worldly a desire as material knick-knacks? Or is this also a divine scheme? “God does not regulate your life,” is Morarjibhai’s explanation. “God only regulates the results of your actions. You can’t do any harm to me unless I am to suffer harm. You may simply be an instrument.”

Can’t truth then be an instrument, a weapon? The RSS can say it is propounding a truth, a violent Gandhism. He replies, “The two can never stand together. Truth is absolute. It is not the RSS perception of it.”

As a minister in the then Bombay constituency, Desai had to attend to the ugly rioting that had broken out in Ahmedabad. Gandhi had advised him to “meet the flames under the sole protection of god, not that of the police or military”. He must “perish in the flames”, if need be. Says Morarjibhai today, “A man must be convinced about his ideals.” What purpose are ideals that are nursed in an ivory tower, spitting in the face of reality? “You give your own shape to reality,” he says smugly.

This statement by itself sounds egoistic. Who is an individual to shape reality? And how can he be so sure that his truth is more valid than the truths of others? But when you see the words in the Desai context, you must go down a few notches to look up at the man.

Madhu Limaye, writing about his “warm hearted and loveable friend”, had said, “Morarji’s personal integrity is unimpeachable. He trained his body and disciplined his mind and achieved an enviable inner equipose.” How easy it is for us to confuse detachment for serenity, and clockwork mechanism for perfectionism.

Is abjuring rewards the highest virtue? If Gandhi were alive, what would he have to say about awards like the Bharat Ratna? “He would not have permitted it. I, too, don’t believe in these things, but since I had accepted the Pakistani award I could not refuse this one.”

Who are we to cynically look at the recognition? Haven’t we conferred on a human being the title of Mahatma, which is also a form of reward? Isn’t Desai’s statement, “I wouldn’t like to be anything I am not”, a more honest stand and the proof of the existence of certain values?

What are those values? “Simple living, high thinking,” is his facile comprehension. Morarjibhai’s austerity is that of a man who can afford milk and honey, walnuts and almonds. He can stand steadfastly by the truth because he has nothing to lose.

His rigidity has endeared him to very few. “This rigidity is an abuse,” he asserts. “It means one is untruthful and that I am not. I will make adjustments only if truth is not compromised.” Often, this obduracy causes a problem. His insistence on introducing prohibition gave many a dry day a bad name.

Yet one cannot deny that the man has made sacrifices. He left his job of 12 years as a magistrate during British rule, resigning in his mid-30s when men are busy climbing professional ladders. He chose to follow Gandhi instead. But while Gandhi’s visage was always wreathed in smiles, Desai’s countenance is immovable – clear evidence of how adopting someone else’s values as your own is always more of an uphill task.

He missed out on relationships. As he put it, “I was never a fond father.” But he trusted his son, who feels he has protected his unworldly father. “Since I was in business, I knew how things worked. My father would have been taken advantage of. He was above these things.” Morarjibhai’s protests were often expressed with a sulk. By not plucking flowers, he was saved from the thorns.

He missed out on life. Closing himself to things that did not adhere to his principles, he probably did not get all that he deserved. That, in itself, became a virtue. Long ago, Morarji Desai must have realised that for people to see a halo around your head you have to turn your back to the sun.