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From 1967 to 1973 Haksar, a former protégé of Krishna Menon, was Mrs Gandhi’s most trusted adviser. One of her biographers, Katherine Frank, describes him as ‘a magnetic figure’ who became ‘probably the most influential and powerful person in the government’ as well as ‘the most important civil servant in the country’. Haksar set out to turn a civil service which, at least in principle, was politically neutral into an ideologically ‘committed bureaucracy’. His was the hand that guided Mrs Gandhi through her turn to the left, the nationalization of the banks and the split in the Congress Party. It was Haksar also who was behind the transfer of control of the intelligence community to the Prime Minister’s Secretariat. His advocacy of the leftward turn in Mrs Gandhi’s policies sprang, however, from his socialist convictions rather than from manipulation by the KGB. But both he and Mrs Gandhi ‘were less fastidious than Nehru had been about interfering with the democratic system and structure of government to attain their ideological ends’. The journalist Inder Malhotra noted the growth of a ‘courtier culture’ in Indira Gandhi’s entourage: ‘The power centre in the world’s largest democracy was slowly turning into a durbar.’ (en) |
