Mani Shankar Aiyar is highly educated, boasting of degrees from some of the best known Indian and foreign universities. Yet, he never misses an opportunity to undermine, nay, insult his higher education by mouthing some of the most astounding things. Invariably, he makes news not for his erudite remarks but for his inanities. For someone who was nominated to the Rajya Sabha in the bespoke ‘intellectual’ category, whether it is inside or outside Parliament, Aiyar always seems to hit headlines for all the wrong reasons. A former member of the elite Indian Foreign Service, Aiyar left it to exploit the more profitable profession of politics when his Doon School contemporary Rajiv Gandhi was wheeled out as the next best hope of the nation following the death of the heir apparent, Sanjay Gandhi. Aiyar has never since looked back. Even though he can be reckless enough to chide anyone and everyone even in the Congress Party, his survival instinct ensures that he has nothing but high praise for the Gandhis. You will not hear a word edgeways critical of the mother-and-son duo. Because he lacks a constituency to call his own anywhere in the country, Aiyar feels obliged to measure his words before he comments on the Gandhis. Clearly, the good life as a politician with all its usual attendant gains would have been beyond his dreams had he stayed on in the diplomatic service. The point.
If he can be careful in not offending the Gandhis, if he can always mince words even when the world blames the Gandhis for monumental leadership failures, why cannot he hold his wild tongue when it comes to other? (Though his foul remarks about the Opposition figures get wide currency, he is equally harsh on senior Congress colleagues in not-so-private conversations. His description of, say, a P. Chidambaram or a Manmohan Singh is unprintable.) Now, whether it is by design or by conviction, he has always had a soft spot for Pakistan. He has assiduously cultivated top Pakistani connections and counts quite a few top-notch Pakistani diplomats as his personal friends. It helped that he was once posted in the Indian consular office in Karachi. All this would be fine were he not to undermine the Indian policy on Pakistan while being on the Pakistani soil. Even if the urge to curry favour with the hosts could be irresistible, the intellectual in Aiyar should have dissuaded him from giving free rein to his ingrained pro-Pakistani feelings. After all, Aiyar does not speak in his private capacity as a well-fed and well-cosseted guest of his enormously lavish and obliging Pakistani hosts. No. He wears the more important hat as a foremost spokesperson of the main Opposition party who enjoys the confidence of its controlling leadership. For him to say on a Pakistani television channel, that for the Indo-Pak relations to progress “the foremost thing to do is to remove Modi,” was sheer arrogance. It showed his anti-democratic instincts. It yet again bared his homicidal hatred of the Prime Minister.
Not long ago he had publicly intoned that a chaiwalla will never become prime minister, though he was free to sell chai outside the AICC office. Indian voters gave a fitting reply to the arrogant and elitist Aiyar in May last year. Now, in his remarks on Pak TV he made the advance in the Indo-Pak ties conditional on the return of the Congress to power. Why would he appeal to the Pakistani audiences to bring the Congress back to power when that can be done only by the Indian voters? Or was he suggesting that Indian Muslims who had veered away from being the captive vote- bank of the party could be nudged to return if the entrenched powers in Pakistan elected to help? Mark his words.: Bring us (Congress) back to power and remove him (Modi). Why would a Congress leader tell Pakistanis to bring Congress back to power unless he believed that it could help swing the Muslim vote towards the party? Aiyar was equally offensive trying to link the Paris attacks to the on-going war in Syria or to the poor socio-economic conditions of Muslims in Europe. Implicitly justifying the killings of 130 innocent people in Paris last Friday, Aiyar gratuitously advised the West to stop the ‘anti-Islam phobia’ to prevent such attacks. On the Paris attacks there seemed to be little difference between Aiyar and Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Muslim vote-trapper, Azam Khan. Therefore, aren’t all those higher education degrees wasted on someone like Aiyar?
