Mani Shankar Aiyar

Mani Shankar Aiyar (born April 10, 1941, Lahore, India [now in Pakistan]) is an Indian diplomat, politician, and government official who, after a distinguished foreign-service career, became a senior leader in the Indian National Congress (Congress Party).

Aiyar’s family migrated to India from newly formed Pakistan, following the partition of British India in 1947. His father, an accountant, died while Aiyar was still a boy. Aiyar attended the prestigious Doon School in Dehra Dun, Uttar Pradesh (now Uttarakhand), where he befriended future Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. Aiyar went on to earn two degrees in economics, one at the University of Delhi in 1961 and the second at the University of Cambridge (England) in 1963.

In 1963 Aiyar entered the Indian Foreign Service, and over the next 15 years he served at various overseas diplomatic postings, including Belgium and Iraq. In 1978, following a warm-up in relations between India and Pakistan, he was named India’s first consul general to that country, occupying the long-unused office of the deputy high commission in Karachi. He remained there until 1982, at which time he returned to New Delhi to serve for the next year as a joint secretary in the national government’s Ministry of External Affairs. The final portion of his foreign-service career (1985–89) was also spent in New Delhi, where he was assigned to the office of his friend Rajiv Gandhi during most of Gandhi’s term as prime minister.

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Aiyar decided to retire from the Foreign Service in 1989 to pursue a career in politics. A member of the Congress Party, he served as a special assistant to Gandhi, who was then president of the party, until Gandhi’s assassination in 1991. His proximity to the Gandhi family shaped much of his subsequent political career.

Aiyar first ran for elected office in 1991, when he won a seat in the Lok Sabha (lower chamber of the Indian parliament) from a constituency in Tamil Nadu state. Although he lost his next two elections to that chamber (1996 and 1998), he was reelected to it two more times (1999 and 2004). In 2004 he joined the cabinet of the newly formed Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition government, where until 2009 he was the head of the Panchayati Raj, the ministry overseeing India’s system of panchayats (self-governing village councils). During his tenure in the UPA government, Aiyar also held the portfolios for the Ministries of Petroleum and Natural Gas (2004–06), Youth Affairs and Sports (2006–08), and Development of North Eastern Region (2008–09). In 2006 he was honoured as the year’s outstanding parliamentarian by the president of India.

Aiyar lost his seat in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections and resigned from the government. In March 2010, however, he was nominated to the Rajya Sabha (upper chamber of parliament) by the president on the strength of his expertise in the field of social services and his literary accomplishments. There he served on the Standing Committee on Rural Development and on the Consultative Committee on External Affairs. He left the Rajya Sabha in 2016.

Aiyar generally was held in high regard during his diplomatic and political careers, and he maintained connections with many of the foreign leaders with whom he had interacted over the years. He was especially known as a fierce protagonist for peace between India and Pakistan through dialogue and diplomacy. As a parliamentarian, however, he sometimes provoked controversy with his blunt statements. On one occasion he compared the parliamentary leaders of the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party to animals, and on another he blamed fellow Congress compatriot P.V. Narasimha Rao for the 1992 destruction of the Babri Masjid (Mosque of Bābur) in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, during Rao’s tenure as prime minister.

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During his long years of public service, Aiyar developed a reputation for being an avid orator, a prolific newspaper and journal columnist, and an authority on South Asian politics. His books included Remembering Rajiv (1992), Knickerwallahs, Silly-Billies, and Other Curious Creatures (1995), Confessions of a Secular Fundamentalist (2004), and A Time of Transition: Rajiv Gandhi to the 21st Century (2009).