I admired I G Patel , not just for his brilliance, but for his devotion to duty, his affability, and his sense of humour. The publication of his memoir gave me a chance to write an appreciation of him in the Telegraph of 2 December 2003.
Sir Indravadan’s last war
Although I have
known I G Patel for over half a century, I could not say I had known him well;
14 years is a huge age difference when one is young, though the distance
diminishes with age. He was a close friend of my brother Mahendra, and it was
with good reason that everyone who admired Mahendra did not think the world of
me. For Mahendra, of course, I G was a paragon – a brilliant economist who went
on to serve India with distinction in most distinguished positions. For me his
achievements were no less real, though different: although he had the brains to
have become a great economist, he chose the thankless task of serving that
capricious master, the Government of India, and still managed to keep his
integrity intact. He was head and shoulders above his contemporaries: he was a
great worthy, to use a favourite word of my Cambridge contemporaries, and high
and mighty to use a favourite phrase of his.
So I never managed to ask him: how did he, the
quintessential civil servant, gather himself up just when his bureaucratic
career had ended, when he was just about ready to retire in Baroda and stay
late in bed, and become director of London School of Economics, one of
Britain’s best? True, he had a starred first in economics from Cambridge. But
that was 36 years earlier. No one is asked to head an institution because of
how well he did in college exams. Academic brilliance is merely an entry
qualification, whose value depreciates rapidly as one ages; ultimately it is
one’s ability to lead people who are too important to bend to one’s will that
takes one to the top of great organizations. So my lazy answer was that it was
I G’s proven ability to raise millions for India from hard-hearted
international worthies that the guardians of LSE must have appreciated.
In his new book (An Encounter with Higher
Education: My Years at LSE) IG solves my puzzle. I used to know R S Bhatt
slightly; he was in various nationalized banks, and had a mien suitable to a
worthy. I should not be surprised, but he was a friend of I G’s. When I G was
director of IIM Ahmedabad, he had Bhatt invited to give a lecture on the
Institute’s annual day. The professor in charge did not ask I G to say the
usual gracious words after Bhatt’s speech. Bhatt was miffed. To pacify him, I G
took him to the back of the hall where he could fume inconspicuously. There
Bhatt told I G that he was going to suggest I G’s name for the next director of
LSE. I G told him he could do so if he wanted, but would he keep quiet. And that
unconsidered remark ended up in a perch in Aldwych.
I G obviously shares some of my wonder at his leap
from a tree of knowledge in Ahmedabad to another, distant one in London;
otherwise this book would not have been written. I have always thought administrative
jobs to be a terrible grind. I left them to more worthy people when they were
around; and a few times, when importance was thrust upon me, I always tried to
pass on the burden to others or looked for a chance to abbreviate the torture.
But I G has an altogether more virtuous bent of mind; he actually cherishes
public service. That, plus a sense of past but still pulsating excitement at
having done a difficult job well without any previous preparation explains this
book. He should have given this book the title of one of his chapters: “At the
deep end.”
I G was no doubt a dark horse. Margaret Thatcher said
to him, “Oh, you are going as principal of that school! How come LSE always has
foreigners at its head?” Xenophobia is not an exclusively British disease; it
has deep roots in India too, and is a staple of Indian politics as l’affaire
Sonia illustrates. But Mrs Thatcher’s sentiment must have been shared by other
British worthies; and it cannot have made I G’s job easier.
But what made it really difficult was Mrs Thatcher’s
policies. For in the 1980s she was wielding her axe ferociously; all British
tertiary education was the victim. Budgets were being cut; and as governments
normally do, the British government did not simply cut the grants and let universities
cope. It also had strong views on what they must do with the money it gave, and
hedged it with so many conditions. The two sore points were that the government
controlled salaries and hence made it impossible for institutions to compete
for good academics, and that it disapproved of tenure, which was an important
instrument for retaining senior staff. Cambridge and Oxford ameliorated the
impact of these prejudices by giving good teachers more time for their own
research; LSE, on the other hand, had a tradition that even professors had to
teach a first-year course. LSE continued
to give tenure. The University Grants Commission had warned it that its grant
would fall 1.5-2 per cent a year; so either staff had to be reduced or teaching
loads had to increase or both. It was calculations like these that made I G’s
directorship painful.
I G goes in some detail into his
experiences with Sir Karl Popper, famous for his The Open Society and its
Enemies. Popper was much hated by the left in my student days over 40 years
ago; he did not mellow with age, and had many enemies within LSE itself when he
retired. But he did bring prominence to philosophy in LSE. By the time I G took
over, Popper had retired. He asked to be allowed to call on I G, and they got
on very well together. Then I G proposed that LSE institute a chair in Popper’s
name. When the selection was held, however, Popper’s two favourite students
were rejected, and Nancy Cartwright, whom he somehow did not approve of, was
selected. He refused to let his name be used for the chair; under the
compromise I G worked out, she was appointed, but the chair was not named after
Popper.
Such are the stories of which good
biographies are made; and I G is a master storyteller. My only complaint is
that there are too few of them in this book. For I G, running the LSE was a
serious business; this book is shadowed by the sombreness of the British
‘eighties. I G reports in detail on what he calls the Great Debate: what and
whom tertiary education is for, and who should pay for it. He quotes at length
from his annual reports. To him, they must be testaments to battles fought and
truces made. But in a different country and at a different time, they read like
the minutiae of alien history, at any rate to someone who is not an academic
and not an LSE alumnus.
I G, for all his sense of humour, is a
conscientious man. He took his tasks seriously, and fretted at less than
perfect performance even when he knew that the results were not in his hands. I
think he has done enough of this dutifulness; now he should let down his hair,
and think of the fulfilling side of his life – his friends, his travels, his
conversations, his wit. Let those be the subject of his next book.
