A generous gesture on the Rhodes front

THE 1953 batch of the Indian Police Service (IPS), to which I belong, is proud to announce that the officer who topped the batch, Raghavachari Govindarajan, will have his name etched in the records of Oxford University’s Rhodes Scholarships Trust, along with former President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. The ex-President’s great-granddaughter, Soumya, and her husband, Govindarajan’s son Mukund Rajan, have together contributed a tidy sum of money to Oxford University for instituting the sixth Rhodes scholarship for Indian students.

Ex-President Radhakrishnan’s great-granddaughter and former IPS officer Govindarajan’s son have contributed a tidy sum of money to Oxford University.

The scholar, to be chosen in 2025, will join Oxford in 2026. Menaka Guruswamy, a senior advocate in the Supreme Court who is known for fighting people’s causes pro bono, is the Chairperson of the Indian Chapter of Oxford’s Rhodes Scholarships Trust.

Mukund was a Rhodes scholar himself. He was enrolled at Oxford at the same time as Soumya was studying there on another scholarship. They met on the Oxford campus and later married. He joined the Tata Administrative Service and quickly made his mark. Ratan Tata chose him as his principal aide in the chairman’s office. A few years after Ratan retired, Mukund left the Tatas and started his own consultancy firm, ECube Investment Advisors Private Limited.

When Mukund was Ratan’s principal aide, I touched base with him. Later, we met frequently. When I first met Soumya, she was employed in a foreign bank. Later, she set up her own consultancy firm, Wakefield Advisors, which is not only a great success but also helps out in social and charitable causes. In 2021, she figured in Forbes India’s list of most powerful women.

Had Govindarajan refrained from joining the IPS in 1953, I guess he would have topped the subsequent year’s IAS examination and joined the 1954 IAS batch. In 1952, when he and I took the exam, the candidates who had not attained the age of 21 were ineligible for the IAS. Candidates were allowed to compete for the IPS at the age of 20. Both Govindarajan and the No 2 in my batch, Anand Kumar Verma, were 20 when they were selected.

Govindarajan retired as chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, a post that has been subsumed in the office of the National Security Adviser. He had donned the police uniform only for the first two years of his service, of which one was spent under training at Mount Abu along with 36 other probationers. His elder son, Raghuram Rajan, served as the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India.

The sixth Rhodes Scholarship for Indian students is sponsored by the Radhakrishnan and Rajan families. It will be administered by the Indian Chapter of the Rhodes Trust. Some additional funding required to assure perpetuity was provided by an American Rhodes scholar and his wife, as well as by Oxford University itself.

Bill Clinton was a Rhodes scholar before he was elected US President. Atishi, recently sworn in as the Chief Minister of Delhi, and Peter Lynn Sinai, belonging to my Goan Christian community, were also Rhodes scholars. Sinai stood first in the UPSC civil services examination of 1957 and was allotted the Foreign Service. Isabel Colaco, who stayed in the flat next door to mine in Mumbai and belonged to my community, also studied at Oxford on a scholarship from the university, like Soumya Rajan.

In 1958, five years after Govindarajan and I joined the IPS as probationers at the Central Police Training College at Mount Abu (Rajasthan), a future poet joined the 11th regular recruitment batch. He was Keki Daruwalla, hailing from the tiny but remarkable Parsi community. Keki’s family migrated to India from Lahore. He was allotted the Uttar Pradesh cadre but, like Govindarajan, was seconded to the Intelligence Bureau (IB) under the Earmarking Scheme.

The scheme drew upon the most brainy ones in each IPS batch and earmarked them for the IB. They would form the core of the analysts required to sift the grain from the chaff that found its way to the IB every day. Besides reports from men in the field, drawn largely from the subordinate ranks, there were newspaper clippings and material gleaned from contacts and informers that needed to be digested and screened before the Director briefed the Prime Minister, which he did every day.

R&AW (Research and Analysis Wing) of the intelligence agency was segregated from the IB in 1962 and tasked with external intelligence alone. Both Govindarajan and Keki Daruwalla were assigned duties in R&AW when it was formed. From my batch of 37 officers, four were selected for the Earmarking Scheme. Govindarajan and Anand Verma were first detailed to the IB and later to R&AW. Hari Anand Barari and Ram Kishan Khandelwal stayed on in the IB. Barari became the bureau Director and, on retirement, was appointed Governor of Haryana.

Keki’s death was widely mourned by poets, especially those who use the English language as their medium of communication. Two eulogies published in the print media moved me literally to tears. Those pieces were not written by his colleagues in the IPS, but by individuals devoted to culture and literature. The IPS fraternity also mourned his death. He brought glory to the service through his poetry. Excellence in intelligence work is, through sheer necessity, kept under wraps.

What moved me was that an IPS officer, serving the country in an anonymous capacity, came to the notice of the public because of his excellence in another field.