A True Visionary
The story of C D Deshmukh, distinguished civil servant, a politician by accident, the first governor of the RBI in pre-Independence India, is a story of a man who, endowed with all that is necessary to acquire greatness, just missed it. As a district officer, he wrote some of the most original reports on revenue settlements; as a governor of the Reserve Bank, his annual speeches addressed to the board of directors were a model of penetrating economic analysis which would have done honour to any economist of original thought; he had a prophetic vision; he had the making of a literary figure being steeped in classical Sanskrit and English literature.
His love for his country and its ancient civilisation were seen in his actions and words. He was sounded both by the British and the US governments whether he would allow himself to be nominated as a managing director of IMF in 1956, but he turned it down as he believed that he had much to do in his own country. The same Deshmukh could write an extraordinarily trite and vain autobiography, cataloguing his achievements with the enthusiasm of a school boy. He betrayed lack of sense of proportion, dignity and decorum in expatiating on trifles of his life unlike many of his own service such as Malcolm Darling, Penderal Moon and Ashok Mitra, who could write their classic memoirs, encapitulating with brilliant insights the social, political and the intellectual history of their times. He justified his Quixotic quest for the presidentship of India on the ground that being in that office would help his wife, Durgabai, to undertake social work. His body language at the time he announced his engagement and the
exuberance and extravagance in his expression, while writing about his wife were unbecoming for a man of his stature, erudition and age.
One may well ask why such a gifted man could not scale the height of greatness. One plausible explanation may be that his marriage to Durgabai at late age broke the carapace he so assiduously built around him during his youth. Being intellectually gifted and a member of the elite service was enough for him to be married to a woman of accomplishments and social graces. But an indiscretion that he committed by marrying an intellectually inferior daughter of a landlady might have haunted him all his life. He stored up his disappointments by maintaining a distance from his own society and people. When he met Durgabai, a lady of distinction and some one to reckon with in her own right, he totally surrendered. He became loony and was not the same Deshmukh he was before.
What a pity that his enormous talents were laid to waste! Note for instance, his imaginative expose of the different types of people in change management. He envisaged a dynamic partnership of politicians, administrators, technicians, statisticians and economists as involving a voluntary assumption of additional responsibilities as well as self-imposed discipline regarding non-interference. It is in a way a supreme panchajana practicing panchashila within a country (p.139).
His perceptive mind and intellectual perspicacity are manifest in his strictures on the weaknesses of the Indian society, which he identified as a law and order situation, the control of growth of population, and conservation of land surfaces. These are dealt with, in his view, in a lackadaisical manner and with infermity of purpose because the revelation of the maladies calls for patient and objective study, for which in the hurly-burly of politics there is no time or even honest inclination (p.158).
He castigated his perpetually garrulous countrymen and rightly that Unlike China we seem to have no capacity for mounting movements as distinguished from exhortative slogans, occasional brush of enthusiasm and ephemeral campaigns