Legendary director Ritwik Ghatak's film on Vladimir Lenin in 1970 hit the censorship hurdle but it finally got the go-ahead thanks to the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's trusted aide P N Haksar, who convinced her to clear the movie with an adult certificate.
This finds mention in a biography of influential and powerful civil servant Haksar by Congress' Rajya Sabha member and former Union minister Jairam Ramesh titled "Intertwined Lives".
Drawing on Haksar's extensive archives of official papers, memos, notes and letters, Ramesh presents a chronicle of the man who decisively shaped the nation's political and economic history in the 1960s and 1970s.
"The eccentric Bengali filmmaker had made a film on Lenin but it had run into controversy," writes Ramesh.
On January 6, 1971, Haksar told Gandhi about Ghatak's black-and-white film "Amar Lenin", made in the centenary year (1970) of the birth of the Russian revolutionary.
"Generations of people all over the world have seen far more in inflammatory films by Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Rossellini and others. These films, at any rate, were shown on a mass scale. And nothing very much really happened. Even if the film is certified as it is, hardly any cinema would show it on a commercial basis," he said.
"I myself saw the film and I cannot say with any sense of realism that Ritwick Ghatak's film on Lenin will bring the revolution even fraction of a second earlier," Haksar told Gandhi.
He was rather more oppressed by the poverty of Ghatak, who he said "staked up a little money with the help of some hapless financier and they are both desperately trying to sell this film to the Soviet Union".
"It would be great fun exporting Indian Lenin to the Soviet Union! I hope the Soviet society survives the depredations. It is really quite comic that so many hours of official time should have been wasted in considering the solemn question whether the film should or should not be released," Haksar said and suggested letting the film go with a 'A' certificate.
After dictating the note, Haksar realised that he may have been carried away by his liberalism and suggested to the prime minister that she may agree to having the film certified 'for adults only' subject to deletion 'only of that portion of the commentary on land grab sequence', writes Ramesh in the book, published by Simon & Schuster.
Gandhi agreed!
Educated in the sciences and trained in law, Haksar was a diplomat by profession and a communist-turned-democratic socialist by conviction. He had known Gandhi from their student days in London in the late-1930s, even though family links predated this friendship.
In May 1967, she plucked him out of his diplomatic career and appointed him secretary in the prime minister's Secretariat. This is when he emerged as her ideological beacon and moral compass, playing a pivotal role in her decisions like nationalisation of banks, abolition of privy purses and princely privileges, the Indo-Soviet Treaty, creation of Bangladesh, rapprochement with Sheikh Abdullah and the Simla and New Delhi Agreements with Pakistan.
This power and influence notwithstanding, Haksar chose to walk away from Gandhi in January 1973. She, however, persuaded him to soon return, first as her special envoy and later as deputy chairman of the Planning Commission where he left his distinctive imprint.
Exiting government once and for all in May 1977, he then continued to be associated with a number of academic institutions and became the patron for various national causes like protecting India's secular traditions, propagating of a scientific temper, strengthening the public sector and deepening technological self-reliance.
"Haksar contributed heavily to the making of Indira Gandhi, especially in the first six or seven years of her prime ministership. They formed an awesome duo: she with her charismatic appeal, he with his intellectual genius," says Ramesh.
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