Bet all ye schmucks in the boondocks think Panch Pandavas refers only to Yudhishtira, Arjuna, Bheema, Nakula and Sahadeva.
Ha ha ha.
Shows how little y’all know because there’s little evidence that any of these ‘wife-sharers‘ existed.
Here are the real Panch Pandavas of India:
* P.N.Haksar
* T.N.Kaul
* D.P. Dhar
*Â P.N.Dhar
* R.N.Kao
Now for a brief history lesson.
The time was the late 1960s. Indira Gandhi had become Prime Minister of India following Lal Bahadur Shastri’s unexpected death in Tashkent.
However, unlike her father Jawaharlal Nehru, who was an extraordinarily well-read man and whose ideas laid the foundation of modern India, there’s little evidence to show that Indira had any intellectual DNA in her body.
Early Days
Those were the early days in Indira’s tenure as Prime Minister and she faced intense threat to her political survival from the old guard of the Congress party. These old foggies were collectively referred to as the Syndicate.
The inexperienced Indira was confronted with a hard choice. She couldn’t rely on the counsel of the Syndicate whose members viewed her as a puppet but at the same she needed some wise counsel to navigate the country through the treacherous shoals of her inexperience.
So Indira developed a team of five smart advisers whose advice she could rely upon in governing an unruly nation.
In time, these advisers came to be known as the Panch Pandavas.
1. Foremost among these advisers was Purshottam Narayan Haksar, the England-educated lawyer who became Indira’s Personal Private Secretary and close adviser. In her biography of Indira Gandhi, Katherine Frank writes that “Indira trusted Haksar’s intelligence and judgement implicitly and completely. From 1967 to 1973, he was probably the most influential and powerful person in the government.” Continue reading »
Recent Comments