V.K. Krishna Menon always made people angry. When he left southern India in 1924, coming to England under the auspices of his mentor Annie Besant's Theosophist and Indian Home Rule movement, Menon disappointed his father by not becoming a lawyer and returning to Kerala to take over the family practice. Moreover, he disappointed Besant by not remaining true to the Theosophist or Home Rule faith, and instead charted his own path with various intellectuals on the British left, especially Harold Laski. He would eventually frustrate even those new leftist friends: first by his conservatism and gradualism, and then by his radicalism, adopted in the mid-1930s. His personal prickliness did not help: as even his allies noted, he created “round himself an atmosphere of suspicion and intrigue.” Alan Lawson, who photographed Krishna Menon along with Jawaharlal Nehru on a visit to the front in Spain in 1938, had a more generous explanation. Owing to his vegetarianism, he could rarely find anything to eat. Whatever the reason, the same year Indira Nehru (later Gandhi) identified the problem: “[t]here are so many groups and parties here, and Krishna is not popular with any of them.”

Perhaps his unique and ironic gift was an ability to alienate everyone equally, placing him on an equal footing with everybody. If he irritated the left, he positively frightened the right, and his mid-1930s embrace of the far left, including the British Section of the League Against Imperialism and the Communist Party of Great Britain, made him a bete noire for MI5, and eventually the US intelligence services. Even at the height of his powers after Indian independence, when he had the ear of Jawaharlal Nehru, everyone around India's leader detested or at best tolerated Krishna Menon, both for his imperious manner and his political intransigence. The White House and the US Embassy in New Delhi were not alone in rejoicing when Krishna Menon took the fall for the Indian army's disastrous performance against China in 1962.

This essay will argue that Krishna Menon's troublesomeness, both for his allies on the left and his enemies on the right, originated in the mid-1930s, when he followed Nehru's lead to embrace a “united front” approach to anticolonialism.