Few careers offer the rich diversity of personal and professional experiences as does a life in diplomacy, and if one has the privilege of representing a country as unique as India, the opportunities for making a contribution to issues of war, peace and development, as well as for introspection, self-education and original insights are very special indeed. Unfortunately, the stories of former Indian diplomats are often never told. While in service, the official demands on a diplomat’s time are an undoubted deterrent; the Official Secrets Act (whether in or out of service) even more so. Indeed, for a retired Indian diplomat attempting to write a memoir, the element of self-flagellation involved in recollecting events of long ago only gets aggravated by the anxiety of not violating, either in spirit or deed, the OSA!
Thus, when HarperCollins approached me to edit a volume of autobiographical recollections of former ambassadors, I accepted with some trepidation. That the distinguished colleagues I approached for a contribution immediately accepted was a matter of agreeable surprise: I can only take it as a mark of their personal consideration for me, as well as evidence of the shared conviction in the ambassadorial community that the effort might be worth making, because there is indeed a story to be told.
All the contributors are retired diplomats; some are in their late seventies, eighties or even nineties – so their recollections, insights, reflections (and prognostications for the future) constitute a valuable addition to the sparse reservoir of ‘oral histories’ available with us, presented possibly for the first time within the covers of a book in this way.
The range of subjects covered is wide. Each writer was left free to decide which facet of a particular experience or event or professional challenge he wished to dwell on, and the style and approach to be adopted. The common thread connecting the very different styles is an unstated willingness on the part of contributors to open the doors of the ‘Ambassadors’ Club’ to a wider audience which includes non-specialists, to share some of the background, atmospherics, off-the-record interactions, personal details, assessments and conclusions which are rarely discussed in public. The reader is therefore likely to find quite a few ‘revelations’ embedded in the narratives, including on some sensitive issues on which diplomatic lips are usually firmly sealed. Some contributions might even resemble a piece of abstract art, to be interpreted one way or the other according to the reader’s inclination.
The contributions have not been grouped together under various heads, for this would have been difficult apart from being somewhat artificial. But if one were to attempt to give the reader some idea of what could be expected from this pot pourri of ambassadorial reminiscences, and the luxury of picking and choosing the piece to read, according to preference or mood, here is a rough and ready guide:
‘Transitions’ would sum up the recollections on Bhutan (A.N. Ram), Sikkim (B.S. Das) and Nepal (Krishna V. Rajan). India inherited from Britain and duly adjusted according to its evolving security perceptions, different treaty relationships with these three Himalayan ‘states’ when it became independent. Under new treaties, Sikkim was a ‘protectorate’, Bhutan enjoyed notional sovereignty and Nepal’s independence was made subject to certain limits. Preoccupation about China, which imparted to all three states their geopolitical importance for British India, only increased after 1947, but Nehru chose to deal with them in his own way, combining British Indian colonial strategic thinking with his progressive and democratic preferences. Calibration was the name of the game. Thus, ideas of the complete merger of Sikkim and Nepal with India were discouraged by Nehru even when they were feasible. Successive governments in New Delhi adjusted their policies, depending on the level of local sensitivity to its concerns about China shown by the regime of the day in Gangtok, Thimphu or Kathmandu – and also the degree of warmth or otherwise in relations between New Delhi and Beijing. Eventually, the linkages with India have followed different trajectories, and thereby hang some fascinating tales.
Ram had the distinction of several assignments in Bhutan, including one as part of the Bhutanese Permanent Mission in New York. He gives a fascinating (and necessary) reminder of how the shared vision of Jawaharlal Nehru and King Jigme Dorji Wangchuck, developed after an arduous and lengthy journey on horseback and foot by Nehru to Bhutan in 1958, resulted in the eventual ending of Bhutan’s traditional isolation and the emergence of a mature, friendly, fast-developing yet culturally very traditional neighbour in India’s sensitive northern periphery.
Das, a senior IPS (Indian Police Service) officer-turneddiplomat because of his own inclination, was utilized in the latter capacity by the Indian government for nearly fourteen years. He was given the unusual responsibility of being the chief executive of Sikkim. The mandate given to him will probably be forever buried several fathoms deep. But the sun did set (with India’s encouragement) on its ruler, the Chogyal, and Sikkim proceeded to embrace democracy and eventually opted to become an Indian province. I happened at the time to be the special assistant to Foreign Secretary Kewal Singh (described by Das as ‘the principal actor’), and can testify to the fact that the entire exercise was carried out with finesse and confidentiality in a manner which must be quite rare in the history of post-Independence India. A handful of officials (Kewal Singh, Mrs Gandhi’s principal secretary P.N. Dhar, the political officer in Gangtok K.S. Bajpai and later Gurbachan Singh) worked as a superb team and under the leadership of a clear-sighted prime minister who genuinely believed that the national interest of India coincided with the popular aspirations of the vast majority of the people of Sikkim, and approved and oversaw the implementation of policies which, in retrospect, can only be described as ‘successful’ – from the point of view of the people of Sikkim as well as of India.
The chapter on Nepal describes India’s relative success in defining and maintaining a certain direction in Indian policies, despite changes of government in New Delhi and Kathmandu, against the backdrop of a monarchy reluctant to adjust to a purely constitutional role, a democracy struggling to consolidate, stabilize and deliver, and an incipient Maoist insurgency committed to challenging state authority and ending Nepal’s special relationship with India. Just when it seemed that the two countries had developed a certain maturity in their search for a stable and mutually beneficial relationship, political turbulence took over, with the spectacular rise of Maoist power, the hijacking of an Indian Airlines flight to Delhi, the royal massacre and a palace coup against democracy. Could the subsequent unfolding tragedy in Nepal have been better anticipated by India and even prevented when there was still time? That is the troubling and unanswered subtext of the Nepal memoir.
‘Grand Stand Plus’ would probably well define the contributions by A. Madhavan, Prabhakar Menon, K.N. Bakshi and A.N.D. Haksar. Madhavan’s is a reflective flashback on one of the defining events of our time, the fall of the Berlin Wall. The backdrop to the tumultuous and unexpected people’s movement which led to the rapid reunification of Germany, and the implications of the latter for India and the world, are captured with imagination as well as objectivity. It was a time of turbulence and change: Gorbachev in the Soviet Union urging glasnost and perestroika; Tiananmen in China; the Wall as a symbol of communist dictatorship as well as a challenge to aspirations for unity and freedom; German reunification, elections, eventually the unravelling of the Soviet Union itself.
India’s efforts to retain the priority attention of united Germany were in some measure successful due to Madhavan’s efforts and the support he received from Rajiv Gandhi, President Venkataraman and Narasimha Rao; but the farsighted vision of successive Indian leaders going back to Nehru, who had asserted that the Wall was a historical absurdity and a symbol of united rather than permanently partitioned Germany, always underpinned the robust bilateral ties. (Madhavan reminds us that Western leaders, including Margaret Thatcher, were opposed to reunification when it looked imminent, with Thatcher even writing to Gorbachev urging Soviet intervention to prevent this ‘disaster’ from happening).
Menon’s analysis of the foreign policy of one of India’s enigmatic, successful and still underestimated prime ministers, P.V. Narasimha Rao, brings his foreign policy vision to life through a rare and hitherto silent insider’s account. It makes a compelling case for a better understanding of the achievements and services to India of Rao – a prime minister once caricatured as a ‘boneless wonder’ by a former foreign secretary for his alleged ineffectiveness as a member of Rajiv Gandhi’s cabinet, even characterized recently (by an eminent Indian journalist) as ‘India’s most ruthless prime minister’. Menon is clear that Rao ‘brought to bear on India’s foreign policy . . . a density of thought rarely seen in the conduct of India’s foreign relations’ and that ‘his novel approaches . . . made him a pathfinder through some of the less charted terrain of India’s foreign policy’.
Bakshi, a long-time Pakistan expert since his days even as a young member of the service, shares some remarkable insights on perennial India-Pakistan differences in his riveting memoir of the events leading to the Shimla Agreement. This was the agreement signed between Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Indira Gandhi after Pakistan’s military defeat at India’s hands, which was supposed to herald a new era of peace, and settlement of differences exclusively through bilateral dialogue. For Bakshi and his fellow professionals at the operational level, the agreement was a disappointment, representing a victory of the idealism of seniors and political masters over hard-headed objective understanding of the ‘psyche’ and indeed, the raison d’être of the Pakistani core establishment, which is to resist a comprehensive and irreversible state of normality in India-Pakistan relations. The fact that in the following decades, other Indian leaders have also tried to go the extra mile with Pakistan because of the same idealistic expectation, and failed because the fundamental strategic objectives of the ‘core’ in Islamabad remain unchanged, is a sad reflection of India’s inability or unwillingness to adjust to ground realities in its neighbourhood.
Haksar gives a brief, elegant and reflective account of the impromptu India-Pakistan summit meeting between Zia-ul-Haq and Morarji Desai during the funeral ceremony of Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta, the unexpected degree of instant personal rapport struck between these highly dissimilar leaders, gently encouraging speculation as to why India might have been silent when Bhutto was executed by Zia the following year, and why Morarji has the distinction of being the sole recipient so far of both the Pakistani as well as Indian highest civilian honours.
A third category of contributions could be termed ‘Responses and Strategies’. Former foreign secretary and long-time strategic thinker (and China expert) Jagat S. Mehta, now in his nineties, reflects on the uneven course of India-China ties and prospects for the future, while recalling his own hands-on experiences in dealing with China, and incidentally questioning Nehru and his advisers in their judgements of Chinese intentions in the late 1950s/early ’60s. Could the India-China war have been avoided if Nehru had been a better judge, or better advised, and his devoted and overawed bureaucrats were not convinced that ‘Panditji knows best’? He is clear that India, warts and all, will ultimately triumph over China because of the former’s ‘global’ temperament as contrasted with China’s cultural conditioning to be chauvinistic and isolationist.
T.P. Sreenivasan describes his unusual experiences as India’s man in Fiji after a coup aimed at marginalizing the Indian-origin majority in Fiji’s affairs. Here is a good example of innovative diplomacy in a difficult and unstable situation. In his own words: ‘Contentious elections, change of governments, military coups, trade sanctions and expulsions are par for the course in diplomacy, but to face all these at one post and that too in a tropical paradise is extraordinary.’
L.L. Mehrotra arrived in Sri Lanka at a particularly difficult moment in 1989. India’s high-risk response to President Jayewardane’s request for troops to fight the LTTE had run into deep trouble under the new executive president, Premadasa, who was determined to secure the immediate withdrawal of the troops while following a policy of appeasement vis-à-vis the LTTE and the JVP in an environment of brutal large-scale assassinations perpetrated by both organizations. How the daunting challenges to Indian diplomacy in a tense, complicated and tragic situation were tackled is graphically documented by Mehrotra. Was Rajiv Gandhi’s risky military intervention in Sri Lanka, in a violent and unstable internal situation (caused in part by India’s ill-advised policy under an earlier government’s watch to harbour and support the LTTE’s activities from Indian soil), condemned to end in any other outcome than a humiliating withdrawal?
Not every Indian diplomat makes it to a multilateral organization. Multilateral experience is considered to be specialized, and it is sought after for more reasons than one. But it can be a rewarding as well as challenging – sometimes frustrating – experience. Chandrashekhar Dasgupta, one of the few acknowledged specialists who has been intimately involved with the tortuous route of international negotiations on climate change from the beginning, shares his recollections of the first breakthroughs achieved by India and the developing countries in their efforts to get the developed world to accept a fair share of responsibility in managing the threat to the planet on this score. Kant K. Bhargava, a former secretary-general of SAARC and one who has worked with steadfast zeal but not always with too much encouragement from his own government to making the regional grouping an effective and beneficial one, recounts his experiences, including post-retirement, over several decades (part of the training was to convince an EU interlocutor that papadams were different from spaghetti and hence entitled to duty-free treatment). And Prakash Shah reveals the disappointing episode of his appointment as the UN special envoy to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, again without much support from his home government, and in the face of the determination of the US to ensure that Saddam Hussein should be toppled before sanctions were ended through a successful directly negotiated understanding between the UN and Iraq.
Three first-person accounts of the 1970s: of experiences in Kreisky’s Austria, in Allende’s Chile and in Idi Amin’s Uganda, complete this fascinating mosaic. K.L. Dalal describes his encounters with two women who were in the shadow of great Indian leaders, but melted away into anonymity after the leaders themselves died. Miraben was Mahatma Gandhi’s devoted disciple who abruptly left India and chose to retire in ashram-like austerity in a remote Austrian village; Emilie Schenkl, the widow of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose (who died in mysterious circumstances), cut off her Indian connections because of the Bose family’s reluctance to recognize her as his spouse. Dalal also contributed to removing the misunderstandings which had cropped up after the declaration of Emergency between Mrs Indira Gandhi and a close traditional friend of the Nehru family, Chancellor Kreisky. G.J. Malik, a veteran diplomat now in his nineties recollects the peculiar challenges confronting India’s ambassador in Allende’s Chile, including in the aftermath of the bloody coup that overthrew the president, in an era of deep suspicion about the CIA’s sinister activities against non-friendly regimes in developing countries. And Niranjan Desai paints in vivid colours Idi Amin’s Uganda, where he was sent as a junior officer from the ministry following the bizarre expulsion of the Asian community. Born and brought up in Tanzania, where he spent the first seventeen years of his life, Desai’s account of his personal travails as he tried to befriend the Indian community in its hour of need, ending with his being declared persona non grata, is of interest, not least because of the contrast with the aggressive pro-diaspora stance taken by the Government of India decades later in the aftermath of the Fiji coup, as described by Sreenivasan.
There has been a sea change that has occurred in the way India now treats its diaspora, but the basic dilemmas remain: how should India react if a foreign government mistreats people of Indian origin who are not Indian citizens (as in Malaysia)? And what is to be done if a foreign government is unable to provide security for Indian nationals against large-scale racist attacks (as in Australia)? As India assumes a high profile in global affairs and ‘Indians’ become more successful and prosperous, the dilemmas may only become more acute.
One hopes that this collection will be an eye-opener to anyone who thinks that the Indian Foreign Service is all about cocktail parties and luxurious living conditions. What comes across is the capacity of an Indian diplomat, by virtue of training and experience, for survival (physical and professional) in adverse situations, for objective assessment and analysis, for reflection and introspection, improvement and improvisation, understanding of and contribution to historical events of which he or she happens to be part – often in anonymity, and always with professional discretion and dedication.
KRISHNA V. RAJAN