Book Review
[All we experienced was the more
than year long Indian economic blockade in 1989 when King Birendra refused to
accept the draft new Treaty of Peace and Friendship that sought to give India
first right and thus total control of all our natural resources. One wonders if
Rasgotra had a hand in its formulation since he was recalled as Ambassador
during the violent demonstrations in Kathmandu when India sought to annex
Sikkim; and he was asked, by PM Indira Gandhi in 1985, to come forth with a new
Nepal policy.]
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Discussion
on "A Life in Diplomacy" a book by Maharaja Krishna Rasgotra.
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watch video here >>
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'A Life in Diplomacy' is a remarkable book
written by an author at his ripe old age of 9O and done within a span of one
year without notes or reference to dairies!
It opens with
a chapter on Nehru's rationale and philosophy behind the doctrine of
nonalignment. Largely, the chapters are structured around his career path as a
diplomat in different positions and countries, including the UN. There is a
chapter entitled 'About Myself' which touchingly describes his childhood,
adulthood and his initial career as a university teacher of English in pre and
post partitioned India for three years; before he entered the Indian
Foreign Service in 1949 at the age of 25 years with his MA in English from
Punjab University.
Yes,
it is a beautifully scripted personal and professional account of his life as a
diplomat but does not end there. He also chooses to hark on the likely future
envisioning India as a great world power and offers us a methodology to
understand its power trajectory using Platonic, Kautylian and Machiavellian
insights and his 21st century Mandala model built on bilateralism
(Appendix P. 395).
In
short, whither India in the 21st century? As per his foresight, it will be
engaging with all nations, while maintaining the closest security, political
and economic relations with USA, Japan and Russia. By implication, he sees
China as a rival in its global power play, if not an adversary or enemy. But
always favouring talks with it- be they at the official, semi official or
unofficial levels.
I
first came into contact with the author in 1973 and was struck by the beauty of
his wife, Kadambari Viswanathan (to whom he dedicates this book) and how
graceful and handsome a couple they together made.
They
were impeccably polished, cosmopolitans and outstandingly suave as a diplomatic
pair.
There
is an interesting anecdote that when he was serving in England, as they
attended the races on one occasion, rumour swirled that veritable Indian royals
were in attendance! Caused, perhaps mistakenly, by his first name, Maharaja, as
well as their charismatic personalities and public demeanour. He tells us that
while he was serving in the United States he was actually offered a career in
films by a Bollywood producer director.
Seeing
him as described above, I was completely surprised to read that he came from a
small village from Jammu; a son of a self educated middle school headmaster.
Rasgotra studied in his father’s school, seven km away from his village. He did
his High School in an establishment, owned and managed by Sunni Muslims twelve
km away, travelling by bicycle.
After
Class V, as his ancestors had roles as pundits in the Dogra Royal Court, he
also pursued Sanskrit until his BA, which he did from Hindu College, Amritsar.
The department was headed by an Oxford graduate, who influenced him greatly.
His Master’s in English he obtained from Government College, Lahore. I get the
impression that, unlike many Kashmiris who have grown up to abhor Pakistan, he
loved life in a United Punjab; accepts the reality of Partition and maintains
goodwill to Pakistan and Muslims.
He
went to becoming a college teacher of English as a young adult of 22 yrs
teaching in a girls’ college. He mentions that the “allure of teaching Keats
and Shelly to young and beautiful Punjabi damsels with romance in their big
eyes were not without risks”.
I
am surprised, too, by the fact that he wrote and published poems in Hindi:
which poetry also led to his being stared at, winked at and made faces
at—anything to get his attention--by the girls in the Girls’ College in
Sailkot. All told, the three years as an English lecturer he enjoyed the job.
His sharp eye for spotting feminine beauty is admitted once more when he writes
he was dumbstruck on first seeing in the 1950s,Vijay Laxmi Koirala, sister of
B P Koirala, married to a Pakistani Foreign Secretary. He says his
heart did the rumba.
Undoubtedly,
he is a complete Nehru admirer. He tells us, in defense of Nehru’s Tibet
policy, which is much criticized these days, that Nehru actually sought twice,
through informal channels (as India’s representative to Lhasa was an
Englishman) to get Tibet into the UN prior to the Chinese invasion in 1950; but
it got no response from the Dalai Lama and his cabinet. This covert diplomacy
was premised on the fact, insists Maharaja Krishna Rasgotra, that since 1911-
with the fall of the Manchu dynasty— Tibet was 'effectively independent’ when
it stopped to pay tribute to the Chinese Imperial Court. It was hoped that if
Tibet, on its own initiative, sought to be a member of the UN, then, member
countries of the UN would perhaps support it. But it was dashed when China
invaded Tibet in January 1950.
It
may be underscored here that when Tibet did eventually ask Nehru to sponsor it
into the UN, Rasgotra simply says that it was “ too late”; and that is why
Nehru refused to take up the matter further. It may be noted that the Nepal
India Treaty of Peace and Friendship was signed in 1950 and, surprisingly,
there was no interest to sponsor Nepal as a UN member state.
To
further back Nehru’s foreign policy, he asserts that British and US support of
Pakistan, as well as the fact that the Indian army (and Navy too), were under
the command British officers, made it impossible to have a military presence in
Poonch prior to accepting the UN Ceasefire Resolution. He goes on to suggest
that Nehru did not invoke UN’s Chapter VII since this would have led to direct
US and British military intervention sanctioned by the UN Security Council. It
is implied that India, and Pakistan’s security forces, were being guided by the
British through their commanding officers.
We
learn from him that the US was of the view that Non Alignment was immoral. The
US believed that India should, like Pakistan, be joining the US in a military
alliance against the Soviet Union. He was struck by the ignorance of the US
Department of State on South Asian affairs.
He
recollects that when the renowned Journalist Walter Lippmann asked US Secretary
of State, John Foster Dulles, “ why he was supporting Pakistan so much” ,
the answer came that he was doing so “ because Pakistan had the best fighters
in the world —the Gurkhas”!
Rasgotra
is, to repeat, a Nehruvian par excellence — going so far as to justify the
flaws in his Non Alignment policy and in his China (and Tibet) policy. What
perplexes me is this: he would call for a strong Indo-US policy using it as a
fulcrum of India’s post Cold War foreign policy and, yet, he also cautions one
to not down grade Russia’s importance to India in its effort to improve its
relations with the US. Does he advocate NA-II?
Methinks
not: he simply strategizes to keep the option to play of one against the other
as any smaller, weaker power would and judiciously should. Ironically, when
Nepal seeks a balanced relations between India and China he would object
preferring that we still stick to ’special relations’. Which is most welcome at
the people- to-people level, but definitely not at the state- to- state level.
The wisdom of all grandmas is as valid in diplomacy as in family life:
“children never keep all your eggs in one basket only”.
Nevertheless,
on hindsight, he faults Nehru on two strategic fronts. One, Nehru turned down
President Kennedy’s offer, in 1961, to help India be the first to conduct a
nuclear test. This would have meant many hats in one go, as it were, for India
implies the author — no war with China; no 1965 war with Pakistan; also, would
have been a member of Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), which it desperately
seeks, and fails, to achieve even in 2016. Two, Nehru refused to accept
nomination into UNSC and, on the contrary provided, China the seat.
How
much of an admirer of Indira Gandhi is he? He sees her as a compassionate and
courageous leader, who “spurred the industrial and intellectual revolution her
father had begun to bring India into the modern age” (P. 351). At the personal
level he says, following Indira Gandhi’s assassination, “ Life was not going to
be the same for me anymore. Fortunately the end of my career in the Indian Foreign
Service was only three months away” (P. 351).
Rasgotra
was Ambassador to Nepal during most of the Indira Gandhi’s declaration of
Emergency. I am surprised that there is no reference to the extreme hard line
adopted by India when Nepal demanded two separate treaties for transit and
trade on the grounds that they were separate matters.
India
Chief Negotiator was Dr P C Alexander (who later assumed the position of
Private Secretary to both PM Indira and PM Rajib). Ambassador Rasgotra was team
member who, himself, witnessed the attempted bullying by Alexander in the most
undiplomatic manner! And coming from a
man who, actually, served as a senior executive in UNCTAD, which
organization espouses the cause of the land locked, sea locked and least developed
nations. As lady luck would have it, when Indira lost the general elections two
separate treaties were made possible by PM Moraji Desai and Foreign Secretary
Jaga Mehta in the1978.
He
was in direct contact with the Prime Minister as it became common practice for
the PM’s Office to by pass the Minister of External Affairs— no other than PV
Narasimha Rao: who is totally ignored by the author. Posting in Nepal, as
Ambassador, was directly made by Indira Gandhi.
The
author believes that Rajiv Gandhi had a grand design of a new world order for
peace. We in Nepal, or South Asia for that matter, never felt its ripples with
Gandhi as PM and Maharaj Kumar Rasgotra as Foreign Secretary at the time of the
founding of SAARC in 1985.
All
we experienced was the more than year long Indian economic blockade in 1989
when King Birendra refused to accept the draft new Treaty of Peace and
Friendship that sought to give India first right and thus total control of all
our natural resources. One wonders if Rasgotra had a hand in its formulation
since he was recalled as Ambassador during the violent demonstrations in
Kathmandu when India sought to annex Sikkim; and he was asked, by PM Indira
Gandhi in 1985, to come forth with a new Nepal policy.
Notwithstanding,
demonstrating his virtual loyalty to the Nehru dynasty, he defends the passage
given to the CEO of Union Carbide, Warren Anderson despite the horrors of 15000
thousand deaths with indirect harm to 200000 people. Caused by chemical
poisoning and insulted by the pittance by way of a fair compensation to the
victims and their families. What is most bizarre is his implying that, as
Foreign Secretary, the order to release Warren Anderson was given by the Home
Minister, P V Narasimha Rao when he was reporting directly to the PM Rajiv
Gandhi!
Maharaja
Krishna Rasgotra served as Ambassador to Nepal from December 1973 to October
1976. Before that, he had served in Nepal as second secretary in 1954. From
Nepal as Ambassador he moved on to being India's Foreign Secretary from 1981
till 1985 under Indira and then, after her assignation, under Rajiv
Gandhi.
He
tells us that Nepal and USA are the two countries he liked most in all is
several assignments the world over. He served in the US from 1952-54. Then in
the UN mission from 1958-62. He served also as Ambassador to UK,
Netherlands, France, Morocco Tunisia.
For
his first sojourn in Nepal, Maharaja Rasgotra was hand picked by Nehru, to
proceed straight from Washington DC. One can imagine why he loved Nepal
professionally since he got his first taste of 'development diplomacy' as well
as 'cultural diplomacy’; two aspects of diplomacy far removed from traditional
diplomacy practiced in the US.
When
he came to Nepal, he was just a 30 year old charismatic bachelor who could hob
nob with King Mahendra and Queen Ratna, and other Royals, with their love for
poetry and poets and Bollywood. He was instrumental in setting of the historic
Indian Library. His responsibility over development aid led him to travel all
over Nepal by foot and horseback. He observed that the Terai was being treated
like a Nepalese colony.
In 1950 when
King Tribhuvan had taken asylum in the Indian Embassy the era of micro
management of Nepal's affairs had been ushered in. Both King Tribhuvan and Ambassador
CPN Sinha had changed Nepal’s course of history by ending the 104 year old Rana
dynasty. But Rasgotra sees nothing wrong with India engaging itself
in ‘nation building’ — and that too of a country that was founded as
an independent nation in 1869; exactly 188 years before India came into
existence!
He feels it
was necessary transiting from an autocracy to a democracy -- reforming its
military, civil administration and economy. Rasgotra grossly errs when he
writes that there was such a need arising from the "widespread armed
insurrection triggered by King Tribhuvan's voluntary exile” (P.
95). It could not have been more peaceful with a minimal loss of life on
account of the revolt amidst the Rana clan to support King Tribhuvan and forsake
their own dynastic oligarchic rule.
Rasgotra does
mention that not all in Nepal were happy with the blatant interference from
India. He says it stunned India how, with all the nation building on behalf of
Nepal, "anti India criticism was inspired and encouraged by a weak Nepal government to divert the blame for its
failure to alleged India interference and intervention". This is the same
old constant that is drilled by India’s MEA and the spoon-fed Indian press that
continues, unfortunately, even today.
Although he
got on famously with the Royal family he begrudges them for not pursuing the
path of true democracy and even coins a novel phrase, " Durand Syndrome”,
to describe Nepalese diplomacy towards India. By which he means the Royal
Palace playing China and Pakistan or any other country against India in
quest “ for its own survival and prosperity (P. 310).
The phrase
Nepal's Durand Diplomacy he inherited from the British Resident in Kathmandu
who in 1890 wrote to his Foreign Secretary
that " the settled policy of the durbar is to play of China against
us and to make use or pretended subordination to that power as a safeguard
against the spread of our influence over this country ".Rasgotra takes a
notch higher when he writes that " That Nepal durbar was actually trying
to reduce, if not eliminate, India's interests, role and influence in the
country" (P. 310).
Rasgotra
was again handpicked, but this time by Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, to be
the Ambassador to Nepal with the instructions from her that
“Nepal’s
rulers can not to be trusted. They say one thing and do the opposite. I do not
like that. They are not our friends…Be
firm in dealing with them” (P. 297).
He
says that within two to three weeks of his arrival in Nepal, he found that the
Royal regime had tilted towards China, and actively encouraged anti Indian
propaganda while blatantly violating trade treaty provisions.
He
writes that the (1971) transit facilities were generous and yet Nepal chose to
describe Nepal as an India-locked country. That it was, under the
King's direction, accepted and signed without bickering as offered by India.
On his return to India, after the end of his assignment, India Gandhi had
enquired how long this stage of affairs would last and he retorted "For
ten to fifteen years ... citing the logic of Nepal's Durand Syndrome”.
Suggesting that it is genetically built into the Royal Court of Nepal. One may
ask: is it so now that we are a secular, parliamentary republic with Prime
Minister K P Sharma Oli going well beyond the foreign policy of
Nepal’s monarchs?
How wrong
Rasgotra’s response to Indira Gandhi turned out to be. As it happened the 1971
treaty of trade and transit came up for renewal in 1975 during his very
tenure as Ambassador to Nepal. I am surprised that this period of bitter
acrimony in Nepal India bilateral relations finds no space in his book. It was
when Indira Gandhi opted for constitutional dictatorship with her declaration
of Emergency that lasted from 1975-77.
Nepal demanded
that there should be two separate treaties for transit and trade vehemently
turned down first in Kathmandu and then in New Delhi by the Commerce Secretary,
P.C. Alexander who later became the Personal Secretary of both PM Indira and PM
Rajiv Gandhi. As luck would have it, it was her defeat in the general elections
that made it possible for Nepal to have two treaties, which was made possible
by PM Moraji Desai and Foreign Secretary Jagat Mehta.
It seems
that Rasgotra was also instrumental in getting B P Koirala to return to Nepal.
It is well known that B P Koirala's activities in Bihar and UP was disliked by
Indira Gandhi and she wanted him to get back to Nepal. Especially as he was
close to George Fernandez , who Rasgotra says she intensely disliked.
He thus plays
the BP card with King Birendra to get him back when he tells his sister, Vijay
Laxmi in 1975, that B P's exile was a waste and he should directly write to
King Birendra that he wished to return as a loyal citizen to lead a peaceful
life. And that he should write several requests. It is written by him that
at a dinner in the Indian Embassy in 1976, King Birendra mentioned that he had
received two letters from B P Koirala and wondered why he wished to
return?
As Rasgotra says, India's
foreign policy goals in Nepal are stability, democracy and prosperity. He
ignores that these goals can never be met when India chooses to
blatantly patronize Nepal’s political leaders with funds and instructions
that has dearly cost politics of Nepal the vital need for democratization of
political parties from within and the development of a culture of
democracy. They remain the necessary and sufficient conditions
for a ‘true democracy’.
Such a short
sighted policy of ‘calibrated instability’ is bound to back fire as the
more educated, much travelled and more patriotic and self confident youth
of Nepal begin to see through the anti-national machinations of its
political leaders.
But it has to
be admitted (even after this third devastating economic blockade of Nepal in
2015 that sent more people into absolute poverty than the megaquake of the same
year, high resulted in a GDP growth of just 0.77%; down from the targeted 6.5%
and also below the trend growth of 4.5%) that it is, after all, PM Modi who
realizes the folly in this hackneyed Indian diplomacy when he agreed to have
two Eminent Persons’ Groups, one from each country, to jointly and severally,
review the entire gamut of our bilateral relations; and, through dialogue and
debate, come forth with a joint recommendation for change befitting the 21st
century. Will it make a difference, that is the historical question that
remains to be seen?
Reading
Maharaja Krishna Rasgotra’s survey of India’s diplomacy one gets the sense
that it will be a mountain to climb until and unless our own diplomatic
calibre and capacity is strengthened across ministerial lines right
away, to take up the onerous task of effective negotiations with
India even prior to the recommendations of the Joint GEP. This calls for
stability on the bureaucracy so that Secretaries and Joint Secretaries can
properly learn from their organizations’ memories.
I say
this because Rasgotra is critical of an Indian foreign policy that
gives highest priority to " improving relations with our neighbours”. Even
goes so far to condemn PM I K Gujral for his policy of non-reciprocity to all
neighbours as "revealing an outstanding innocence of the reality of
international relations”
(P. 376).
This shows
that he is a hardliner, if not a hawk, when it comes to dealing with
neighbours. And there are many such in the defense and foreign
policy establishments in India, including the media.
His subscribes
to the strategic importance of bilateral relations over regional and sub
regional relations. This is why he, naturally, played down the importance of SAARC
- and regionalism - for an India that aspires to be a world power and
a globalisation that is found on regional blocs. Rasgotra was Foreign
Secretary in 1985 when SAARC was inaugurated.
His
perspective of a good neighborhood policy is Machiavellian out and out,
borrowed from British Imperial rule and christened as the Nehru doctrine.
Rasgotra's motto on neighbourhood policy may be summed up thus: " Take a
firm, stable and unwavering policy”. Never mind ’neighbourhood first’.
As a first
rate diplomat, and unlike so many hardliners in the establishment, his
style of diplomacy subscribes to the principle that 'talk talk is better than no talk or war or use of force by other
means'. He believes in constant formal and informal dialogue with all
countries — Pakistan, China, Nepal or whoever.
In
his first meeting with Pakistan President Zia Ul Haq he tells us that Zia had
offered a no-war pact which was ignored by hardliners in India. He believes
that Indo-Pak relations would have changed forever with such a pact.
He
also tells us about his struggles within his own ministry to get a new
direction into India’s foreign policy when he got PM Indiria Gandhi to call on
President Nixon in 1982 despite fierce opposition of FM Rao and other pro USSR
bureaucrats.
As a final
word, it is an easily readable book, beautifully written, that all
diplomats and international relations scholars, students and, especially, our
editors, anchors and journalists would greatly benefit from. If you wish to
understand the intricacies and perplexities of foreign policy making and
diplomacy in India with all the in-house personal rivalry between prominent
actors this is the book to read and treasure.
* The author is Professor at SAIM & former Finance Minister of Nepal.
* The author is Professor at SAIM & former Finance Minister of Nepal.
