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Pakistan to Russia, a man trusted by Vajpayee & Manmohan Singh — remembering Satinder K Lambah

One of India’s most loved diplomats, Lambah passed away after a long battle with cancer Thursday. He'll be remembered for helping nearly pull off a pathbreaking agreement with Pakistan on Kashmir.

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New Delhi: Satinder K. Lambah, one of India’s most loved diplomats, who once had the trusted ear of prime ministers Atal Bihari Vajpayee of the BJP, as well as Manmohan Singh of the Congress party, passed away after a long battle with cancer Thursday. He was 81.

As the PM’s special envoy to Pakistan between 2005 and 2007, Lambah will be remembered for helping nearly pull off a pathbreaking agreement on Kashmir that would have been signed between Manmohan Singh and then Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf, if Singh had stuck to the original plan and visited Pakistan in August 2006.

But fate intervened. India first asked the visit to be postponed because elections were to be held in Uttar Pradesh, then Musharraf got busy with some foreign tours. By March 2007, Musharraf wanted to try one last time, according to then Pakistan foreign minister Khurshid Kasuri, but he was soon ousted by the lawyers movement that started in Pakistan that same month.

Born in Peshawar in July 1941, Lambah believed till the end that both India and Pakistan needed closure from the trauma of Partition, and learn to live like normal neighbours.

As high commissioner in Islamabad between 1992 and 1995, Lambah counted among his friends both Nawaz Sharif, then prime minister (now in self-imposed exile in London), and earlier, one of Pakistan’s best known calligraphers and painters, Sadequain Ahmed Naqvi.

Sharif invited him for lunch the day after he was sworn in as PM, Benazir Bhutto — who succeeded Sharif — gave Lambah a farewell dinner.

Sadequain and Lambah’s family often dropped into each other’s homes. In fact, Sadequain even painted a portrait of Lambah’s wife, Nina, that hangs in pride of place in their Delhi home.

“Sati worked so hard in the back-channel with (then national security advisor) Tariq Aziz,” Kasuri told ThePrint over the phone from Lahore, referring to Lambah by his nickname, adding, “We stitched together a 12-point framework agreement that had the potential of settling the Kashmir problem. That led to both of us meeting Kashmiri leaders of all hues inside India, Pakistan and third countries,” Kasuri said.

The framework agreement on Kashmir, Kasuri added, was premised on the idea of autonomy that Jawaharlal Nehru and Sheikh Abdullah had once envisaged for Kashmir. It contained the idea of a “joint mechanism”, with elected Kashmiri representatives from both sides resolving connectivity bottlenecks, managing watersheds and environmental issues.

Troop reductions in cities and towns were envisaged. Elections on both sides would be monitored by international observers.

“Both of us wanted closure on Kashmir. How long can we fight over it, we asked. And then the question, ‘What is Jammu & Kashmir’ turned out to be a difficult one, but ultimately we resolved it. We took the defence concerns of both Pakistan and India, in Gilgit-Baltistan and Ladakh, into account,” Kasuri said.


Also readThe ‘I’ factor in Pakistan’s political turmoil – India


Engaging with the world

Lambah spoke a variety of languages, including English, Hindi, Punjabi, a smattering of Russian and Hindko — the last, widely spoken in Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab provinces.

It was this familiarity with that part of the world that persuaded Vajpayee to appoint him special envoy in November 2001, soon after the US had bombed Afghanistan and thrown out the Taliban.

So on 21 November, 2001, Lambah led a small team of diplomats and doctors carrying five tonnes of medicines, into Kabul to reopen India’s embassy that had been shut for over a decade — even before the Taliban came to power in 1991.

The doctors got to work at the Indira Gandhi hospital for children in the Afghan capital, Gautam Mukhopadhay took charge at the mission.

One month later, Lambah was asked by then foreign minister Jaswant Singh to represent India at the Bonn Conference, where the fate of Afghanistan was being decided. India was hardly the flavor of the month in Bonn, and not just because Pakistan was being wooed by western powers and India held few cards.

“Sati Lambah didn’t even have a room in Hotel Petersburg where the conference was held, but he got in,” remembered a diplomat speaking on the condition of anonymity, referring to the fact that India was pretty much out in the cold. But Lambah wasn’t going to give up.

“Lambah soon established a relationship of mutual respect with James Dobbins, then US special representative on Afghanistan. Dobbins respected him because he knew Sati knew what he was talking about. There was no bombast, just plain and simple information,” the diplomat said.

According to Ronen Sen, with whom Lambah switched places in Moscow in 1998, Lambah had a “deep understanding of people, he was a very keen observer not just of the niceties of diplomacy, but of histories of nations”.

So when Jaswant Singh went to Moscow in mid-1999, Lambah set up a meeting with Vladimir Putin, then Russia’s national security advisor. Putin would go on to become prime minister and then president, taking over from Boris Yeltsin.

If Sen is widely acknowledged as the man who revived the India-Russia relationship from the depths to which it had sunk in the early 1990s (a lowlight of which was the 1993 cancellation of the ISRO-Glavkosmos deal under pressure from Bill Clinton’s America), by convincing a reluctant New Delhi to pay in advance for the Sukhoi MKI fighter jet, which helped keep the Russian aeronautical industry going and prevented their chosen scientists from being poached by the US, China, Israel — for which the Russians remain “deeply grateful”, according to a second anonymous observer — then Satinder Lambah must be recognized as having stabilised the tie.

Lambah pushed for the signature of a “strategic partnership” between the two countries when the elites in Delhi and Moscow were hardly engaged with each other — each was looking elsewhere, mostly at the US. But Lambah’s early association with Putin not just eased India’s understanding of the transition in the Kremlin, it also paved the way for Putin’s visit to India in October, 2000 to sign the aforesaid “strategic partnership”.

Lambah went further. He convinced New Delhi that it was the right time to invest in the Sakhalin oil fields in eastern Russia. At $1 billion, it was India’s largest foreign investment at the time — that investment has paid off, many many times over, over the last 22 years.

“Sati’s Russia stint was very substantial,” Sen told ThePrint. “He helped India engage with Yeltsin, then Yevgeny Primakov and then Putin… if I had a question about anything, didn’t matter whether I was in PMO during the Rajiv Gandhi years or later, I would check with him.”

Seven years later, in 2008, after he was retired, Lambah would strike again for India, this time in his capacity as the head of the committee that dealt with the US, with the Aspen India think-tank. Over the next five years or so, Lambah would head a Track Two dialogue that smoothened the prickliness on both sides — from the 123 Indo-US nuclear agreement to Afghanistan and Pakistan, across the transition from George Bush’s America to Barack Obama.

Critically, the Track Two dialogue fed into Track One, the government-to-government conversation. While Bush had pushed the nuclear deal, with a little bit of help from Manmohan Singh and Ronen Sen, Lambah persuaded the Democrats in the Obama administration to see that India was a benign power whose size, population and democratic credentials should only weigh in favour of separating civilian nuclear power plants from military ones.

By the time Obama came into office, he had agreed to forget the “killer amendments” on the Indo-US nuclear deal that he had proposed when he was in the Opposition.

By this time, too, the new US representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke had been gently told that there was no real need to add “India” to his AfPak portfolio. Lambah’s Bonn Conference experience helped him make friends with Holbrooke and tide over a potential diplomatic disagreement.

As a young officer in 1972, Lambah had witnessed both jubilation and suffering when he opened India’s embassy in the new nation of Bangladesh. Towards the end of his life, even when he was suffering from colon cancer, Lambah continued to engage with the world. From commoners to corporates to kings, he treated them all with deep cordiality and immense respect.

(Edited by Poulomi Banerjee)


Also read: ‘Sharp intellect, soul of discretion’ — Veteran diplomat Satinder Lambah passes away at 80


 

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