It is a matter of printed record that I had promised this instalment of First Person, Second Draft along with the National Interest last week, questioning the ministry of external affairs’ over-the-top reaction to their diplomat-versus-her-maid issue in New York. So I can’t be accused of indulging myself with a convenient afterthought, given the sharp reaction from the Indian Foreign Service community. Let me admit that I have spent much of my working life with wonderful members of the same service. We journalists, particularly reporters, get a free ride on other people’s brilliance. Most of them were, in any case, civil servants, and given the kind of stories I pursued, so many were from the IFS. It is therefore that I count some of the finest members of the service as my closest personal friends. I spent many wonderfully productive hours with so many of them, and such fun evenings too. But I also argued with them, which sometimes upset some. There was a cover story in India Today (‘India’s Foreign Policy: Losing Direction’, December 15, 1991), which I reported with Shahnaz Anklesaria Aiyar, and considerably more recently, ‘Indian Fossil Service’ (National Interest, IE, June 28, 2003) and last week’s ‘Our Indian Feudal Service’ (National Interest, IE, December 21), the casus belli for now.
I can list many stories of brilliance as well as monumental errors of judgement, of sacrifice as well as greed, of pompous misuse of privilege as well as utterly humble propriety. But of all the services, if the IFS is the most thin-skinned (the IPS is obviously the most thick-skinned), there is reason for it. The fault lies, as usual, with us journalists. For decades, the MEA has had a most loyal press corps dutifully reporting all its diplomatic conquests. Every foreign visit by an Indian prime minister is a stunning success, every trouble with the neighbours invariably their fault. But the growth of media post-1977 slowly began challenging this. It is still a work in progress.
I have the survivor’s instinct to begin this story-telling with a character from the IPS, though in diplomatic garb. This was our RAW resident chief at our embassy in Washington in the mid-1980s, harmlessly designated minister (consular), but charged with keeping an eye on the CIA, ISI, Azad Kashmiris and the Khalistanis at the same time. As his term was ending, he called some friends over for a farewell dinner and I, then on a sabbatical in DC, was privileged to be invited as well. The guest of honour was the head of America’s all-powerful Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS), in a way also our man’s counterpart. After dinner, there were speeches. The INS chief thanked the host for a terrific professional relationship, and particularly his wife for introducing him and his family to south Indian vegetarian cuisine. As a parting souvenir then, he offered our chief spook the US Border Patrolman’s sleeve badge. Our man accepted it with a grating smile and announced he would leave it with his son, who was settling down in Florida. If he ever has any trouble with the INS, he said, he could show it to them and say, your chief gave this to my dad. I am not so sure how well it served to teach the American some Indian-style family values. But as a tax-paying, ordinary Indian, this was possibly my most embarrassing moment in an Indian diplomatic precinct. Footnote: our spook rose really high in RAW on his return, and I have no way of knowing if his son ever had to wave that badge at the INS. Don’t ask his name, if you’ve been around long enough, you can figure it out.
I have much to be grateful to our foreign service for. Hardeep Puri, then in our Colombo High Commission, bailed me out of a nasty lock-up in war-torn Trincomalee in 1985, and a succession of senior and the brightest Indian diplomats in Pakistan and Afghanistan blessed me with their hospitality, friendship and, most importantly, wisdom. Nothing made a travelling Indian reporter more proud than to be told that your embassy was the best-informed in a newsy country. My favourite moment of all was the Tiananmen Square massacre story in Beijing in 1989. As in any communist country in those days, foreign journalists and diplomats all cohabited in the same designated expats’ compounds and fed off each other. Everybody had concluded, particularly Western diplomats and reporters, that this was going to be the end of the communist regime, the 28th and 38th Armies and god knows who else is supposed to have revolted and were marching on Beijing. The only diplomats who said exactly the opposite were India’s, led by Shivshankar Menon (then minister in our embassy). Nothing of the sort was going to happen, they said. Things would return to normal in no time and, soon enough, those arrested will be on state TV facing military trials. One of the younger members of the team even told my photographer colleague, Prashant Panjiar, to go take pictures quickly before the water hoses arrived to wash away the bloodstains from the avenues. As things later turned out, you felt so proud as an Indian journalist of your foreign service. There were two lessons to be learnt: one, that when all diplomats seem unanimous on something and the foreign hacks agree, you must get very suspicious. And two, check with the brightest diplomats, usually India’s.
Another set of Indian diplomats, though led in this case by a cop, Julio Ribeiro, pulled me out of a real crisis in a Bucharest under revolution in January 1990. I was robbed of my laptop, passport, traveller’s cheques, everything. Ribeiro, who had indulged me since his days as a tough cop in Punjab, promised me a new passport in two hours in spite of the fact that there were still tanks on the streets, and blood (Nicolae Ceausescu had been killed just a week earlier). But I didn’t have a photograph and realised how impossible it was to get a new one in Bucharest. Ceausescu had banned photography and you needed a permit to have a picture taken, after stating the purpose, at one of a handful of photographers’ shops. Ribeiro and his equally fearless wife walked me to one, wading through crowds and tanks, and I sat still forever in front of a pinhole camera. But picture done, they took me home for lunch and sent the picture to the chancery, and I was legitimate again. I may not be able to explain the gravity of that crisis now. But to be left without papers in Bucharest at that point was not a nice thing. And it was wonderful to see an Indian embassy with its tiny but dedicated team, which subsequently helped me get fresh visas for other countries in the region as well. On a similar casual walk next year, two Sikh terrorists shot at Ribeiro and his wife. On my next visit as a reporter to Romania, he greeted me from the hospital bed, but with the same smile.
But a contrast was also soon to become evident in faraway Moscow in August 1991 as KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov put Mikhail Gorbachev under detention in his Crimean dacha and declared a hard communist coup and reversal of perestroika. Even more thrilled than old Soviet communists were the leading lights at the Indian embassy in Moscow who celebrated the return of old times when, as Ambassador Alfred Gonsalves said to me so longingly, you could simply call key politburo members and get your issues sorted out. The return of communism was seen as a philosophical vindication and a signal, as if the Cold War was to resume. It made a hide-bound, scripture-driven diplomatic group so smug that their despatches even clouded the judgement of one as astute as P.V. Narasimha Rao. He made one of his stupidest statements ever on the day of the so-called communist coup when he said it was a warning to all reformers in a hurry. Because the coup collapsed on August 21, in a little more than 48 hours, and the reformers were back in power. If anything, the coup hastened the fall of communism and by the time I got there, a day later, cheery mobs were already yanking out and shattering statues and busts of the great communist leaders. Some brought bulldozers and cranes, others plain hammers. Moscow was suddenly in the grip of an iconoclastic frenzy. Our mission under Gonsalves was meanwhile nursing its wounded pride.
I filed my story that evening from the office of John Kohan, the Time magazine Moscow bureau chief. India had no email yet and the only way to get the story across in time was from Time‘s Moscow bureau to its Delhi office. I finished really late, so late it was dark even in Moscow in August and both photographer Bhawan Singh and I were famished, with no prospect of finding any food in chaotic Moscow at that hour.
Who else would come to our rescue at such a moment but a sincere, warm and generous Indian diplomat who lived in the same building in that expat ghetto? He took us to his apartment and his wife found us platefuls of life-saving lasagna. We tucked in greedily, but their attention was not on us. They were looking down from their window at the mobs vandalising communist leaders’ statues from that large Moscow square. Both had tears in their eyes. Both said the Russians would regret what they were doing. How could they do this to Lenin, Stalin and even Trotsky, who built the great Red Army? You could see where unquestioning faith and ideology had clouded diplomatic judgement even among the brightest. You could also see why and how Rao had been persuaded to make so silly and hasty a statement. Who is the diplomat I am talking about here? Do I look like such a namak haraam to you?
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On the two occasions that I have been dragged into foreign policy issues non-journalistically, once unwittingly and once deliberately, I have seen a brilliantly sympathetic and fair response from the IFS, and a particularly surly one too. The first was when in late 1991, as the mujahedin made gains against his army, Afghan strongman Najibullah in the course of a routine interview took me aside and asked if I would take a message to my prime minister (Rao) that he urgently needed money to buy some weapons from North Korea. Why me, I asked, I am just a journalist. But he wouldn’t listen. He said his intelligence told me I was very influential in Delhi and must take the message to my prime minister as our ambassador wasn’t listening to him. As events proved shortly thereafter leading to his brutal killing this wasn’t the only mistake his intelligence had made. I tried reaching Ambassador Vijay Nambiar, but couldn’t.
On my return, I mentioned this as a joke to M.J. Akbar (then advisor to the Congress government) and the very next morning, I got a call to see Rao. I have described that meeting in detail in ‘Alone in the crowd’ (National Interest, IE, October 14, 2000). But I was now dreading to run into Nambiar as he might think I was undercutting his authority and being too clever by half. But nothing of the sort happened. We did meet several times afterwards. He laughed and said Najib had got impatient with his scepticism as he suspected with good reason that not all the money demanded would be used to buy arms, and said I did the right thing.
Much later, on the other hand, I got caught in another set of circumstances in setting up the Lahore bus ride for Atal Bihari Vajpayee and his summit meeting with Nawaz Sharif. This brought me the wrath of the Warriors of IFS who said I was sabotaging their Pakistan policy obviously in cahoots with Vajpayee, and seeded the thought for the ‘Fossil Service’ article. There is much else shared, all pleasant if sometimes too adventurous, between me and my IFS friends, but it is too early to tell some of those stories now. I know one person who will know what I am talking about is Satinder Lambah. He and I share a very special story from when he was high commissioner in Islamabad and I came visiting. It is too early for either of us to tell it yet. It has to wait for India-Pakistan relations to improve so dramatically that it will be seen as a joke, as it should be. But not now.
The first time I attacked the IFS as Indian Fossil Service it brought me an unintended benefit: a treatise from two great dadas on the limitations of professional diplomats. Just days after that column had left the foreign service furious, I was invited for a very small, select farewell dinner that Brajesh Mishra was hosting for US Ambassador Bob Blackwill. Four of the guests (all around one table) were former foreign secretaries and I got my share of flak. One His Eminence even suggested direly that if he had ever suspected I had such views on his service, he would have never sent articles for publication in this newspaper. But soon, the conversation lifted. Brajesh Mishra (himself from the IFS) said sometimes he got so exasperated with the hidebound MEA, he wanted to ask the army chief to lend him a regiment of tanks so he could demolish South Block.
Bragesh (that is how Blackwill pronounced his host’s name), before that, can I borrow that regiment from you and send it on to Foggy Bottom (home of the state department in DC)?the departing US ambassador asked. There was animated discussion on who was to be blamed for indecision and sloth, politicians or professional diplomats, until Blackwill closed the argument.
I will repeat what I tell my class at the Kennedy School (at Harvard), he said, that career civil servants, including diplomats, are like doctors and nurses in the emergency ward of a hospital. When a patient is wheeled in at night, they are trained to follow SOPs (standard operating procedures). Then politicians come the next morning, like the specialists in a hospital, and decide what to do.Problems, he said, arose wherever the specialists abdicated their responsibilities to the emergency room staff.
A distinguished former foreign secretary said to me at a Christmas get-together earlier this week that some of the over-reaction to the maid issue by the MEA, as also to what was seen as my peremptory criticism of it, was perhaps because under a succession of weak and distracted external affairs ministers, the ministry feels left out of all larger decision-making, even disenfranchised. So it does the least it can under the circumstances: fight for its privileges.
It should be in the fitness of things, therefore, that I end this chapter with some stories of privilege, or rather on how not to misuse it, and regrettably, both involve Americans in a positive light, which I suppose is doubly regrettable in these weeks.
The first involves M.J. Akbar once again. Shortly after junior Bush came to power and Strobe Talbott, Bill Clinton’s powerful deputy secretary of state, returned to being a scholar, he visited Delhi. Akbar invited me, among others, to have dinner with him at Chor Bizarre, the Kashmiri restaurant on old Delhi’s Asaf Ali Road. As we finished dinner and dispersed, I found Talbott alone, looking lost. He asked me if I could help him find a taxi or an auto-scooter. Strobe Talbott searching for an auto, at 11.30 pm, in old Delhi, I thought to myself. This is nuts.
I offered to drop Talbott home (Imperial hotel) and asked, on the way, how come he did not have an embassy car, especially as he was such a security risk and a particularly luscious kidnap target. I even said jokingly how rich I could become if I just spread the word in that part of Delhi that one Mr Strobe Talbott was at a loose end at that hour. We laughed together. But he said he was a private citizen now. It would be improper and illegal for him to seek any help from his embassy. He took me back at once to Jerusalem 1992, when short of time, Benjamin Netanyahu (then foreign minister) jumped in the front seat of my rented car and we recorded the interview as I drove him to his office.
Now how would this work in our system? Where any member of any service, visiting a foreign capital, considers it his birthright to be chauffeured and chaperoned by the Indian mission all you need to do is find a batchmate. It will be unfair if I didn’t mention that many of our journalistic tribe also consider such ‘facilitation’ an entitlement.
The second story is older, back to Washington in the late Eighties, and involves two private individuals even if one of them is a great Bollywood star of our schooldays so I will have to hide their identities.
Our friend Mr A had the most popular green fingers in DC’s Indian community. A bachelor in his 50s already, he grew Indian vegetables (karela, bhindi, etc) in his yard, filled the back of his pickup with fresh produce and gifted it to his friends on Sunday mornings. We were on his list of beneficiaries too.
Besides fresh vegetables, he also had stories. Actually, a continuing story about his unsuccessful attempts at getting married. He gave out matrimonial ads in Indian papers and corresponded with many, but never got close to making up his mind. Except once.
One of his respondents was one of Bollywood’s greatest stars of the Sixties. Along with vegetables, he brought us a boxful of correspondence with her. She wrote him long letters. Some included clippings of her interviews in Filmfare and Star & Style. They were close to tying the knot, he said. She even came to America to get to know him, they travelled together, and he had pictures with her at Disneyland. Then it all went wrong. All because, in the process of introducing her to the American way of life, he took her grocery shopping at Safeway.
They stood in the check-out line and the star suddenly said she was happy to marry him but wouldn’t live in America. Why, Mr A asked.
Because, said the diva of yesteryear, there are so many people in the store who didn’t even recognise her, and she was not used to anonymity. Worse, several Indians in the same line did, and were greeting her warmly but refusing to take her ahead of the line.
This country is like that …. ji, said Mr A, the man standing behind us is Caspar Weinberger (then secretary of defence), and nobody is yielding their place for him as well.
The star returned to India. Once again, don’t ask me who she is. Two clues: she is still unmarried, and in my more facetious moments, I sometimes say that the twin Shapoorji Pallonji Towers near Tardeo (Imperial Towers) in downtown Mumbai look like architect Hafeez Contractor was inspired by the designer of the same heroine’s sequinned, rustic cholis in dacoit movies until the very early ’70s. If you still can’t guess, go back to Bollywood 101.
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