Mr Dixit, I presume

J.N. 'Mani' Dixit, India's former foreign secretary, was an expert on Sri Lanka, an accomplished diplomat and a public servant Delhi didn't deserve.

Former National Security Advisor J.N. Dixit in New Delhi on June 1, 2004. | Commons

The first time I met J.N. ‘Mani’ Dixit, in September 1985, I had not particularly given him a reason for me to be in his good books. I had just been arrested by the Sri Lankan military for nosing around “sensitive installations” near Trincomalee. This was actually a Tamil temple that had been burnt down in ethnic fighting very close to the lagoon resort of Nilaveli which just got swept away in the December 26 tsunami.

Trincomalee was then a combat zone and I had jumped the unwritten conditions of my visa to take the train there from Colombo. I had spun a completely ridiculous web of lies in the process, all involving friends. I had told Sunil Gavaskar, who was then participating in the Test match in Colombo that I was merely taking a day off to visit Kandy because I couldn’t bear to see India lose to Lanka. I had told Lalith Athulathmuthali (then Sri Lankan internal security minister) I was going to be at the cricket match. And I had told Dixit’s key lieutenant Hardip Puri and his wife Lakshmi, the high commission’s press officer, (now both ambassadors in Geneva) that I was doing some interviews and was not to be missed for a day or so.

But then once the Sri Lankan military locked me up, I had no choice but to try and reach the very same people for help. Lalith gave me a mouthful for lying to him and also misusing the hospitality but helped if I promised to be at his house the next evening for cognac. Hardip pulled a few strings too and I was on the next train back to Colombo — as it turned out, it was also the last train out of Trinco for a long, long time. That very night a bridge along the track was blown up by the Tigers. It was on my safe return that I was presented before the high commissioner who should have been furious for the trouble I had caused as also for the IOU his mission had had to concede to the Sri Lankans to get me out.

He had other reasons to be cross with me too. Just the previous year, I had written an extremely contentious investigative story out of Tamil Nadu for India Today revealing, for the first time, that Indian intelligence agencies were running covert training camps for Sri Lankan Tamil insurgents. The story had provoked Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to dismiss India Today as an “anti-national magazine” at a press conference. R.K. Karanjia echoed the sentiment in a front-page story in The Daily, headlined “It’s Lanka Today, not India Today” (let’s avoid the name of the reporter for now), and went on to suggest that I had been bought over by the Sri Lankan deputy high commissioner in Madras for a bottle of Scotch. But as Mani never let me forget when we got to know each other better in later years, that particular story was the albatross around his neck when he walked into Colombo as our high commissioner. The Sri Lankans quoted it as conclusive evidence of Indian complicity in their Tamil insurgency, their government reprinted copies of it, their media kept on quoting from it.

So here I was, brought to his office like a prodigal schoolchild, expecting to be screamed at again. But Mani, as so many obituaries have now told us, was not one to get ruffled, blow his top. “Young fellow,” he said, his eyes expressing amusement more than anger, “were you born with this gift of getting yourself into trouble? At least you should have told us you were going there.” I was still not senior enough for high commissioners to call me home for a drink. But he gave me tea, and a little lecture on how damaging my earlier story had been and how, having written that, it was in any case so perfectly reckless of me to have gone into Tiger territory.

All Sri Lankans had to do, he said, was shoot you and tell the world the Tigers did it because you had exposed their camps in India. This was old-fashioned avuncular concern and it stopped at that. Then he gave me a long lecture on how I did not understand the history of ethnic unrest in the island, the complexities of India-Sri Lanka relations, the gravest provocation Jayewardene had caused Indira Gandhi by getting carried away in his own electoral rhetoric after she lost her election after the Emergency and asking his voters to vote out the cow and the calf (Sirimavo and Anura Bandarnaike) as Indians had done with theirs (cow and calf was then the symbol of the Congress and the metaphor was also used by Indira Gandhi’s nastier opponents for her and son Sanjay). A big power and its leadership, he said, could never allow such arrogance to fester in its neighbourhood and, in any case, Jayewardene had been so cruel to his Tamils and so what if they were given a little wherewithal to fight back. Outranked by such distance, I only mumbled my disagreement and left.

Our next encounter was a full two years later. In the latter half of 1987 I was on a sabbatical in Washington and missed most of the initial phase of Op Pawan (the IPKF operation against LTTE). I returned to see the India Today issue with bodies of Indian troops in Jaffna on the cover, an image that still gives me nightmares. The operation had been a military disaster of sorts and I returned to Sri Lanka to reconstruct it, and to figure out what may have gone wrong. I now called on Mani on my return.

The mood was now very different. Dixit was already mocked as the “viceroy” by the Sri Lankan media for how he had rail-roaded the accord between Rajiv Gandhi and Jayewardene and the tight control he kept over things since Indian troops landed on the island. He was protected by Indian para-commandos. From his window you could see two Indian navy frigates anchored in coastal waters.

“Nice to see you again,” I said. “We have both moved on since we met last, I am now a special correspondent, and you the viceroy.”

“I knew you had cheek, young man,” he said. “But now I figure you also have a sense of humour.” Then he paused for a long drag from his pipe, and said, “Actually, I now admit you also have wisdom.”

He then went on to admit how “I and the rest of us who played with these fellows (LTTE)” were so much in the wrong. “You were right,” he said, “in sticking your neck out and saying two years back that we were creating a Frankenstein. It has already swallowed so many of our lives, and who knows where this will stop.”

Now when was the last time you had an Indian foreign policy maker say something so honest to a mere special correspondent. Subsequently, he acknowledged this at seminars, in public speeches and indeed in so many social conversations. There was another thing he said that evening, in that reflective mood. “I must make another confession,” he said. “I now realise this country has a long way before it can think of becoming a big power.”

“What made you think that way, Mr Viceroy? When?” I asked.

“The moment the first shot was fired in Jaffna. Our responses. Our self-doubt. We are a long way yet from acquiring the big-power temperament,” he said.

From then on we met more frequently as I travelled often to Sri Lanka and then to Pakistan. One column is too little to tell a dozen more such exchanges as our professional relationship evolved — where the gain, obviously, was mostly mine. But from then, on to the foreign secretary’s office in a most difficult phase where he joined hands with Narasimha Rao to fob off the Americans on the nuclear issue and destroyed Benazir Bhutto’s credibility as she visited 28 foreign capitals in one half-tenure as prime minister plugging her cause on Kashmir, to a star Indian Express columnist, to the NSA’s post, the topmost concern on his mind was the same as in his office in Colombo in the winter of 1987 — how to build a big-power temperament in India, and how to propel it in that direction. It is particularly cruel, therefore, that his innings were to be cut short just when India had begun to show both the mind and the muscle for that.

Mani was a philosophical man and would, perhaps, have no regrets. I, however, have a couple. One, that I was counting on him to someday help solve the mystery of what exactly happened in December 1995 when India came close to testing the nukes, but Rao somehow pulled back. Strobe Talbott claims it was under US pressure. But others (including me) believe it was part of a more complex, very Rao-Dixit-esque policy formulation. Each time I asked Rao what happened, he patted his belly, indicating the secret would remain there and go with him into his funeral pyre. He kept that promise last month. I had hoped someday Mani might resolve that for me. Now he has taken that secret to his pyre as well.

The second regret is personal. Mani was at our home for a dinner we hosted for Newsweek editor Fareed Zakaria on Sunday night, his usual self, telling Fareed how much he liked his writing though he disagreed with him often, telling my children he had known me since I was a cub reporter. The regret is, he did not eat his dinner before leaving. He said there was a call from the PM and left at 10. “I am not just the NSA in this job, I am also a general purpose factotum,” he said, in his usual self-deprecatory manner. He also said he would call me home soon one evening when there would be no calls because there was so much to talk about, for hours.

But that was not to be. The very next morning, he was gone forever, also taking to his pyre the secret of what happened in December 1995, leaving in grief so many more friends, admirers, colleagues than almost anybody before him who served this ungrateful city in bureaucratic straight-jacket.