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When Brezhnev Pleaded with Indira Gandhi
An unputdownable treatise on Indian diplomacy, with a wealth of insight and fascinating anecdotes
An unputdownable treatise on Indian diplomacy, with a wealth of insight and fascinating anecdotes
Leonid Brezhnev (right) and Indira Gandhi in Moscow during her 1976 visit to the Soviet Union. (Express Archive)
A life in diplomacy
Author: Maharajakrishna Rasgotra
Publisher: Viking
Pages: 400
Price: Rs 699
At the age of 92, Ambassador Maharajakrishna Rasgotra has penned his experiences of and reflections on “a life in diplomacy”. It is unputdownable and should find place on the library shelves of every serving diplomat and made required reading for probationers entering the Indian Foreign Service. Having himself entered the service in its second regular batch (1949), Rasgotra’s diplomatic career evolved alongside the evolution of India’s foreign policy, from its ageless philosophical, civilisational and historical underpinnings to its current state of play.
Although the book begins with fascinating glimpses into the life of a small-town boy, traumatised by Partition but determined to put that behind him, and a deeply moving account of the loss of his 10-year-old son crushed under the wheels of a military vehicle, Rasgotra disavows the book as an autobiography. It is essentially a treatise on post-Independence Indian diplomacy, woven around the major themes and milestones of the past seven decades, but also interpreted through his sharp and succinct evaluations of key players, and a wealth of fascinating anecdotes and stories about them. He is an exceptional raconteur.
Sample this: Brezhnev pleading with Indira Gandhi, “I want to get out of Afghanistan. Please show me the way.” And Indira tartly responding, “The way out is the same as the way in”! Or of Nehru’s PMO in 1957 calling Rasgotra, then a junior officer at our mission to the UN, to convey Nehru’s specific instruction that Rasgotra “personally” take “special care of a young man of great leadership potential” — one Atal Behari Vajpayee, just elected for the first time to the Lok Sabha. Autres temps, autres moeurs. (Other times, other ways)
And another little gem: Rasgotra paying his farewell call on Margaret Thatcher in 1990 and enquiring about how the Commonwealth Summit of a few months earlier had gone — and her responding, “What summit! Rajiv did not come and Benazir was heartbroken!”
There is the delicious recollection of the anti-Indian US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, telling Walter Lippmann who had asked him “why he was boosting Pakistan so much” that he was “doing it because Pakistan had the best fighters in the world — the Gurkhas”
! Of Krishna Menon at the UN, Rasgotra says the man could “convincingly feign exhaustion”. Menon ticks off the Pakistan delegate for demanding plebiscite by turning to the chair and exclaiming, “Sir, ask this gentleman whether his country has ever seen a ballot box
!”Where Stalin had refused to receive India’s first ambassador to Moscow (Nehru’s sister), he agreed to grant an audience to the next ambassador, Dr S Radhakrishnan. Having charmed the wily old dictator, Radhakrishnan called on the Soviet foreign minister, Vyshinsky, and demanded to know why the Soviet Union was not supporting India on Kashmir in the UN Security Council. “Taken by surprise, Vyshinsky mumbled something about India never having asked for Soviet help in the matter.” Radhakrishnan answered, “But that’s what I am doing now, am I not?” And thus began the saga of the Indo-Soviet (Russian) relationship that has been the sheet anchor of Indian foreign policy since. Rasgotra apprehends that “in recent efforts to improve relations with the US”, we might be “downgrading Russia’s importance in India’s foreign policy considerations” and hopes “this is not so in reality”.
The apprehension is well founded, but sits slightly at odds with Rasgotra’s reservations, dating from his posting to Washington of 1952-54, about our having needlessly needled the Americans over issues where “no vital Indian national interest was involved.”
But he also concedes that the US “sabotage(d) a real possibility of a peaceful, bilateral settlement of the Kashmir problem” through the Nehru-Bogra agreement of August 1953 to hold a plebiscite even, said Nehru, “if this meant the loss of the Valley”, only because India did not want an American plebiscite administrator. However, Rasgotra’s bias in favour of the Americans comes through when he assuages Swaran Singh’s fury at Kissinger saying, “Indians are bastards anyway” by claiming the word “is used to show affection” and “all that Kissinger had meant was that Indians are OK guys”!
There is also the intriguing story of Nehru not responding directly to Kennedy’s “repeated pleas” in their one-on-one meeting at the White House “for his advice as to what he should do or not do in Vietnam”.
Another stunning revelation is that Kennedy in 1963 “sent a letter, written in his own hand, to Nehru offering help to India to conduct a nuclear test
” — but the letter has never been traced.On China and Tibet, Rasgotra takes issue with the letter drafted for Sardar Patel by Sir Girja Shankar Bajpai. He says “the British policy of maintaining with force India’s special political interests (in Tibet) could not be sustained” and that Nehru “had rightly decided to persevere in a conciliatory approach towards China”. That conciliatory approach was gradually abandoned from 1959 on, leading to the military disaster of 1962 — about which Rasgotra is strangely silent.
He approves Rajiv Gandhi’s initiative to “defreeze” the relationship, but is highly critical of Rajiv, under whom he served his “worst three months as foreign secretary”, for being “misled by uninformed enthusiasts around him,” to make repeated mistakes in his Sri Lanka policy.
On our northern neighbours, particularly Nepal which he deeply distrusts, Rasgotra is “convinced that the concessionist policy of seeking our neighbours’ love will only bear the bitter fruit of disappointment”, but is more tolerant of Pakistan: “I am all for continual dialogue with Pakistan”. He recounts the joint text he negotiated in 1983-84 with Niaz Naik that fell by the wayside principally because the US considered it “anti-American”. Rasgotra recognises that the US will always “act primarily and always in its own interests” but nevertheless seeks a strong Indo-US relationship as the fulcrum of our foreign policy.
An ardent fan of Kautilya and Machiavelli, Rasgotra concludes that “a combination of principle and pragmatism makes for a successful foreign policy.” Yes, but in what proportion?
The writer is a former diplomat
http://indianexpress.com/article/li...hnev-a-life-in-diplomacy-book-review-2859627/
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