‘The story isn’t over yet. What will India do to constrain N-arms race? Your Govt will have to come back to that’

• Well a lot of change since then…Indira Gandhi and Henry Kissinger… those were very frosty days, as frosty as the weather today.

I remember his visit quite well…there was quite a bit of mutual respect between them. I think the relations between Kissinger and Indira Gandhi were better than the relations between India and the US.

• Or between Indira Gandhi and Nixon for that matter…

Yes, that’s for sure.

• But describe to me how exactly it was then, because in 30 years everything has changed completely. ’74 was Pokharan, the eve of the Emergency, ’74 was a very different Indira and a very different India.

Well, the big difference I think was that ’74 was still very much in the depths of the Cold War. And even though it was not literally the case — it shouldn’t have been the case — India and the US ended up on the opposite sides in the Cold War. That was really the overall geopolitical context. It was not a good relationship for a very long time.

• Jaswant Singh told me on this show some time back, I think the line that he quoted to me from Madeleine Albright… he said that Madeleine said ‘‘Fifty years in our relationship, the mice ate it away.’’

Yes, there is a phrase that has come out from Washington in the last couple of years: ‘‘If you are not with us, you are against us’’. But there was a little bit of that attitude towards India going back to John Foster Dulles, when Prime Minister Nehru went to Bandung with one of the co-founders of the Non-Aligned Movement. In Washington, particularly on the part of Secretary of State Dulles, the NAM was seen as only slightly better than the other side in the Cold War. And India in particular was seen as, to use a famous word, tilting more towards the Soviet Union than the US.

• Those were interesting years. I have read some of the stuff that Dulles had written, those that have been declassified. And I can see that he was truly fascinated by the personality of Nehru… And there’s stuff from Eisenhower that says ‘‘it is quite well known that what works with Nehru is a personal appeal and not as much policy or ideology’’.

Yes, President Eisenhower himself actually had a rather warm feeling towards India and Nehru. You might recall that Eisenhower invited Nehru to his farm in Gettysburg and while he didn’t make a great deal out of it publicly, he and Eisenhower wanted to have a better relationship.

• There are descriptions of their discussions about China on which Nehru had a different take. But it is a fact that the US and India have had a very different worldview over the past decades, except now, in the past five or 10 years.

Yes. I think one of the reasons why President Clinton was so eager to have a better relationship with India was because he scented that end of Cold War created an opportunity that none of his predecessors have had. He would have liked to initiate a quantum improvement in the Indo-US relationship during his first term, but for a variety of reasons he couldn’t get around it.

• But if you were advising the President on his South Asia policy during the Cold War, would you have advised him to handle it differently?

Well, in a way I did. I was not in the capacity of a Presidential adviser but as a journalist. As you know, we journalists can advise anybody.

• It’s a very pregnant title, that of your book, Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy and the Bomb…tell me how does this fit into this Indian ideological upbringing?

Well, as you and your viewers know well, the issue of the extent to which India’s defence was going to have a nuclear weapons component has been debated in this country for a very long time. It was in the background, I’d even say in the foreground, of Pokharan I, which is the so-called Buddha Smiles test of 1974.

• The peaceful test.

Peaceful test. And indeed that was one of the principle topics of conversation between Indira and Kissinger on that trip to India in 1974. On the subject of nuclear weapons and whether they are necessary… the US and India had a disagreement for over 30 years. And that disagreement was muted, when India had what it claimed was a peaceful nuclear capacity. But when India in May 1998, decided it was to have an unambiguous…

• …And had to give up the hypocrisy…

Well, I’d put it as, it was going to go from an undeclared nuclear capability to a declared nuclear capability… That really brought the relationship to perhaps the lowest point than ever…

• The Seventh Fleet, Enterprise…

Well, we didn’t have naval vessels off your shore, but in terms of the intensity of the state of disagreement between us, I think it was a new low in a relationship that never had very many highs. It was against that backdrop that President Clinton decided that we have to intensify our engagement…

• And there was real anger in Washington…

Fury…including on the part of the President of the US, for all kinds of reasons. First of all, President Clinton felt frustrated and disappointed, he had wanted to use the second term of his presidency to have a closer relationship with India. He felt that was now going to be difficult if not impossible.

Second, he attached very, very high priority to non-proliferation, persuading countries throughout the world that padding nuclear weapons was unwise and unnecessary in terms of advancing your own interests, and he was very concerned of what the consequences will be in the India-Pakistan relationship. Of course, one of the first things that all of us in Washington worried about when India tested was whether Pakistan was going to test. And the answer was, yes of course, Pakistan was going to test, although we made an effort to persuade them not to test.

• Describe the first moments when the news came in…

Well, it was a bad day. A bad way to begin a week, it was on a Monday morning in the May of 1998. It’s the opening scene of my book. I came to the office expecting a more or less normal week at least by State Department standards. And this made the irony all the more painful, we learnt what had happened quite a few hours before from CNN. We didn’t even get the news from our intelligence services.

• The CNN getting the better of the CIA…

Yes… and the first thing I did was to pick up the phone and speak to my counterpart in the CIA to give some more information. He didn’t know what had happened, so he was not only getting the information from the CNN, but also the State Department, which was the worst possible from his standpoint. But then we moved into very high gear…

• In fact, one of your colleagues at Brookings and a well-known analyst on India, Stephen Cohen, then said that the problem with intelligence people is that they don’t read anything that’s not marked classified. If only they had read BJP’s poll manifesto, they’d have known what was coming.

But let’s look at it a bit more seriously. Yes, if we had been listening very carefully to the hints that we had got, our level of expectation, if not suspicion, would have been much higher. Indeed, as you know, there were villagers around Pokharan who knew what was coming because of all the preparations. There was even a story that had gotten into a Sikh community newspaper in Canada predicting the tests. Here’s one of the reasons why we didn’t know. Our attention was focused elsewhere. This was the period when we had almost non-stop crisis going on in Iraq, huge problems in the Balkans, and it was simply a question of information overload and attention deficit.

• But would you say that we Indians have been pretty good at keeping big secrets?

Yes, and for good reasons from your standpoint. Because, there are a couple of times previously, which I also recount in my book, India had been very close to testing, at least keeping open the option of testing at Pokharan, and the US found out, used diplomatic channels, particularly Ambassador Frank (Wisner) when he was here, to persuade your government not to do it.

• That was a well-known case during Narasimha Rao’s prime ministership.

Yes, and by the way, it was precisely during that episode that I first became aware of the name Jaswant Singh, because he was then a spokesman of the BJP. And he had some rather forceful and eloquent things to say on the subject, on what appeared to be American pressure to stop India from testing.

• We’ll come to Jaswant Singh and how you changed the course of history in 14 meetings, seven countries, and three continents over two years. But before that, tell me exactly what happened.

Well, what’s happened is more or less what has been in the press at the time. We, the US government, took the information we had, brought it to the Prime Minister through his personal secretary at the time, said here’s what we think you are going to do, we think it will be a huge mistake…President Clinton got into the exchange directly… but there was no formal promise that the government would not test.

• Clinton called Rao?

Yes…

• Because that is not something that is on the record.

There was no formal promise, but clearly the American message was received, and the tests didn’t happen.

• But did Clinton call Rao and hold out a threat?

It wasn’t a threat, it was more a strong argument that this would be contrary to everybody’s interests.

• And what was your sense? Do you think Rao wanted to test or do you think it was some elaborate clever game that he was playing?

Well, I actually discussed India’s possible tests directly with PM Rao when he came to Washington to see President Clinton. President Clinton used his private meeting at the Oval Office to make the case not to do it and then he sent me to see him afterwards in his hotel room to deliver the message more clearly. I had the impression that Rao was genuinely torn. On the one hand, he was under pressure from various forces within his own government. On the other hand, he understood the logic of the longstanding Congress party position of what might be called the nuclear ambiguity.

• That’s the one charge that the BJP has sort of laid at the doors of the Congress…that the Congress party buckled under American pressure and we did not. And that if it was left to the Congress party, they would have compromised India’s nuclear interests.

My own view is that’s a way of describing the situation with a point of view… that it was absolutely right to test. I don’t happen to share that point of view. But this is a disagreement that’s now in the past, in history. Once India had made a decision that it was going to test, once it tested, we, the US, and the world were confronted with a new reality. Then the question became not of concentrating all our rhetoric and political efforts on recrimination but trying to figure out what to do next.

• And that brought Jaswant Singh into the picture…

Yes.

• Tell me a little bit about how it started and how it went on…

It started because of an important and positive decision at the level of the two leaderships, that is to say PM Vajpayee and President Clinton. Both these men, who had no personal relationship at that point and each had some reason for annoyance with the other — President Clinton, as I said, was furious at India’s decision to do the tests, PM Vajpayee had reason to be annoyed at the US because the US immediately slapped every kind of sanctions…

• Let me ask you the frontbencher’s question now. In this engagement who got more for his country? You for US, or Jaswant for India?

I’ll answer that in two parts. The great American Secretary of State Dean Acheson once famously said that he never read a memorandum of conversation in which the author comes out as second-best. My book is an exception to that, because, in so far as it is an extended memorandum of conversation between Jaswant Singh and myself on the nuclear issue, the non-proliferation issue, Jaswant comes off better than I do in that he accomplished more of what I think was the Indian strategy in the dialogue than the US did, which is to say he and the Indian side held firm against any significant concessions.

But the most important point is that there was an overarching goal in that dialogue, and that was to get away from a zero-sum, win-lose dynamic between the two countries and see if we couldn’t find genuine common grounds on which to do some good things. And in that sense, I think, both of us made real accomplishments.

• Well, that’s the point, apart from the engagement of the nuclear issue, the fact is Jaswant Singh brought in a completely new paradigm in Indian worldview, which was not pro-West, but was westernised in a way. And see where he was coming from: there was 40-45 years of socialism, aggressive non-alignment. So I think while he may have accomplished a bit more than the nuclear issue, the US and the West too have achieved some in the sense that India changed its worldview entirely.

Well, I conceded a considerable amount here, namely, that my good friend and counterpart Jaswant Singh accomplished for his government more in the non-proliferation area than we wanted to accomplish. But the last chapter of the book is called ‘‘Unfinished Business’’. This story is not over yet. There is still a big question out there. What will India do, in some sense, in institutionalising its moratorium on the testing of nuclear weapons? What will it do in order to achieve a treaty that cuts off the production of fissile material? What will it do to constrain and thus stabilise the competition with its neighbours over ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons? And the fact that we did not achieve as much as we wanted in the Clinton administration does not mean that that issue is now off the table. I think that your government is going to have to come back to that.

• If this paradigm change in India’s foreign policy hadn’t come about, do you think India would have had the same relationship with US after 9/11?

I’d make two points here. I would like to think that the US under President Bush was better able to engage with India than it would have because of the dialogue conducted by the Clinton administration. But there’s another point too. The Bush administration was able to engage quite effectively with Pakistan and with President Musharraf after 9/11. That was possible I think, in large measure, because the US under President Clinton remained engaged with Musharraf, even after the military coup, even after Kargil, even after all the difficulties both with the US and Pakistan, and between India and Pakistan. And we were under a lot of pressure, and certainly a lot of advice, from our Indian friends, going back to Kargil and the coup in 1999, to wash our hands off Pakistan. I think it was a good thing that we did not do that. I think it was a good thing that President Clinton made a visit to Pakistan after his visit to India.

• Clinton wagging his finger to Musharraf to him becoming the stalwart ally, Musharraf has come a long way. How do you look at him? One of your old colleagues has mentioned about Musharraf to me, twice in three years, as a work in progress.

Well, let’s hope it’s a progress in the right direction and let’s hope the work continues. I had a chance to see President Musharraf in Davos just a week ago. I am pleasantly surprised that President Musharraf, given his history, as the architect of Kargil, as an unreconstructed revanchist on Kashmir, has been willing to get it right on the third track. Pakistan and India had an opportunity for a breakthrough at Lahore, Pakistan ruined it…Agra was a disaster. Now there is a third chance and it seems to have some real promise. But I must tell you, I think I am not the only one who feels that this whole situation is fragile. And it’s fragile in part because so much depends on President Musharraf himself. He’s already been the intended victim of several assassination attempts. The question arises, is the peace process only one bullet away?

• That brings me to the last question. Is Al-Qaeda only one successful assassination attempt away from getting the Bomb? After the revelations that have come out about Abdul Qadeer Khan and the rest?

I think I understand what you are saying. There is obviously a nexus or a connection between the Pakistani nuclear weapons capability and the danger of the Bomb getting into other non-State hands. It’s a danger over it getting into other State hands. And the name A Q Khan, which I have been hearing since I have been coming to India, has only recently made it to the newspapers in the US. So there seems to be a welcome but a belated effort on the part of some Pak authorities to get hold of a very dangerous situation. In fact the question is, is it too late now?

• Is the Bush administration making a mistake by leaving it all to a man instead of a system or institution?

Right. That’s exactly the accusation against the Bush administration, that was made against our administration, for continuing to deal with first the Nawaz Sharif government, and then the Musharraf regime. I don’t think it is a mistake. Whenever I hear that kind of criticism, I always wanted to ask the person: What is the alternative?

Very often it was the Clinton administration receiving this kind of criticism, either about Sharif or Musharraf… the Indian answer was either a non-answer or the answer was ‘‘have nothing to do with them, dismiss them as a failed State, treat them as the rogue nation they are, and deal only with us.’’ We have always refused to do that, and the Bush administration refuses to do that. I think both have been right. Just as engaging India is important — that is the title of my book — we have to do what we can to remain engaged with Pakistan, otherwise Pakistan will become a self-fulfiling prophecy of a very negative sort.