Diplomatic Mission

Jagat Mehtas memoir offers a welcome insight into the transformation of Indian foreign policy....

In the late 1970s,during the brief rule of the Janata Party,the buzz in Delhis diplomatic circuit was that Jagat Mehta made foreign policy and Atal Bihari Vajpayee translated it into Hindi. That dig was certainly unfair to Vajpayee who was then the external affairs minister of India. Forcing Hindi onto every aspect of national life was one of the favourite pastimes of the Jana Sangh and the RSS that Vajpayee was brought up in.

The fact,however,is that Vajpayee as the first non-Congress foreign minister and Mehta the intellectual-bureaucrat together made the first significant effort to reorient Indias foreign policy after Jawaharlal Nehru. No wonder they ran into huge resistance from the Nehruvians in the Delhi establishment. For that reason alone,Mehtas memoir is a welcome insight into the history of Indias foreign policy at a critical juncture. Mehtas awesome intellectual reputation rested on his willingness to challenge the conventional wisdom.

Mehta was not always right; he was patently wrong on many occasions. But he was unafraid of trying to turn his convictions into policy and courting controversy. His calls for reorienting the foreign policy got him the tag of being pro-America when Delhi was locked in an embrace with Soviet Russia,and his efforts to reconcile with the neighbours won him the tag of an appeaser.

As he reached the upper echelons of the Indian Foreign Service in the post-Nehru years,Mehta presided over the first effort at policy planning in the South Block. He sought to engineer a greater balance in Delhis relations with major powers,normalise relations with Pakistan and China,and build good relations with the smaller neighbours.

As the nations chief diplomat,Mehta had to deal with the first regime-change in Delhi after independence in 1977 when the Janata coalition ousted the Congress from power at the Centre for the first time. Serving as chief diplomat for Indira Gandhi,Morarji Desai,and Charan Singh,Mehta had to get the foreign policy establishment used to power transitions and create a basis for bipartisanship. When continuity was a safe option,Mehta chose bold pursuit of change. This cost him his job as foreign secretary in 1979.

Mehta,who remains a powerful voice in the national discourse on foreign policy three decades after his retirement from the IFS,concludes his memoir with a very important question that forms the basis of the books title. Why did Indian diplomacy underperform in the decades after independence?

Mehta looks for answers in the inability of national leaders to avert the tragedy of Partition,the reluctance of professional diplomats to challenge Nehrus judgements,especially on China,the collective wishful thinking about Russia,the belief that Cold War was permanent,and the alienation of the neighbours.

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As we begin to locate Indian foreign policy record in its historical context,Mehta offers a valuable first cut in understanding an important period. When written,the history of our diplomacy may look more kindly on Mehtas diplomatic contributions than his contemporaries did. After all,many of the heretical assumptions of Mehtas initiatives towards the US,China and Pakistan have become part of the received policy wisdom since Vajpayee unleashed the transformation of Indian foreign policy in the late 1990s.

That the Congress Party and Manmohan Singh continued down the new path,in a new spirit of bipartisanship that has served a reforming India well,is indeed a tribute to Mehtas farsightedness. Mehta was merely ahead of his time and circumstance in the 1970s.

If Mehta represented a nation in relative economic decline during the 1960s and 70s,his successors in the South Block acting for an India on the rise may yet redeem the tryst.