One Life is Not Enough

by K. Natwar Singh

An unexamined life is not worth living. —Plato

I am a short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist.

Defiance is a prominent part of my character. A price has to be paid for defiance. I have, without regret, paid the price more than once.

I have a passion for history, which is not shared by a very large number of my compatriots. In the last one hundred years we have produced only three eminent historians, D.D. Kosambi, Irfan Habib and Romila Thapar. All three, left of centre.

The father of the atom bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, paid a heavy price for opposing the development of the hydrogen bomb. A genius was thrown to the wolves by the American establishment.

Five rupees in hand, the amount the Mahatma charged for an autograph,

The killings of the Muslims of Bharatpur echoed in the United Nations’ Security Council in January 1948 when the Pakistan foreign minister, Sir Muhammad Zafarulla Khan, referred to the plight of his community and the treatment meted out to them.

In December 1955, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, and Nikolai Bulganin, the Prime Minister of USSR, arrived on a state visit to India. They got a genuinely warm welcome, both in Calcutta and in Delhi. The two leaders also spent a weekend in Srinagar. At a reception hosted by Sadr-e-Riyasat Karan Singh, Khrushchev, without consulting his Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko, announced that the whole of Kashmir was a part of India. No other country had said so.

Tony Agate was also one of my senior officers. One day, I sent him a file sanctioning the leave application of the section officer. Tony sent the file back with LBW written on it. I went to him and asked what a cricketing term was doing on a leave application. He asked how a dope like me got into the IFS. LBW meant ‘Let the Bastard Wait’.

Indira Gandhi joined us, followed shortly after by M.O. Mathai. I was talking about the book Mulgaonkar had asked me to review. Mathai told me sternly that as, an officer of the IFS, I could not write for newspapers.

S. Gopal, in his biography of Nehru, writes, ‘Mathai exercised vast and irregular power… Nehru was informed that Mathai could not account for his great wealth and without doubt had received money from C.I.A. as well as businessmen in India. It can indeed be safely assumed that from 1946 to 1959, the C.I.A. had access to every paper passing through Nehru’s Secretariat.’

In 1961, Queen Elizabeth II was the chief guest at the Republic Day parade. Lord Mountbatten had got Nehru to agree to the Queen and President Rajendra Prasad jointly taking the salute. This was an atrocious proposal. I spoke to several of my colleagues about it. There was unanimous disapproval. I also spoke to S. Gopal, the son of Dr S. Radhakrishnan. Sensing the mood, Nehru dropped the idea. What bothered me even more was the pernicious influence of the Mountbattens on Nehru, so much so that he was literally eating out of their hands. He was oblivious to Mountbatten’s glaring shortcomings. His wife, Edwina, had fallen in love with Nehru, and he with her. When Edwina Mountbatten died in early 1960 in Borneo, Nehru paid her a tribute in Parliament. This was unprecedented.

Mao Tse Tung was transforming China—the lives of five hundred million Chinese and their way of thinking. His aim was to produce a society which would be a model for all communist countries. He put an end to chaos, squalor and corruption. The cost of this transformation, in human terms, was no doubt high but no one had an inkling of this in the 1950s. It is only now we know that Mao was responsible for the murder of seventy million Chinese. One could, as a detached observer, complete an entire encyclopaedia of suffering under Mao.

The Prime Minister’s refusal to place Hungary at par with Suez created an outrage in India. Jayaprakash Narayan wrote (on 5 November 1956), ‘If you [Nehru] do not speak out, you will be held guilty of abetting enslavement of a brave people by a new imperialism more dangerous than the old because it masquerades as revolutionary.’ Krishna Menon made matters worse by stating in the Security Council that events in Hungary were a domestic affair. He went further. On his own, he abstained from voting on a resolution condemning the Soviet Union for the use of force, justifying his action with an abrasive speech. The Prime Minister stood by Krishna Menon to the chagrin even of senior officials of the Ministry of External Affairs. Jawaharlal Nehru did himself no good by defending the indefensible.

Nehru innocently committed a serious mistake by making the Tibetan leader sit between himself and Chou En-lai.

Radhakrishnan called on Mao. His hand was bandaged as he had hurt his finger while getting into a car at Phnom Penh. After shaking hands, he patted Mao on the left cheek. Mao, as well as the other Chinese officials present, were taken aback by this unusual familiarity. However, the philosopher quickly diffused the situation by saying, ‘Mr Chairman, don’t be alarmed, I did the same thing to Stalin and the Pope.’

At the banquet Mao gave for Radhakrishnan, he picked a piece of meat with his chopsticks and put it in the plate of his vegetarian guest. This was the ultimate act of expressing deep friendship. I watched with horror, but the Vice President dealt with this culinary outrage with extreme tact. He did not touch the meat but helped himself to a dozen vegetarian dishes.

I was at first puzzled that Pantji had allowed the reporter to stay in the room even after he had been identified. Then the penny dropped. Had he asked the reporter to leave the room, he would have run to the nearest telephone to file the story immediately. Pandit Pant knew that. He dealt with a somewhat tricky development with breathtaking sure-footedness. He won my whole-hearted respect that morning.

Nehru told the Chinese PM that some of his senior Cabinet ministers would call on him. Being the shrewd man that he was, Chou insisted that he would call on them instead. I accompanied Chou when he met Vice President S. Radhakrishnan, Home Minister Gobind Ballabh Pant and Finance Minister Morarji Desai. Though not one of them was familiar with the complexities of the Sino-Indian border, they chose to go into the specifics. The Vice President and the Finance Minister thus succeeded in irritating the Chinese Prime Minister. The Vice President began by saying that the Sino-Indian border problem should be settled during Prime Minister Nehru’s lifetime. The Chinese leaders found this incomprehensible. The Vice President said that the two countries had no conflict in two thousand years and war would be no solution. To this the Foreign Minister of China, Marshal Chen Yi, replied that China did not want war. He had first-hand knowledge of war. For thirty years the Communist Party of China had fought against the Chiang Kai-shek government and the Japanese imperialists. He himself had seen his wife and son being executed across a river. The Vice President then asked what 400 square miles of territory was compared to the friendship of 400 million Indians. Premier Chou En-lai replied what were a few thousand acres of land compared to the friendship of 600 million Chinese. The Vice President was no match for Chou En-lai. The Vice President was somewhat condescending and his generalizat...

The joint communiqué issued on the last full day of the visit, 25 April 1960, was notable for a major omission—it made no reference to the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. It was believed India was not agreeable to its inclusion since, in its view, the occupation of Indian territory by China was a violation of the principles and their inclusion would amount to condoning it. The communiqué said that the two Prime Ministers explained ‘their respective stands on the problems affecting the border areas’, noted the failure of the talks ‘in resolving the differences that had arisen’ and the consequent need for further examination of the factual material.

Having completed three years at headquarters, I was posted to London as Private Secretary to Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, the High Commissioner. She turned me down as I was close to her sister, Krishna Hutheesing, with whom she didn’t get along. Both sisters had a well-developed streak of self-destructiveness, which made them say and do things which, in calmer moments, they no doubt regretted. Their temperaments were very different, but both were given to inspired indiscretion.

Anyone acquainted with the functioning of the UN would be aware of the unwritten rule that the UN Secretary General must come from a small country.

In November, Pandit Nehru, accompanied by Indira Gandhi, arrived in the US for talks with President Kennedy, who had spoken of Prime Minister Nehru’s ‘soaring idealism’. Kennedy remarked that Nehru’s was the worst visit of any leader he had hosted. The PM was jaded, tired and made a dull after-dinner speech. His address to the UN General Assembly too was serviceable, though uninspiring. B.K. Nehru had arranged for the boldest and the brightest in Kennedy’s White House to be at the breakfast with PM Nehru. They were all very excited about meeting him. But the PM remained silent. It was clear that he was past his prime. He was exceptionally affectionate when I asked him to sign some photographs of his that I had taken. This was the last time that I saw him.

the Americans moved a resolution in the Security Council condemning India’s liberation of Goa and two other Portuguese enclaves. The British delegate invoked a sixteenth-century Anglo-Portuguese treaty which laid down that an attack on one country would be considered an attack on the other. What surprised us in the Indian delegation was that two great democracies were defending Portuguese colonialism. The Soviet delegate, Z.A. Zorin, vetoed the resolution that was condemning India’s getting rid of Portuguese colonialism. The reaction in the Western world against India was virulent. As B.K. Nehru later wrote: There was hardly any necessity for me to explain our case to the State Department; they knew it well and undoubtedly sympathised with our predicament. I went to the President to give him our point of view. This also was really unnecessary because he knew our case as well as I did. When I said that I hoped he was not annoyed with us, like the rest of the country seemed to be, he said, ‘Not at all. I am not in the least bit annoyed because I understand your case. You have done now what you should have done fourteen years ago. But you spent those fourteen years preaching morality to us and telling us how wrong it is to use force in one’s own interests. Now you have done exactly what any other country would have done and used violence to further your interests. The result is that the country is saying that the minister (preacher) has been caught coming out of the brothel a...

Throughout my diplomatic career, I was repeatedly told that a good diplomat should think twice before saying nothing. At the UN, the lesson was to speak, and speak even when speech made little sense.

For African diplomats, at the time, diplomatic level playing fields did not exist. Finding apartments was a humiliating experience. An African delegate, Harry Stow, told me of his ordeal: no fewer than eighteen apartment owners shut the door on him when they saw that he was black. It made him bitter.

Before an Ambassador can begin his formal duties, he has to present his credentials to the Head of State. Rajwade went decked up in a black achkan, churidar pyjamas and a turban. The Emperor received Ambassadors sitting on his golden throne, with two Ethiopian lions sitting next to him. Most Ambassadors not only dreaded this ordeal, they panicked when they saw the two lions licking their lips. India’s Ambassador behaved differently. He walked up to His Imperial Majesty, read his speech and handed to the emperor his letters of credence, signed by the President of India. He then withdrew. At this stage, the two lions got up to follow the Ambassador. This was the moment when all the other Ambassadors broke into a cold sweat and were all but ready to run. Rajwade did nothing of the sort; he walked nonchalantly. This was too much for the Chief of Protocol, used as he was to seeing Ambassadors collapse with fear. He said to Rajwade, ‘Your Excellency, do you not see the two lions who are following us?’ Rajwade replied, ‘Excellency, Mr Chief of Protocol, I recognize no lions. I have eyes only for the Lion of Juda.’ From then onwards, he was shown unusual respect by the Emperor’s establishment.

My African journey made me even more critical of the colonial powers. Whites, who in their respective countries would have been porters and petty traders, lived in Africa like pashas. Their treatment of Africans was so appalling it almost made me sick. In Africa, their behaviour was shameful. What was extraordinary was that, even in 1962, the British were justifying their policies of oppression—from Fiji to Mauritius, from Trinidad and Tobago to Rhodesia. They were lecturing us on human rights, having paid no heed to them for three hundred years. I constantly crossed verbal swords with the British delegates on the committee.

I told him that he would have had plenty of time when he was Governor General. With a smile on his face, he said he spent much of his time patching up the quarrels between the PM and the Deputy PM.

Another day, we discussed the Partition of India. To provoke him, I said Lord Mountbatten sold Partition to Nehru and Sardar Patel. Rajaji replied, ‘Let me tell you, Natwar Singh, I sold Partition to Mountbatten. The Attlee government had already made up its mind to transfer power, but did not know how to go about it.’ Mountbatten had asked Rajaji how to break the impasse. He said Partition was the only solution. I said that Gandhiji had been against Partition. Why had he suddenly given in? This had come as a great shock even to my teenage self. Rajaji said Gandhiji had been aware of what was going on in the minds of Pandit Nehru and Patel and other members of the Working Committee. Only Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and Jayaprakash Narayan had been against Partition. Gandhi had been very disillusioned. He left Delhi for Calcutta before 15 August. His dream of a united India lay shattered.

In the UN, one got a good idea of which way the winds were blowing. Even the non-aligned countries, including Egypt, Indonesia and Ghana, did not openly support us. B.K. Nehru has claimed in Nice Guys Finish Second that Jawaharlal Nehru, late in 1962, had received a note from the Chief of the General Staff, Lt Gen. Verma in which he predicted a war with China. PM Nehru took no notice of Verma’s note. He actually said that he did not expect a war with China during his lifetime! PM Nehru had invested much in his China policy and, when it failed, he panicked for the first time in his life. His letters to President Kennedy asking for military help made even a hardcore Nehruite like me wince in embarrassment (see Appendix 1). What made matters worse was the American media, which relished sniping at Pandit Nehru and ridiculing him.

On a visit to West Germany in 1959, she was presented with a two-seater Mercedes, which she accepted. Mrs Pandit got to know of this and wrote to her brother that it would create a wrong impression if Krishna-masi was to accept the car. Krishna-masi never forgave her elder sister for what she called her ‘betrayal’. The Prime Minister didn’t want to get involved in the tiff between the two sisters. Eventually, Lal Bahadur Shastri, whom Pandit Nehru had deputed to sort the mess out, found a solution whereby Krishna-masi could keep the car but would have to pay import duty for it.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the Foreign Minister of Pakistan at the time, was leading his country’s delegation at the 1963 session. Mrs Pandit had known his father, Shah Nawaz Bhutto. But the young Bhutto was cast in a different mould. He was a product of Berkeley and Oxford, a fine debater, abrasive, arrogant and sartorially striking. He had a passion for beautiful women, most of whom fell for him. He was an outstanding Foreign Minister who outwitted us in weaning China away from the US without annoying the US. In his speech, he made a blistering and venomous attack on India. On the issue of Kashmir, he was offensive beyond words. Vijaya Lakshmi’s Pandit’s immediate reaction was to exercise her right of reply. It required a combination of tact and persuasion to dissuade her from doing so. I told her that nothing would please Bhutto more than to get a reaction from her. So, instead, she asked one of the senior secretaries to reply, to the considerable discomfiture of the Pakistanis.

Papua New Guinea was uncharted territory for me. On arrival, everything was a surprise. Parts of Papua New Guinea were still living in the Stone Age. Cannibalism, though no longer rampant, had not altogether disappeared. I was introduced to a man who had been locked up for seven years for killing a man and eating his heart. He had felt no remorse but had walked to the nearest police post to give himself up. But such instances were extremely rare in the mid-1960s.

Now I come to the widening chinks in his foreign policy armour. His three cardinal errors were: his disastrous handling of the Kashmir issue, his misplaced trust of the leaders of the People’s Republic of China and his turning down of the Soviet proposal to give India a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council. All three have been millstones around the necks of the people of India and successive governments since 1947.

Taking the Kashmir issue to the Security Council of the United Nations was a monumental mistake. By doing so, he converted a domestic matter into an international one. What was even more erroneous was his going to the Security Council under Chapter VI of the UN Charter, which addresses itself to disputes. He should have taken the Kashmir problem to the Security Council under Chapter VII, which deals with aggression. In the case of Kashmir, he allowed his personal feelings to cloud his professional judgement; a major failing for a statesman of his stature. Members of the Council rightly said that, by doing so, India had accepted that a dispute exists.

On 22 October 1947, Pakistan invaded the Jhelum Valley in Kashmir. India learnt of this incursion two days later and Pandit Nehru spoke to Lord Mountbatten, who had stayed on as the Governor General of Independent India, about it. Mountbatten, as well as the three chiefs of the army, air force and navy were all Englishmen and maintained their own agenda. In Pakistan, too, the army, air force and navy chiefs were Englishmen. These chiefs of the two states were in touch with each other and were secretly informing

Mountbatten of day-to-day events. Mountbatten kept Nehru in the dark. Not only that, he used the British High Commission in Delhi to send messages to British Prime Minister Clement Attlee and King George VI—all behind the back of a government of which he was the Governor General. It was Pandit Nehru’s error to have invited Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, to become the first Governor General of India. Jinnah was more realistic. When Mountbatten suggested that he become the Governor General of Pakistan as well, Jinnah firmly turned him down. Mountbatten nominated a Chairman of the Defence Committee that played a critical role in policymaking, a role from which he should have been excluded. Pandit Nehru did not object personally and these matters, which should have been discussed in the Indian Cabinet, did not come up. Thus, the Defence Committee took over the duties of the Indian Cabinet with the full knowledge of the Prime Minister. Mountbatten was a constitutional figurehead, yet it was he who advised Pandit Nehru to take up the Kashmir issue to the United Nations. He was even against sending Indian troops to Srinagar until the Maharaja of Kashmir had signed the Instrume...

An American writer has written that Indians had made Abdullah a member of the delegation in the expectation that he would be an effective spokesperson for India’s cause. They could not have calculated that he would undercut their position by calling for Kashmir’s independence in a private conversation with the US delegate in the Security Council Warren Austin. Nehru had put all his Kashmiri eggs in the Abdullah basket.

In October 1954, the Prime Minister visited China, and was welcomed in Peking by a million people lined up on both sides of the road as Pandit Nehru and Chinese Premier Chou En-lai drove by in an open car. Pandit Nehru genuinely thought that it was a spontaneous and popular welcome. The fact is that it was organized spontaneity. If the Chinese government had so decided, not a single person would have been on the roads. In later years, when I read the record of the talks, it became clear that there was no real meeting of minds and, most importantly, the border question, too, was not raised. On his return, Pandit Nehru stopped in Calcutta. The first letter he wrote on his China experience was to Edwina Mountbatten, and shared with her the content of his discussions with the Chinese leaders. Strictly speaking, this was against the oath of secrecy he had taken. At the time, of course, no one knew of this letter, and only came to light later when his selected works, edited by S. Gopal, were published.

In 1959, the Dalai Lama, as well as the large entourage accompanying him, crossed the Chinese border with India and sought refuge. The immediate and the most serious fallout of India playing host to the greatest Buddhist in the world was that Sino-India relations, already strained, began to fall apart. Throughout 1959, Peking kept the heat on Pandit Nehru, provoking numerous incidents on the border. Pandit Nehru, for the first time during his tenure, faced pointed criticism within the Lok Sabha, even from members of the Congress, for what they called his inept handling of the situation.

The Chinese troops had favourable terrain on their side of the border. They were extremely well-trained, armed and equipped. Their information about our weaknesses was up to date. Having achieved their objective, they withdrew and declared a unilateral ceasefire, sparing us further humiliation and damage. Not one non-aligned nation supported us. It was President Kennedy who, preoccupied with the Cuban Missile Crisis, promised and delivered aid promptly. Pandit Nehru’s letters to Kennedy are pathetic. B.K. Nehru, who was then Ambassador to the US, reports in his memoirs that he felt a sense of shame when he was delivering Pandit Nehru’s messages to Kennedy.

Her first major decision on 6 June 1966, the devaluation of the Indian rupee, was treated with derision. The Congress President, K. Kamaraj, considered it a sell-out. Mrs Gandhi herself soon realized that she had been misguided by her advisers. She was, however, a quick learner and a great leader, who was not averse to taking risks. After this, she did not trust anyone outside her immediate circle.

Economic subjects bored her.

Soon after Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister, in May 1966, Mao Tse Tung launched the Cultural Revolution in China. Mao had been feeling that he was being isolated by some of his senior comrades, particularly Liu Shaoqi, Peng Chen and Peng Dehuai. The Revolution lasted almost ten years and China was torn apart from east to west and from north to south. The Red Guards, who answered to none, save Mao, were let loose. Their relentless attack on very senior members of the Communist Party led some to commit suicide; houses were ransacked, ancient monuments were destroyed

Two young officers of our Embassy in Peking were on a picnic in the western hills. They had taken some photographs when they were arrested and treated harshly. They were not only detained, but it was announced that they would receive capital punishment. This was, of course, part of the psychological war that Mao and his Red Guards were using to demoralize everyone. It was only after a great deal of pressure and protest that the Chinese government decided to let them leave. But, before they could be flown out, they were put in a truck and exhibited before a crowd of two hundred thousand people. They were pushed and kicked and spat upon. Such treatment was contrary to every known diplomatic rule.

President S. Radhakrishnan’s five-year term was to end in May 1967. He had been openly critical of the Prime Minister’s style of functioning and, in his broadcast to the nation of 25 January 1967, on the eve of Republic Day, he overstepped the bounds of constitutional propriety when he said, ‘Even after making allowance for all the difficulties we cannot forgive widespread incompetence and gross mismanagement of our resources.’ Indira Gandhi was upset and annoyed by this and decided not to give Radhakrishnan a second term—the eminent philosopher paid the price for patronizing a powerful politician.

India continued to view the world and its problems in a simplistic and moralistic manner, rather than in empirical terms.

In March 1967, the Svetlana incident caused a slight dent in Indo-USSR relations. Svetlana was the daughter of Joseph Stalin. She fell in love with Brajesh Singh, a committed communist who had lived in Moscow for many years. Brajesh Singh then fell seriously ill and doctors recommended a shift to a warmer climate. He was not permitted to return to India. So Brajesh Singh stayed in Moscow, where he died. Svetlana, however, was permitted to come to India to immerse Singh’s ashes in the Ganga River. On 23 March 1967, the American Ambassador Chester Bowles brought a memo for Indira Gandhi, which Svetlana had given to a member of the American Embassy on 6 March. He requested the Prime Minister to look at it. Indira Gandhi told the American Ambassador that the Soviets were putting the blame on India for allowing Svetlana to leave India. On 7 March, Svetlana had lunched with the Russian Ambassador and asked if she could remain in India. Her request had been promptly rejected. The Ambassador had handed back her passport and an air ticket to Moscow and had asked Svetlana to leave the next day. Svetlana then got into a taxi and drove to the US Embassy to seek asylum. She was persuaded to take a flight to New York. The Soviets were furious and our Ambassador in Moscow was given a dressing down by Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko.

During the AICC meet at Faridabad that year, Nijalingappa made a withering attack on Indira Gandhi’s functioning and her economic policies. The stakes were very high. She had to act quickly to counter the threat. As a first step to securing her position, Mrs Gandhi wrote to the Deputy Prime Minister, Morarji Desai, telling him that she would very much like him to continue in his role as minister and that he could choose any portfolio, except finance. It was a bold decision. As expected, Morarji Desai felt insulted and resigned from the Cabinet. Next, she nationalized fourteen banks, a step which was widely welcomed in the country. The Prime Minister had demonstrated acute political acumen in meeting the direct challenge of the Syndicate head-on. Though I was not involved in the high-level discussions, all of us in the secretariat were aware of what was happening. Those were tense days and though the Prime Minister outwardly kept her composure, I could see how worried she was. In this crisis she relied heavily on P.N. Haksar, her principal adviser.