In any commentary on contemporary developments, individuals often gather more eyeballs than the institutions they represent but from a nation-building perspective, it is the edifice or structure that matters more than the people who man it.
One of the most important institutions that have emerged in recent times at the national level is that of the National Security Advisor and the attendant offices, having been set up during the Vajpayee-led NDA government in 1998.
The NSA establishment, which has now become the fulcrum of our security apparatus, with the fabled IPS officer Ajit Doval helming it, is the evolutionary product of a series of developments including the Kargil war of 1999, the deliberations of the Kargil Review Committee and a Group of Ministers (GoM) led by the then Home Minister LK Advani, Defence Minister George Fernandes, Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha, and External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh, set up to recommend reforms for enhanced national security, in the wake of Kargil.
The late 1990s were tumultuous times. Within barely two months of a bus ride by Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to Lahore in February 1999 where he proffered a genuine hand of friendship, the Pakistan army had started its infiltration across the Line of Actual Control. It was a betrayal of trust at its blatant worst. India’s national security concerns stood heightened by this chicanery.
A Life Well Spent authored by Satish Chandra, former ace diplomat and currently Vice Chairman of the influential brains trust, Vivekananda International Foundation, provides engrossing insights into episodes like the pioneering work during this period that animated the foundations of the National Security Council apart from being a biographical sketch of his four decades in the Indian Foreign Service.
For example, the author states that the GoM constituted by the PM made up of the four stalwart ministers met no fewer than 27 times during a period of eight months to submit its report in record time.
Statesmanship of high order
This GoM was assisted by task forces focused on four topics whose Chairmen were the likes of NN Vohra (internal security), the late Madhav Godbole (border management), Arun Singh (higher management of defence), and the late Girish Saxena (Intelligence).
In documenting the sequence of events, Satish Chandra offers plenty of sidelights which in effect highlight the statesmanship of a high order which permeated the national thinking of that period.
Madhav Godbole was the Home Secretary who had resigned in protest against the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1991 but LK Advani as Home Minister had no hesitation in approving his name as head of one of the task forces when the name was proposed because of Godbole’s meritorious track record as a bureaucrat. Godbole himself had expressed surprise that Advani readily agreed to his name.
“In the enemy’s lair: Islamabad” is a chapter which similarly deals with the author’s stint as the High Commissioner to Pakistan, acknowledged as one of the toughest assignments any diplomat can get.
It was during this time that General Pervez Musharraf was appointed as the Army Chief by President Nawaz Sharif, superseding others.
About Musharraf, the author’s assessment initially was thus: “I carried the clear impression that Musharraf was an ambitious and scheming individual, a hard liner on India and a crafty political animal who could turn out to be another Zia.”
That Musharraf masterminded Kargil and the coup against Nawaz Sharif is now history. The deep connection between the Pakistan establishment and terrorists sent out to destabilise India is evident from the following incident narrated by Satish Chandra. As High Commissioner, he had developed an equation with the Interior Minister Naseerullah Babar.
During one interaction, the Pakistani Minister sought Chandra’s intervention in the release of a “journalist” in prison in Kashmir. While providing details Babar used a pseudonym. It turned out that the person whose release was being sought was Masood Azhar.
In the doghouse
Ambassador Chandra had assignments in Vienna, Washington, Algiers, Dhaka, Philippines, and Geneva, apart from two stints in Pakistan. The book is an easy read as the author’s writing is uncluttered and lucid. Diplomats are known for nuances but what strikes one as remarkable is the author’s “telling it as it is”.
Sample this. India, as he sums up in the chapter on his Washington days, had employed a Kashmiri Pandit as a lobbyist in the US whose capabilities lay more probably in his culinary abilities than in professionally piloting a cause.
“We have usually been in the doghouse in the US and it is only recently that things have started to change on account of our emergence as an influential economic power. I feel that we would have been better served had we been more professional and employed a tried-and-tested lobbyist... but, clearly, we were guilty of being penny-wise and pound-foolish.”
It emerges from the Ambassador’s narrative that greater agility and speed are required in decision-making and implementation as the country gets pitchforked into a bigger league.
The creation of the combined post of the Chief of Defence Staff for higher defence management is a case in point. The recommendation was by the GoM in 2001. But it took 19 long years for this key suggestion to be implemented.
(The reviewer is a keen observer of polity and the economy)
Check out the book on Amazon.
