(Dr. Shashi Tharoor is a two-time MP from Thiruvananthapuram, the Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs, the former Union Minister of State for External Affairs and Human Resource Development and the former UN Under-Secretary-General. He has written 15 books, including, most recently, India Shastra: Reflections On the Nation in Our Time.)
Diplomacy requires many qualities, but perhaps the most important is that of putting the national cause before yourself. The old saw that a diplomat is an honest man sent abroad to lie for his country is based on a recognition of this simple fact. The service of the national interest may oblige a diplomat to suppress his own beliefs, even sacrifice his own principles, in order to do his job effectively. Lying is part of it: since diplomacy requires you to deal with many who do not have your best interests at heart, it requires you to lie pleasantly to people you privately despise.
The best example of what this can involve came from a non-diplomat, Lilian Carter, President Jimmy Carter's mother, who said that her son was an honest man who was obliged to tell "white lies" that harmed no one. Challenged by an aggressive journalist to give an example of such an acceptable lie, the indomitable Mrs Carter replied sweetly, "When you came in, I said I was pleased to see you!"
General VK Singh is no diplomat, but as an army man he comes from a similar tradition of putting the national interest before one's own. After all, soldiers are trained to sacrifice their lives, if necessary, in the service of the nation: what is mere insincerity compared to that? As Minister of State for External Affairs, he is now the country's second ranked diplomat, and he has already had to feign interest in people he had never heard of, representing countries he had never been to. He has had to make small talk and deliver ritual speeches; wining and dining is part of the job description, even if it sometimes descends into whining and signing.
One of his unavoidable tasks in the job (one in which I preceded him six years ago) is to represent the Government at diplomatic events, especially National Days, that dreaded annual ritual of celebration when Ambassadors blow a large portion of their hospitality budget in trying to impress fellow diplomats and local grandees of the importance and munificence of the country they represent. One arrives at a pre-scripted time, shakes hands and chats politely, stands stiffly to attention for both countries' national anthems, shakes hands, poses for photographs, eats some of what the host offers and sometimes says a few banal words about friendship and goodwill. I've done it a dozen times. In diplomacy, this is about as routine and procedural as it gets.
But the bluff solider who uncomfortably occupies my old office in South Block has managed to make a monumental mountain out of this diplomatic molehill. Assigned the job of representing India at The Pakistan High Commissioner's National Day reception, our doughty MoS donned a green jacket in presumed deference to his hosts' Islamic fondness for that colour. He then attended the reception according to the pre-scripted formula, knowing full well, since it was openly announced, that Kashmiri separatist members of the Hurriyat would be in attendance (As citizens of a free and democratic India, they are free to attend any party they are invited to, just as they are free to form any party they want to.) It is not known whether he said hello to any of them (some years ago I was indeed introduced to Syed Ahmed Shah Geelani at the same event by the then Pakistani High Commissioner Shahid Malik, and greeted him politely before moving on). But if he did, he was just doing his job.
That would, in the normal course, have been that, except that General Singh apparently decided that he needed to distance himself from his own official actions. Taken aback, perhaps, by a few irresponsible media comments about his attendance, he felt he needed to convey to the Indian public that he was only doing his job, and not very happily at that. After he had left the reception, having done his duty to Indian diplomacy, he proceeded to undo his own contribution to Indo-Pakistani relations by issuing a series of bizarre tweets conveying his "disgust" at what he had to do in the cause of "duty".
This was having the worst of both worlds. A diplomat is someone who tells you to go to hell in words that make you look forward to the trip. He doesn't undermine the impact of his pleasant words by explaining loudly to others that he really wants you to burn in eternal damnation. Twitter is a particularly seductive medium for setting the record straight, because it reaches the media as well as the general public. Unfortunately, it also tells the person you were insincerely nice to that you really didn't mean it. That defeats the whole point of the effort you made in the first place.
The damage done by the tweets has to be seen in the context of what the Modi government seems to be doing on the Indo-Pak front. It has stretched out a conciliatory hand, sent the Foreign Secretary to Islamabad, downplayed the terrorist attacks a few days ago in Jammu and Kashmir, and the Prime Minister used the occasion of Pakistan's National Day yesterday to declare his new-found faith in peace and dialogue with our most hostile neighbours. If this is all part of a carefully calibrated opening to Islamabad, the last thing the Government of India needs is for one of its own servants, an instrument of its policy, to undercut the policy he is supposed to help execute.
General Singh is a good man doing a bad job -- mainly because he's in the wrong one. His nature, as he has demonstrated in his army days, is to be blunt, direct, aggressive and confrontational when he deems it necessary, even to the point of suing his own Government while in its service. These are fine qualities for a BJP politician. They are just not what the country needs in a Minister of State for External Affairs.
There is probably no more important issue on our diplomatic agenda than relations with Pakistan. They are thorny, tangled, frustrating, full of pitfalls, betrayals, deceit and treachery, but also of immense potential for ensuring peace and prosperity for our own people. They need to be handled with finesse, subtlety, and yes, sometimes with insincerity. Pakistan is not the right place for a bull who carries his own china shop around with him.
There's an old line about diplomacy that says: "If he says yes, he means maybe; if he says maybe, he means no; if he says no, he's no diplomat." Gen VK Singh, whom I genuinely like as a person, is no diplomat.
If the Prime Minister is serious about his diplomatic opening to Pakistan, he needs to harness General Singh's considerable professional qualities for something more appropriately up his street - a job in which he can say "No". Give him the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan or the bullet train project, and let his office in South Block be occupied by someone who understands the difference " between calling someone a liar and pointing out gently that he may have inadvertently been guilty of terminological inexactitude.
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