For the man behind the Indo-US nuclear deal the habits of professional discretion die hard
The maitre d’ relocates us away from a noisy kitty party but I still strain to hear. Sen, dressed in a conservative suit and carrying a mobile model of reasonably ante-diluvian vintage, admits to being a bad speaker, requiring the volume on the mike to be bumped up when he spoke publicly.
Sen has probably seen more contemporary world history up close and personal than many Indian civil servants. A vastly abbreviated version of a CV he’d helpfully sent me reads thus. Served in Indian missions and posts in Moscow, San Francisco (when Ronald Reagan was Governor of California) and Dhaka (when Mujib was assassinated and the Indian mission attacked). Secretary to the Atomic Energy Commission during the Tarapur crisis. Joint secretary in Rajiv Gandhi’s PMO. Ambassador to Russia (1992 to 1998) during the “most difficult period of the post-Soviet transition”. Last foreign ambassador to present his credentials in Bonn and the first in Berlin as capital of reunified Germany. High Commissioner to the United Kingdom (June 2002 to end April 2004). And there was his post-retirement job as Ambassador to the United States (August 2004 to end March 2009) that set Indo-American relations on a new trajectory.
For all that, he is viscerally disinclined to regale me with tales of diplomatic derring-do, though he does reveal a bone-dry, laconic sense of humour. For one, he assures me he’s an accidental diplomat. He wasn’t a good student and reckons he gained admission into the Indian Foreign Service (in 1966) only because of the interview, which was given more weight at the time, where he was given high marks — “something like 90 per cent”.
I point out that he couldn’t have been that bad since the IFS in those days recruited the top ten rankers in the civil service exam. He came 12th, the second lowest among his batch on the all-India list of IAS/IFS, and made it because two people dropped out. “Everyone (at St. Xavier's College in Calcutta) was shocked. There were many serious students and I knew they were better than me and objectively they should have got in.”
We place the order and Sen gallantly opts for orange juice over alcohol since I’m on the wagon. The rest is proforma: a crispy spinach starter, Chinese greens, a seafood mélange and rice. When conversation resumes, he tells me much of his career was accidental. “It was accidental that I happened to be in Moscow; it was because I suddenly thought of opting for Russian — for no particular reason.” But no, he’s not very good at it because he doesn’t have a facility for languages. Also, despite being a language probationer, he was deployed full time, so the tuition had to be fitted in with his duties.
Sen spent the longest time of his career in Moscow, from Brezhnev in the late sixties onwards. He remembers the eighties as “the time of the funerals” when one ageing party leader after another died. “The whole leadership had come to be based on seniority, though it wasn’t always like that — Lenin, Stalin, Brezhnev were all were fairly young when they assumed leadership.”
A bit like the Indian bureaucracy, I suggest. He smiles and is almost daring on the subject. “We are following a system that was shed by most countries by World War II.” The problem starts from the selection process based on “a few hours performance – an exam and interview – and seniority is frozen for all time”. After that, “it’s robotic — unless you make a major mistake, you go on being promoted.” And the system doesn’t encourage decision-making, “because, if you take decisions, actively, all the time, you are bound to make mistakes. That is why, for a lot of people, when they retire you don’t even notice the difference…”
Inevitably, the talk turns to the nuclear deal and I discover it’s possible for Sen to get worked up — in the quietest possible way. He talks about “one characteristic that distinguishes India from many countries, developing and developed, and that is honouring every commitment we make”.
That was not the case in the nuclear sphere, I say. Though he “was involved in the preparation of every note for cabinet at that time”, he has the grace not to treat me like a headless chicken for that remark. Instead, he says the US government unilaterally abrogated the Tarapur agreement. I argue that India unilaterally violated the agreement by using technology transfers to develop the bomb. “Look at it in a different way,” he urges, “peaceful nuclear explosions were accepted as a norm. The terminology was not invented by us. There were peaceful nuclear explosions in the Soviet Union, US, but when it came to India, the US introduced domestic legislation with retroactive application to an inter-governmental agreement which was approved by their Congress and this was communicated to us in a most formal way.”
If the post-Tarapur sanctions were a “low point”, that Carter legacy was reversed in a remarkable way with the nuclear deal. I forward critics’ viewpoint that India could have signed the Non Proliferation Treaty which has an exit clause. He chews meditatively before replying. “Frankly, the implication of the deal has been better understood abroad. I think I know a little bit” – a trademark understatement – “but the arguments became so legal and technical that, even for me, it was a sure cure for insomnia.”
He says the US tailored the deal so that no other country except India met a specific set of criteria. “But there was so much domestic resistance – sometimes, I think, we have real difficulty in taking yes for an answer.”
On the civil nuclear liability Bill when the government was warned not to yield to the US ahead of Obama's visit, he thought it “unfortunate, but frankly unsurprising that this legislation was seen as being prompted by US pressures”. His take is that people missed the point. “Learned folk tied themselves in legalistic knots rather than focusing on how our country could benefit from maximising technology transfer. What will be the socio-economic costs of perpetuating a state sector monopoly in this sector and discouraging private sector investments? In our obsession with the US, we ignored the inevitability of similar reservations by the French, Russians and others. It is high time we shed ideological blinkers and acted in our own interests.”
The deal, he adds, is also about using very high technology for meeting India’s needs in nutrition, agriculture and so on, just as Rajiv Gandhi had foreseen, which turns the talk to a man with whom he worked closely and admires intensely. I agree that Rajiv was a forward thinker on this issue as he was on the China rapprochement, but the Sri Lanka agreement of 1987 was a major mistake. “No,” he interjects more emphatically than he’s done in the whole meal. I get excited and ask why, expecting some revelation.
No such luck. “It’s still premature for me to talk about it,” he replies, deflecting my sceptical look with a disclaimer, “I’m not being like Mao who said it was too early to judge the impact of the French Revolution but believe me…”. He offers some oblique evidence: it was significant that V P Singh wrote to Premadasa that he was confident about strengthening our relationship on the basis of the Indo-Sri Lankan Agreement, since both politicians had fought elections on getting the IPKF out. “Why did a major Rajiv critic send that letter? Because when he took office he got to know some of the real reasons for the agreement!” There’s also a tantalising digression on Bofors and Rajiv’s innocence before he assures me he can’t go into those details either.
He’s as scathing as it is possible for someone who speaks at a near-zero decibel about the “lack of rational debate” in the public discourse: “People don’t look at the facts.” Take Bush. He surprises me by saying that Bush’s public persona was very different from the reality. “He was seen as an anti-Islamic crusader but look at his record. He didn’t put the military option on the table with Iran. He was the first to get the Quran into the presidential library. And he was also the first president to really attend an iftaar party at the White House — some predecessors made token appearances.” And the most sit-up comment of all: Bush “read at least two books – serious ones – a week”.
The meal is ending and his batch-mate Pradip Baijal waves hello – it’s ten days before the former telecom regulator finds himself in the thick of Radia-related controversies. Although Sen has loads to tell, he is determined to honour the professional dictates of discretion and not write a book. In any case, he never kept a diary and says he destroyed whatever papers he had. Instead, he’s busy catching up on a personal life that was often neglected in the line of duty. It’s a pity he declines dessert, since, who knows, I might have discovered an intellectual side to Rumsfeld too.