This is being written in my hotel room in St Petersburg (previously known as Leningrad) in Russia. This city was made famous in 1942 as the place where the Russian Red Army fought courageously to defeat Hitler's army, which then had to retreat ignominiously just as Napoleon had had to do two centuries earlier.
St Petersburg - named after Emperor Peter the Great - was the capital of Russia till it was shifted to Moscow. Although the political capital is Moscow, Russia's cultural capital and its window to Europe continues to be St Petersburg. You could draw parallels between Washington being the political capital of the United States and New York its business and financial capital. Or like New Delhi and Mumbai.
In the 1970 when I worked in what was then called Hindustan Lever, one of my several responsibilities was the export of our products like Sunlight soap and Surf detergent powder. Russia was one of our export markets and we had a manager posted in Russia. Since he reported to me, I decided to visit this place which, at that time, appeared to us like a "forbidden country". It was certainly forbidding! Getting a visa was very time consuming as the Consulate in Bombay had many question to ask as if one was a spy for some foreign country. The scrutiny at immigration at the Russian point of entry was tedious and bordered on the suspicious.
At the time there was only one hotel in St Petersburg called Nevesky Palace where foreigners could stay, probably because it was under total KGB surveillance. Even the Russian taxi driver who took me to there could not enter the hotel and had to drop me off at the entrance from where the porter took over as he was probably from the KGB. Cars were few and the only ones available were the low-grade version of the Fiat called the Lada. In those days there were no foreign newspapers or TV available in the hotel. And the only bathing soap available was worse than our Sunlight. My Russian contacts looked longingly at Sunlight soap which I gave away to them as gifts which they valued greatly. I discovered that Lux and Rexona bath soaps were very valuable gifts for visits to Russia.
However, it all changed dramatically when Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yelstin came to power in 1991. The changes have been sustained under Vladimir Putin. When you land at the airport, there are friendly smiles. You have a choice of flights and there are taxis which you can order in advance through your hotel for which there is a choice.
May 10 was Remembrance Day in this city - a day on which St Petersburg remembers its 1942 bravehearts who beat the Germans who had encircled the city and cut off all supplies in the expectation that they could starve the Russians into submission and surrender. But the people withstood the siege. A number of them risked their lives to go down the river Neva in small boats or by swimming to smuggle in meagre quantities of food which they distributed to the besieged people. This enabled the city to hold out against the Nazis till the Allied troops arrived almost 10 months later! If the people of St Petersburg had surrendered at that time to the Nazis, the course of world history would have been changed. That is why the siege of St Petersburg is considered one of the most important landmarks of World War II and a unique example of the collective bravery of citizens in the history of mankind. While the Belgians, French, Italians, Spanish and even the brave Dutch people surrendered to Hitler, it was the Russians, especially the people of St Petersburg, who stopped the Nazi juggernaut.
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Today, Russia and India have very different political structures. While ours is an open, democratically elected system, theirs is a system dominated by a single party which has resorted to every available practice to remain in power. Their president has wielded dictatorial powers from the time of Lenin and Stalin to the present day. It is in sharp contrast to our prime minister who is constantly vulnerable to attack in and outside his party. Despite these differences, we, as a country, have very strong and valid reasons to befriend Russia as much as we do the United States.
I am not a Communist - far from it. Still I advocate friendship with Russia for the following reason. If we look in our vicinity, our real long-term enemy is not Pakistan. It is far too small, being the size of one of our states to be able to sustain any conflict with India for any length of time and the US will not support it in any such misadventure. Our real long-term rival (and, therefore, potential enemy) is China. That country sees India as the only major obstacle in its desire to dominate West and Middle Asia. So, it has done its best to befriend Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and even the Hindu country of Nepal. There has been a none too subtle policy of encirclement of India. In spite of the ethnic, linguistic, racial and religious links we have with all our neighbouring countries, they have all chosen to play along with the Chinese whom they see as a buffer against what they perceive as potential dominance by India.
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What should and can India do to correct this perception among our neighbours? One of the first things we can do is to make it easier for people from the neighbouring countries to visit India. Can we not make such visits visa-free in both directions? The benefits of this will far outweigh the risk of a tiny number of migrants entering our country. Can we not rely on our fellow citizens and local authorities to spot such miscreants?
Second, we must have a very ambitious educational scholarship programme for students from neighbouring countries. The amount we spend on this will be a modest investment, maybe ~25 crore, but think of the goodwill it can create among the young, educated Pakistanis, for instance. They will see real India as a free, multicultural, multi-religious country. They will make lifelong friends among Indians. Such generation of goodwill can be of long-term value. The Fulbright Scholarship programme which the United States offered to Indians created more goodwill and understating among a class of influential Indians than several other forms of aid to India. Assisting intelligent, young Pakistanis to study in our Indian Institutes of Technology, or IITs, engineering and medical colleges and Indian Institutes of Management, or IIMs, will create a wealth of goodwill that can never be bought or created otherwise.
People of my generation, which experienced and witnessed the trauma of Partition, are already in the evening of their lives. A new generation which does not carry that burden of history is already emerging. It will see the opportunities in trade and commerce and indulgence in rivalry in sports and games. Religious differences, while still existing, will retreat into the background as they ought to do. This is a subcontinent that can become one of the most vibrant markets in the world.
