As rumours swooped around thick and fast about a potentially explosive, secret Danish draft, I looked around for a quiet corner in the otherwise crushingly-full Bella Centre for a quick cup of coffee. I found myself sharing a table with a pretty, blonde Danish girl. “I’m with the Indian press,” I said to her by way of introduction. “And I’m Connie Hedegaard’s press secretary,” the girl replied.
Ida Ebbensgaard, as I discovered she was called, asked how the Indian media were reporting the climate meet. When I told her about the apprehensions surrounding the secret Danish draft, her mouth fell open. “But,” she spluttered, “Ramesh has been consulted at every move. We have shared the draft with the Indian side every day. Connie calls him every few hours.”
It was my turn to have my mouth fall open. I had just returned from a chat with the Indian environment minister in which he had rather dramatically thrown up his arms and thundered, “We implore the Danish presidency to share the text of the Danish draft with us. We are appalled at the lack of transparency of the whole process.”
Despite my suspicions having been aroused, I had to admit that I owed the Indian minister a big favour. On Tuesday, I had bumped into him while wandering around the cavernous corridors of the conference site. “Hey,” he said chattily, “you speak Chinese right?” This was a charge to which I admitted being guilty. “Well, come along then,” he continued. “I’m off to a bilateral with minister Xie; come on in as my interpreter.”
I spluttered in amazement, unsure if he was joking. But Jairam lived up to his image as a maverick, when I found myself swept into a meeting room at the Chinese delegation office and face to face with Xie Zhenghua, China’s climate change minister and Vice Chairman of the all-powerful National Development and Reform Commission.
The Chinese minister looked inquiringly in my direction. Jairam offered no explanation and merely sat down. Unsure and unsettled I said the first thing that popped into my mind. “My name is Pallavi Aiyar.”
It was said in Chinese but other than that I cannot think of a more uninspiring introduction.
“Oh!” said the Chinese minister, “a translator,” to which I smiled non-committally.
The next 20 minutes saw me making heroic efforts at interpreting, but between, trembling with excitement at the scoop and trying to wrack my brain for the words for “carbon intensity cuts” in Mandarin, I wasn’t in top form.
Luckily, the Chinese interpreters present helped me out at key moments. Xie gave me a few funny looks during the meeting.
“Pathetic interpreter,” he seemed to be thinking, which was true. But a very lucky reporter all the same!
I was pleasantly surprised to find amongst the 3,500 journalists covering COP-15, a number of old friends from China. Not only Chinese reporters but also fellow hacks from the foreign press corps based in Beijing.
The unanimous buzz in the China-watcher camp was about the ramped-up public diplomacy of the Chinese delegation, unique for China at an international conference.
Notoriously press-shy Chinese government officials waged an aggressive publicity war at Copenhagen, holding daily press briefings open to all media, speaking and answering questions in English.
It was a sea change from the usually secretive and low-key manner in which the Chinese tend to operate at international fora.
And it put the Indian delegation to shame, which despite the environment minister’s penchant for private interviews with the press, did not hold a single public press conference all through the second week of the negotiations.
On Friday, when it was announced that Nirupama Rao, the foreign secretary, would hold a briefing in the afternoon, foreign media were told it was only for Indians.
There were many ironies that abounded in Copenhagen. When exhausted journos dragged their weary bones to the Bella Centre at the crack of dawn each morning, they were confronted with cheerful signs with arrows pointing to “PARTIES.”
The delegations at the talks are referred to as “parties” in UN-speak (COP stands for conference of party), terminology that regularly lent itself to unintended puns.
“India only wants texts that are party driven” said Jairam, often coming across to the uninitiated like a teenager headed to the disco.
But the greatest of all ironies was a conference on global warming held in the freezing Danish winter with non-stop snowfall. As I waited on Monday morning — my toes gradually but inevitably losing all sensation — in an outdoor queue for more than 8 hours to gain access to the Bella Centre. I wasn’t alone in thinking how wonderful a little global warming would be for the Danish capital.
