 "Kevin Rudd")
Breakfast with Kevin Rudd, the former Australian prime minister, begins with possibly the most precise instructions for making tea ever heard at The Oberoi in New Delhi. Rudd asks the waiter for a pot of tea at "two-and-a-half times your normal strength - Assam on speed," he says. Rudd turns to me and explains, "I grew up on a farm in Australia. We call it bush tea." Rudd is staying at The Oberoi and does not even glance at the menu to order bircher muesli followed by a bowl of bran.
We start at a brisk pace. My tasteless masala omelette arrives in minutes, Rudd's tea is being poured before it has time to steep, so he asks the waiter to let it sit awhile. My dictaphone, however, chooses that moment to die. This makes me nervous, not least because Rudd has a reputation for impatience and only has an hour. A famous profile in The Guardian a couple of years ago described him as "a big thinker with a short attention span. He was impatient with his ministers, (and) thoughtlessly rude to senior bureaucrats." Since he left politics a couple of years ago and became president of the Asia Society Policy Institute, Rudd, 57, appears to have mellowed as I meet a different person. Rudd has put the recorder on his phone on, saying he always records interviews, but then disarmingly switches it off.
Without any preamble, I ask Rudd about his epic speech early in his term in 2007 when he apologised to the Aboriginals on behalf of the country. For several decades until 1969, national and state government agencies had forcibly seized Aboriginal children from their parents and placed them with white Australian parents or church missions. Like many in the audience, I had been moved to tears watching it on YouTube the night before as Rudd said sorry eloquently and unconditionally, and then found ways to say it over and over as if it were a religious incantation. I ask if he wrote the speech himself. "Every word," he replies, adding that he had only finished the speech half an hour before he delivered it. "The Australian museum has the handwritten text with my appalling handwriting."
Ahead of the speech, Rudd endured numerous "bureaucratic briefs of what I could and couldn't say; this will resonate with Indians". He ignored them, deciding that he could not write the speech till he interviewed someone who was part of these "stolen generations". He met an old Aboriginal lady in Canberra for three hours. She told him of being hidden by her parents before the authorities snatched her from them and herded her into a truck. His outrage at four-year-olds being grabbed from their parents is still palpable. "The beginning of wisdom is to understand how another person experiences reality," he says. "The amazing thing was the Aboriginals accepted the apology." I ask why he seemed so unemotional. Never quite the natural politician, he replies that if he had choked up, it "would have been utterly self-indulgent". Instead, Rudd looked wooden as he stared straight at the camera, consciously not looking at the Aboriginal leaders. "Some of my political colleagues said, 'Mate, is it a smart thing to do on
the first day in parliament,'" he recalls. "(But) not only did the Aboriginals accept it, the rednecks accepted it."
I briefly consider asking Rudd why the unsheathed daggers of Australian party politics seem similar to India's, but time is already running short. Instead, I ask him about China under President Xi Jinping. Rudd is a fluent Mandarin speaker, which likely gives him a sharper understanding of the country than any contemporary politician in the West. As the subject moves to China, Rudd asks me to be sure to check quotes. Why had so many China watchers misread Xi before he took over in 2012 as party general secretary and cast him as a political reformer, I ask? "The party is in his veins. He is a deeply conservative party leader who believes not just in the party's current mission, but in its long-term future... (The party believes) that the only political entity capable of making China strong again is the Communist Party."
Switching to Mandarin for emphasis, he says when Chinese leaders speak of reforming the political system, they mean "administrative reform". Rudd is adamant that Xi will prove a "decisive economic reformer... you will see wave after wave of market reforms". Rudd says that Xi Jinping believes that like his predecessors, "he can hold these two universes (of one-party rule coupled with energetic second generation economic reforms) together". I persist with my question about the early hopefulness in 2012 that Xi would be more liberal, a premise predicated largely on the fact that his father, Xi Zhongxun, had kicked off the first economic reforms in China as the provincial leader in Guangdong in 1979.
I either mangle the tones in mispronouncing Zhongxun or say it too softly. Rudd consequently continues to talk about President Xi and a speech he gave in Brussels, where he laid out how China had tried everything from imperial rule to republican rule and all of these forms of government had failed, before questioning whether Xi's father really was all that liberal.
Refreshingly forthright thus far, Rudd then sidesteps a question about Narendra Modi's government. "I don't know India well. I know China well." He turns reflective, saying that in his current roles at Harvard Kennedy School and the Asia Society, he can try to explain the Chinese world view. "I am surprised by how much is literally lost in translation. There are still common values and common interests," referring to how China has benefitted from an open trading system and would not want to disrupt that. He has been a victim of a mistranslation of English when a Wiki leak referred to US diplomatic documents that misquoted him as saying that the West must be prepared to use force with China. What he actually said was that the West should be "forceful" in putting its positions to China.
Rudd says that that there is recognition that the country's territorial claims in the South China sea should not be pushed too far "because the principal objective of Xi Jinping is to grow the economy. The number one, two and three task is economic transformation." Speaking weeks before the US was humbled when its allies such as the UK and Australia elected to join Beijing's Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, Rudd, who had arrived in Delhi directly from Beijing, predicts that China will be proactive in building its own international institutions and would no longer be content as it has been for the past three decades "to sit in the corner and take notes". I am less sanguine that China's expansionist tendencies will peaceably stop at building a rival to the International Monetary Fund, but we are out of time. Rudd is escorted to a meeting where he mostly listens to a handful of retired diplomats and academics speak of India's relations with China. I come away convinced that Rudd's one-on-one was far more interesting. Not for the first time, I can't help thinking that the best perk in journalism is meeting fascinating people.
