Narasimha Rao turned angrily on me for suggesting India was not doing anything for the Tibetans. “What other country in the world”, he expostulated, “would have shown hospitality to the Dalai Lama?” Reading how desperate London was to distance itself from Iran’s fallen Shah, I can understand his irritation and take pride this new year in the underlying humanity of Indian foreign policy.
The papers released by Britain’s National Archives confirm that Western diplomacy is about money, not men. It’s not a pretty tale. In 1977, British exports to Iran were worth £600 million; in 1978, Iran supplied 14 per cent of Britain’s oil. Anglo-Iranian military projects worth more than £1 billion were on the anvil when Whitehall asked Sir Anthony Parsons, its ambassador in Tehran, if British investments were safe. Parsons lived in a fool’s paradise. “I do not believe there is a serious risk of an overthrow of the regime while the Shah is at the helm” he wrote eight months before the Shah fled. But that is another story.
No one expected Britain to intervene in Iran. But Margaret Thatcher was expected to allow Mohammed Reza Pahlavi whom Britain and Margaret Thatcher had always eulogised as a “firm and helpful friend'” to retire to his estate in Surrey. Thatcher was said to be “deeply unhappy'” about his plight. There were reports of the Queen-Mother clucking her tongue in sympathy. But Thatcher endorsed the view of her predecessor, James Callaghan, and the foreign office that accepting the Pahlavis “would be bad for British interests”.
She was not prepared to risk trade, oil and investment to an Islamic backlash. UK firms and citizens might have been exposed to the risk of confiscation and arrest. Britain’s fourth largest market in West Asia could not be alienated only because of friendship. As a foreign office mandarin warned, asylum would also “saddle” London “with an enormous security problem”. Friends are friends only while they are useful.
This was not the first time Britain had placed political interest above personal loyalty. When Czar Nicholas II sought refuge after the Russian revolution, George V, his cousin, refused. As emperor, Nicholas had ruled a country with which Britain was still at war. The English monarch feared that welcoming his Romanov relative, whom many Britons saw as an enemy, might endanger his own throne. Nicholas and his family were murdered 16 months later.
That might also have been the Shah’s fate had he not fled. But he had nowhere to flee to. Like Britain, France, Switzerland, Monaco, Canada, Panama and South Africa were terrified of the wrath of Ayatollah Khomeini who was demanding the Shah’s repatriation so that he could be put on trial. The US, which the Shah had served faithfully, was equally frightened though Jimmy Carter said in January 1978 that there was no family with whom he would rather spend New Year’s Eve than the Shah and Shahbanou.
Britain feared international disgrace if its refusal to extend hospitality became known. So, a former British ambassador to Iran, Sir Denis Wright, masquerading under a pseudonym and disguising dark glasses, flew to the Bahamas where the Pahlavis were temporary guests to ask the Shah not to embarrass London by asking for asylum.
Similar nervousness prompted Barack Obama to cancel his scheduled meeting with the Dalai Lama in October. It would have offended China. His predecessors who did meet the Tibetan pontiff did so not out of support or sympathy but because they had a particular reason then for tweaking the Chinese dragon’s tail.
Self-interest must, of course, determine diplomacy. Nehru’s final letters to Madame Chiang Kai-shek reveal his distress at having to end a friendship because of affairs of state. But there’s a place, too, for humanity. Respect for the Dalai Lama and what he represents, not realpolitik, moved Nehru to offer hospitality in 1959, regardless of consequences. The same generosity applied when the Karmapa Lama escaped 40 years later.
Other countries accept deposed rulers to exploit them: France did so with England’s Stuart pretenders and, more recently, Nasser manipulated Libya’s deposed King Idris to annoy Gadaffi. But the limitations New Delhi has placed on both Tibetan pontiffs rule out using them in a similar manner, while also exposing India to the charge of not playing the Tibet card. But that was never the purpose of hospitality. Much is wrong with Indian diplomacy but it’s a comforting thought that India can demonstrate a compassion that is absent from the calculations of most other powers.
