Commentary/Mani Shankar Aiyar

The Day After

What a team we'd set up: our very own best and the brightest. In Mani Dixit, a future foreign secretary destined to distinguish himself as the first foreign secretary in four to have had neither an aborted end nor a Caesarean beginning! Back in Delhi, K P S Menon Jr, as head of the Bangladesh division (political) -- a future foreign secretary, and Ram Sathe as head of the Bangladesh division (economic) -- another future foreign secretary.

In Dhaka, Arjun Sengupta, plucked from the obscurity of an anonymous lectureship at D School to be set on the path to glory that was to make him economic czar in Indira Gandhi's PMO (a kind of poor man's Montek Singh Ahluwalia!), executive director in the World Bank, ambassador to the European Union and now member, Planning Commission, with the rank of minister of state and a mansion on Shahjahan Road to prove it.

Alongside him, as counsellor (political), Chandrashekhar Dasgupta, my in house guru since my first day at St Stephen's, now the most deserving candidate to succeed either Salman Haider as foreign secretary or Prakash Shah in New York, provided superannuation does not catch up with him before Chidambaram picks up the courage to act on the Pay Commission's report which, it is rumoured (in Bengali Market, where you can purchase the full secret text for the price of a greasy samosa), has recommended an extension of the retirement age of babudom to 60 or 600 or something.

In the second echelon, we had Arundhati Ghose - Bangadidi! -- who must have been the most toasted diplomat we, or anyone else, has ever sent anywhere. The whole of the Mukti Bahini and most of the Awami League's chhatras and jubas would crowd at her feet, her home becoming a kind of Diwan e Aam for the youngsters to takea breather between bouts of avenging themselves on the Biharis, to the Bangadidi's abiding horror.

Unsurprisingly, she has gone on to become the toast of the entire world diplomatic community, standing up to the bullies at the UN Disarmament Conference, disarming them with her charm while giving them hell on the CTBT, all alone the girl on the burning deck. She was deputy to Sengupta; deputy to Dasgupta was Sati Lambah.

The poor chap did such an outstanding job of it that he was compelled to spend most of the next quarter century growing into our foremost Pakistan expert. He is at present on furlough as ambassador to Germany; if the Pay Commission won't let him retire, I'm warning him that his next posting is going to be Dhaka. Such, in the foreign service, are the Wages of Virtue!

I made my second visit to Dhaka days after the formidable Subimal Dutt had presented his credentials as our first high commissioner. Dutt was the venerable consequence of a strict bhadralok upbringing, a lifetime in the ICS, and two decades in the studied formalities of an Edwardian diplomatic style that was Jurassic Park for us of the Beatles generation.

So, Dixit and Co, did not know quite whether to be congratulatory or incredulous when the high commissioner instructed them to invite me to tea. They pointed out, discreetly and sotto voce, that I might be a splendid fellow and all that but, for all that, a mere undersecretary. 'Headquarters' replied Subimal Dutt, cutting of the argument at source.

When I arrived, he gravely listened as I recounted to him, in tones of awed respect (Mani-talk was still in the future), how Ashok Mitra, then chief economic adviser (and how the Rajya Sabha's Great Commie Bore), had made an awful boo-boo, dictatorily laying down in our committee, without checking what was the unit price of every commodity we were sending Bangladesh and being so hopelessly wrong that the Rs 250 million (then a substantial sum) set aside by the government for the purpose would not let us supply even half the quantities listed in the press release we had issued to let the world know how generous we were before the Bangabandhu had quite landed in Dhaka from Lahore via London and Delhi.

I said that I had been sent out from Delhi to persuade the Bangladeshis to take less without making a fuss. And what, asked the high commissioner, was the outcome of my discussions? I told him of how the Bangladesh commerce ministry had that morning convened a meeting of all concerned where the lower quantities had been mutually agreed. He gravely nodded.

Next day we flew together back to Delhi and almost immediately went into a meeting chaired by the cabinet secretary where Topic No 1 was the outcome of my mission to Dhaka. I reported on the success achieved and was in the midst of preening myself on the congratulations being murmured when I heard Dutt's precise voice cutting like a knife through the air: 'Understandings between under-secretaries do not constitute agreements between governments.' In a phrase, we were brought to earth. He was right, of course. We ended up shelling out more than twice the amount the chief economic adviser had insisted would more than suffice.

The early days in Bangladesh were days of great informality. Both the political masters like D P Dhar and humbler civil servants like Mani Dixit and Arundhati Ghose, had known the political leadership of Bangladesh since the dark days of Mujibnagar.

Prime Minister Tajuddin Ahmed was a particular friend and all the others were well-known and closely acquainted. It was possible to step in and out of their houses and offices without fuss or ado. That changed, of course, as it would and should have, as the government established itself and started fully functioning.

But the past was long enough with us for the full horror of the assassinations of August and November 1975 to his us in the solar plexus as a very personal loss. Mujib and his entire family wiped out, bar Hasina who was fortuitously in Europe that day with her nuclear physicist husband.

And Tajuddin, Qamaruzzaman, Mansoor Ali Khan and dozens of others gunned down in cold blood in Dhaka jail a few months later. I remembered Nurul Islam, as minister of industry, asking on a visit to Delhi whether he might take a walk on his own in the Nehru Park outside Delhi's Ashoka Hotel. He wanted to relive the many hours he had paced up and down its manicured lawns hoping in despair and despairing in hope, wondering whether the nightmare of Pakistan's brutal occupation of his country would ever end. And now, he too was dead, killed not by the hated Pakistanis but by his own, his very own kind.

There is only one survivor of Mujibnagar into the Silver Jubilee -- Abdus Samad Azad, then foreign minister, now again foreign minister. It seems as if Death had chosen them to reap with its sickle, not gently lay to the ground.

And so is Indira Gandhi gone, and so is the protagonist of the other side -- Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, both unnaturally, one by the assassins's bullets, the other by the hangman's noose. Uneasy, indeed, lies the head that wears the crown for within the hollow crown that rounds the mortal temples of a king keeps Death his court. It is difficult to survive glory.

Tamam Shudh!

Shanti! Shanti! Shanti!