Reflections of a former Indian foreign minister

It is one thing to be a key cabinet minister in a government and quite another once the trappings of power are gone. Does a politician become wiser by hindsight when he or she is out of power to form opinions on the domestic governance and foreign policy issues that had confronted his government? This question is bound to crop up time and again as one reads senior Congress party politician and former Indian Foreign and Law Minister Salman Khurshid's latest book The Other Side of the Mountain (Hay House India, Rs 699).

Khurshid was among the key policy-framers of the Congress party and one of its best legal brains who had a ringside view of all the happenings in the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government headed by Manmohan Singh for a decade, from May 2004, before being voted out of power in the 2014 general elections. Khurshid can, therefore, legitimately claim his book to be an "authoritative, forthright and thought-provoking narrative" on several issues, including why Congress lost the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. He had key portfolios in the government and was privy to crucial behind-the-scenes developments that had a profound impact on several issues, including India's foreign policy.

The book analyses what had gone wrong in the Congress-led UPA government's handling of several domestic and foreign policy issues. Khurshid is critical of his own government's actions on these issues but, like a hard-nosed politician, refrains from pointing fingers at any of his ministerial colleagues.    

For Bangladeshi readers, the most interesting portion of the book is undoubtedly the space Khurshid devotes to how he and the UPA government had handled relations with Dhaka during his 18-month tenure as India's Foreign Minister since October 2012. One of the first and foremost tasks Khurshid was asked to do by the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was to focus on India's relations with its immediate neighbours.

Khurshid acknowledges what has been in public domain informally since long - about the importance of India's neighbourhood - that the standard yardstick considered necessary for becoming India's top diplomat, the country's Foreign Secretary, is the experience of the candidate on India's neighbours. 

Khurshid makes it clear in the book that he had been given ample space on most foreign policy issues, especially when it came to dealing with India's most immediate neighbours, including Bangladesh. "As external affairs minister," writes Khurshid, "I had a pretty free run on most matters, with the prime minister taking special interest in the neighbourhood, our rediscovery of America, the millennium conversation with China and the excitement of keeping pace with Japan."

The general perception in India is that the Congress Party has had traditionally close ties with Sheikh Hasina-led Awami League in Bangladesh, and the relations between Delhi and Dhaka have always been on the upswing whenever AL was in power. There are historical reasons for this, the most important being the Bangladesh Liberation War led by Bangbandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the role played by Indira Gandhi in espousing the cause of the war, and the close ties between Bangabandhu's daughter Hasina and her family with Congress' first family, the Gandhis. This, however, did not mean that India did not remain engaged whenever a non-AL government was in power in Bangladesh.

Personal rapport, as Khurshid argues in his book, does play an important role in relations between leaderships of two countries, but diplomacy is mostly based on enlightened national interests rather than personal likes or dislikes.   

So, when Khurshid began his mission of concentrating on dealing with India's immediate neighbours, the very first task for him was challenging - a visit by the Chairperson of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, Khaleda Zia, to New Delhi in October-November, 2012. The book talks about how delicately India has had to handle its relations with Bangladesh, in the light of the bitter political rivalry between Awami League and BNP.

"….As I looked around, there was a virtual storm brewing in Bangladesh between the Awami League Government of Sheikh Hasina (the incumbent prime minister) and the belligerent opposition led by Begum Khaleda Zia. Coincidentally, Khaleda Zia was to be the guest of the Ministry of External Affairs barely 24 hours after I took over from my predecessor S. M. Krishna," Khurshid writes in the book.

Khurshid says that he and Begum Zia "struck up a warm personal rapport in a short while and I was able to arrange for her to call on President Pranab Mukherjee on her return to New Delhi after the ziarat to Ajmer Sharif. She (Begum Zia) was very keen that she get that call and we had to carefully calculate whether it would have a negative impact on our excellent relations with her arch-rival Sheikh Hasina." It is common knowledge in the political circles in Delhi that Pranab Mukherjee has excellent personal relations with Hasina and her family since long. 

The MEA, says Khurshid in his book, "felt that we had made a breakthrough and broken the ice with Begum Khaleda Zia, our relations with whom had been frosty earlier. This was confirmed when I visited Bangladesh some months later and was fortunate to be received by Begum Khaleda Zia very warmly, who offered a sumptuous assortment of pastries and other delicacies for high tea." Khurshid also recalls that Begum Zia "made a conspicuous departure from her standard practice to remain present when I spoke to the media outside her drawing room."

But all those initial signs of positive vibes melted away "as events in Bangladesh turned to ugly confrontation on the streets between the government supporters and the young aspirational nationalists on one side and the Jamaat-e-Islami radicals on the other (and) we were virtually squeezed into the Awami League camp," says Khurshid in his book.

India had to make a choice. As Khurshid says in the book, "there was a real danger of falling between two stools and losing the momentum of the impressive achievements we had been able to make. But what the Awami League needed urgently before the general election (eventually held in January 2014) was the deal on Teesta water sharing (a deal yet to be reached) and the exchange of enclaves." Ironically, while the exchange of enclaves happened a year later - in June 2015 with Congress out of power - the Teesta deal still remains elusive even though there is consensus on the issue between India's two main political players - Congress and BJP. 

The writer is New Delhi correspondent of The Daily Star.