Like with the economy, the realization that its foreign policy needed a new orientation had come to India a while back. Prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, especially, had reached out to the United States, China, and Israel.5 But these were baby steps, more changes in attitude than reorientation of policy. Rao needed to convert these blueprints into concrete buildings.
Prime minister Rao’s first months on foreign affairs were as decisive as his economic management. He appointed J.N. Dixit—a South Asia expert—as foreign secretary. The diplomat Salman Haidar, who would become foreign secretary in 1995, noticed more confidence in Rao. ‘As foreign minister, he was not the sort of person who could make people walk with fear. As prime minister, he demonstrated a very different kind of authority.’6 His choice of foreign minister, the politically busy Madhav Sinh Solanki, meant that it was the prime minister’s office that called the shots.
The traditional approach to Indian diplomacy was posting career bureaucrats from the IFS as ambassadors to other countries. These IFS officers were polished and diligent, but were trained in a Nehruvian past that was ill-suited to a changing world. Rao wanted to signal a new approach. He thought of sending the movie star Dilip Kumar as Indian ambassador to the Bollywood-crazy Soviet Union, cricketer Tiger Pataudi to London, music conductor Zubin Mehta to the US, and the businessman Russi Mody to Germany. J.N. Dixit protested that only professional diplomats could do justice to these sensitive posts. Dixit won the argument, but not before Rao told him, ‘Zubin Mehta would be able to get an appointment with [the CEO of General Electric] Jack Welch not only for me but for himself.’7
To convey that economic diplomacy was to be his priority, Rao’s first overseas visit, in late 1991, was to Germany, the economic engine of Europe. Ramu Damodaran remembers: ‘Before going, Rao read all the briefs given to him . . . he planned for it six weeks in advance.’8 Once in Germany, Rao made sure to extoll the virtues of investing in India—something almost no prime minister had done before. A businessman in the audience remarked that Rao’s style ‘reminded us of a corporate chief executive’.9
He also met with Indologists, a pattern that would mark his other visits abroad. Two decades earlier, during his visit to the University of Wisconsin in the United States, Rao was struck by how out of tune western scholars of India were.10 ‘As these countries opened up to India,’ Ramu Damodaran says, ‘their governments would first reach out to the India experts in their universities. Rao wanted to make sure they had an updated impression.’11
In another pattern that the prime minister was to set, he took his cook with him. As we saw in an earlier chapter, the scrawny, bare-footed Rajaiah was from Rao’s ancestral village of Vangara and had benefitted from chief minister Rao’s land reforms in 1973. He would cook a simple meal of rice, dal, curry, chutney and sambar for Rao in his hotel room.12 Home-cooked dinner over, Rao would then grace the official banquet, where he would feast on fruits, nuts and the occasional desert.13
Narasimha Rao’s German visit took place amidst chaos in the Soviet Union. In August 1991, there had been a coup attempt against the reformist Mikhail Gorbachev. Rao had a phone conversation with him on 23 August 1991. The prime minister began by saying, ‘Mr President, with God’s grace and the will of the Soviet people, you have with your inimitable courage and confidence faced the ordeal of the past seventy-two hours.’ Rao went on to assure Gorbachev that India stood by him against the ‘elements in the USSR that could act so rashly and so diametrically opposed to the will of the Soviet people’.14
Rao had misjudged the ‘will of the Soviet people’. In December 1991, the Soviet Union was formally dissolved. India’s defence contracts were now spread between a variety of nations, from Russia to Belarus to Ukraine. As the Indian ambassador to the Soviet Union put it with classic understatement, ‘Things have changed a great deal. We are learning to change too.’15
The end of the Soviet Union made it agonizingly clear that India needed to renew its relationship with the sole remaining superpower: the United States of America. It was a relationship mired in decades of mistrust and missed calls. India’s new outlook needed to be broadcast to America. Rao decided to relay it through the Middle East.
India had historically supported the Palestinian quest for nationhood, and refused full diplomatic relations with Israel. There were three reasons for this: the need for Arab oil; fear of the Muslim vote bank within India; and an anti-colonial ideology that opposed white settlements on brown land. In 1986, Rajiv Gandhi had asked his favoured diplomat Ronen Sen to list a series of steps culminating in full diplomatic relations with Israel.16 But so distracted was Rajiv by corruption allegations after 1987 that economic and foreign policy reforms lost momentum. ‘Rajiv was worried about the Muslim vote,’ says an official close to him. ‘My assessment was that associating the Palestinian issue with concerns of only Indian Muslims was wrong,’ Ronen Sen counters. ‘The assumption that Indian Muslims are not as concerned with the national interest as other citizens are is untrue.’17
Now in 1991, prime minister Rao realized that the road to Washington, D.C., ran through Tel Aviv. Krishnan Srinivasan, eventually Rao’s foreign secretary in 1994, says, ‘I think he felt he could never get a good relationship with the US going while he did not have a diplomatic relationship with Israel.’18
Rao’s chance came in December 1991, the same month that the Soviet Union was dissolved. The United States wanted an earlier resolution in the United Nations, equating Zionism with racism, to be rescinded. Rao grasped the significance of the vote. He sought advice from retired diplomats— ‘old warhorses’, he called them.19 They all counselled that India should establish diplomatic relations with Israel. Narasimha Rao also asked a senior official from the intelligence bureau: ‘What would be the impact on Muslims [if India opens up to Israel]?’ ‘It would have no impact,’ the official replied.
Rao instructed his diplomats to vote in favour of the resolution. The United States noticed.
That very month, Narasimha Rao invited the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Yasser Arafat, for a state visit. Rao sensed that Arafat was on a weak wicket. His support for Saddam Hussein had left him isolated even within the Middle East.20
Narasimha Rao prepared in advance for Arafat’s visit. Just how much is evident from his archives, where there are four drafts of his speech welcoming Arafat, each heavily pencilled by Rao. His final speech began with flattery: ‘The man we honour today needs no introduction. He has become a legend in his lifetime and a household name not only in the Arab world but in my country, and, indeed, the world over.’ The speech goes on to demand that ‘Israel withdraw from all occupied territories.’
When Arafat came in January 1992, Rao welcomed him with a bear hug. That photograph—of a smiling Rao embracing an Arafat clad in olive-green military suit, and black-and-white keffiyeh—was plastered all over the Indian press. India was not abandoning an old friend.
In private, however, Rao told Arafat that India could only put pressure on the Israelis if it had an ambassador in Tel Aviv. Arafat, a man as wily as Rao was, grasped the subtext. At a press conference in Delhi, he said, ‘[The] exchange of ambassadors and recognition are acts of sovereignty on which I cannot interfere . . . I respect any choice of the Indian government.’21
On 29 January 1992, India announced full diplomatic relations with Israel. The exultant headline of the Jerusalem Post announced, ‘India joins the World’.22
Rao moved to douse domestic fires. On 22 March 1992, he got up in Parliament and used Nehru to justify his decision, just as he had done for his liberalization policies. ‘When we talk of recognising Israel, I do not know what the honourable members really mean. Because we have recognised Israel long time ago when Panditji was alive. What we have now done is to have diplomatic relations. We have a Consulate already in Bombay.’23
In order to balance his outreach to Israel, Rao decided to pay an official visit to Iran.24 India also needed Iranian help in combating Pakistan o
n Kashmir, and clearing the debris in the Muslim world from the Babri Masjid demolition. Worried that opposition parties would attack him for this, Rao sent the diplomat M.K. Bhadrakumar to brief the BJP leader L.K. Advani. Given their bitterness over Babri Masjid, this showed dispassion and pragmatism on the prime minister’s part. Advani rose to the occasion. He listened carefully before saying, ‘I wish all success for the PM’s visit to Iran.’25
Ties between Israel and India have strengthened much since Narasimha Rao’s time. In 2012, defence contracts alone were worth nine billion dollars a year.26 India no longer automatically votes against Israel in the United Nations. That this friendship has been able to flower without affecting India’s relationship with the Iranians and Arabs owes much to Rao’s efforts to disguise change in the garb of continuity.
With economic liberalization at home, foreign capital was now officially allowed into India. But convincing sceptical countries and corporates required more than a rule change. It required economic diplomacy. This had almost never been attempted before. Indian diplomats were used to either pontificating about Third World solidarity in the United Nations or petitioning the West for wheat and dollar loans. They had little experience selling the economy to private investors abroad.
A few months after he took over power, Rao sent a note to all Indian missions, asking them to promote India as an investment destination. On foreign visits—including to Germany and Iran—Rao took with him a planeload of businessmen. ‘Tarun Das and CII especially, were well liked in government circles. He was often on the plane,’ Krishnan Srinivasan remembers. ‘These businessmen could access top politicians from that country in a way they could not do otherwise.’27
The most visible example of Rao’s economic diplomacy was his two visits to the World Economic Forum in Davos. As we saw in the chapter on growing the economy, these visits were the first by an Indian prime minister. Though politicians abound, Davos is famous for hosting money men from around the globe. As Rao put it in a speech in February 1992, ‘I have come here not so much to make a speech, but to know and learn something at this Economic Mecca. I am told that just about everyone who is anyone in the world of business and industry is here. This is a sort of pilgrimage for me. You don’t go and lecture on a pilgrimage.’28
During these visits, Rao—who lacked the handshaking and backslapping routine of a Bill Clinton—was nonetheless able to convey that he meant business; as of 2015, international trade accounted for more than 40 per cent of Indian GDP.29 ‘He was not a person interested in a personal legacy,’ Ronen Sen remembers.30 He said that when it came to the integration of the [Indian] economy to global markets, he would be judged by results.’
In 1993, Narasimha Rao prepared to travel across the border—3500 kilometres of it.31 The boundary with China had been demarcated by the British in 1914, and India took that line to be non-negotiable. The Chinese had never accepted the value of the British line, and this difference of opinion led to border hostilities in 1962. India had been pounded in the war, and relations had since chilled.
When prime minister Rajiv Gandhi decided to break the ice and visit China in 1988, his foreign minister Narasimha Rao had concerns, but soon fell in line. Rajiv established three working groups with the Chinese: on the boundary dispute; technology; and the economy.32 But it was the sheer optics of the visit that improved ties. The then director of the intelligence bureau, M.K. Narayanan, says, ‘There is no denying the fact that the Rajiv Gandhi visit created a major change.’33
Narasimha Rao had been part of the Indian delegation to Beijing in 1988. As foreign minister once before in the early 1980s, he had watched Deng mouthing Mao while moving towards the market. Rao had learnt from this doublespeak and was looking forward to finally meeting his idol. But—as we saw in an earlier chapter—Rajiv chose not to take either his foreign minister or foreign secretary with him to meet Deng. He only took along two relatively junior officials, one of them being Ronen Sen. ‘Rao was very, very hurt,’ a bureaucrat present remembers. ‘He felt he had been slighted.’
In December 1991, soon after Rao became prime minister, Chinese premier Li Peng had visited India. In preparation for the visit, a former Indian ambassador to China had sent Rao a ‘personal note on India China relations’. The note sketched out the personality of Li Peng, ending with ‘Multi-party democracy, political pluralism, human-rights of a western kind, social permissiveness among youth etc. are all anathema to him’.34 Rao underlined that sentence, as he did the conclusion of the note: ‘He is still the man with whom we must do business at least for a little more time to come.’
So nuanced is global diplomacy that most prime ministers defer to their mandarins. Not Rao. In the note, the former ambassador had recommended that ‘India and China could cooperate for South Asian prosperity. Why not think of Joint Sino-Indian projects in Nepal and Bangladesh.’ On the margins, in precise, slanted handwriting, Rao wrote: ‘On the other hand, this will only tend to enhance Chinese influence in these countries to our detriment. The ganging up of our neighbours against us will get a shot in the arm. This may not be tried just now.’
Two years after Li Peng’s visit, Rao returned the favour. When he travelled to China in September 1993, he spoke to President Ziang Zemin of civilizational links.35 As the diplomat Prabhakar Menon (at the time a joint secretary in the PMO) put it, ‘Rao felt that India and China were bound by deeper, philosophical ties more than by a grocery list of things to sell and buy.’36 The highlight of the visit was the signing of the ‘Agreement on the Maintenance of Peace and Tranquillity along the . . . India-China Border Areas’. The pact created a separate mechanism to resolve the dispute, while laying out a series of measures—such as reducing troop movement on the border—designed to defuse tensions.37
The agreement was classic Rao. Faced with a border dispute that seemed irreconcilable, Rao isolated it from other aspects of the Indo-China relationship. This logic has worked well. Trade relations have boomed while, as Ronen Sen says, ‘Factually, China is the most peaceful border we have with any country, thanks to Rao.’38 ‘I do think the peace and tranquillity agreement is a landmark,’ M.K. Narayanan agrees. ‘You can keep arguing [about the border] while delinking it from the rest.’39
While the trip was a diplomatic triumph for Rao, it was a personal failure. Rao wanted to meet Deng, something that Rajiv had denied him in 1988. Deng had by now retired from active politics. He declined to meet with the visiting Indian prime minister. The gossip was that Deng would have agreed to meet someone from the Nehru-Gandhi family.40 Rao was not considered worthy enough.
Narasimha Rao’s Air India One took off from Beijing airport on 9 September 1993. It headed east, to South Korea. Salman Haidar was in charge of the trip. He remembers: ‘India was slow in reacting to the countries east of China. We were clouded by China.’41
I had heard the phrase, ‘Go West, Young Man,’ Haidar says. ‘I coined the term “Look East”.’
Rao became the first Indian prime minister to travel to Korea. In the 1950s and ’60s, the newly decolonized countries of South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia were poor and weak. Nehruvian India, large and democratic, was the leader of the post-colonial world. Indian foreign policy towards East Asia had been a mix of unfamiliarity as well as paternal pomposity. In 1967, when these countries grouped together to form ASEAN, they excitedly invited India to join. India had refused. By the 1980s however, these ‘Coca Cola governments’ had several times the per capita income of India, boasted soaring education and health standards, and were able to project global influence. Narasimha Rao’s daughter Vani travelled with him to Korea as first lady. She remembers her father asking, ‘This is such a small country. Why are they able to have such roads? Why can’t we do that? The basic thing is education. We are behind by thirty years.’42
On 10 September 1993, at a banquet hosted by the Korean President in Seoul, Rao played travelling salesman. ‘The Indian economy is the second largest in the developing w
orld. Its 250-million strong middle class provides a market for manufactured goods which is potentially among the largest in the world . . . We would welcome more Korean businesses to come to India . . .’43 He met with Korean business families. The head of the chaebol Daewoo was particularly keen to chat with Rao. They met in Seoul and within a few weeks again in Delhi. Daewoo cars were soon being driven on Indian roads.44
Rao visited Bangkok in that same year and met with a swathe of leaders, including Buddhist monks and corporate titans. He even had a two-hour session with the revered king,45 the right tactic given the king’s influence over Thai politics. As he got off his plane, a journalist watching through the window called Rao ‘Ninja Turtle’. ‘He purses his lips, walks with a slight stoop, has a back that brushes off everything, listens to a guru, walks fast and hits hard without seeming to.’46
The turtle visited another Asian tiger in 1994. Singapore was considered the gateway to East Asia, and in Tarun Das’s words, ‘an important listening post for multinationals’.47 Rao began the visit routinely, giving a typical speech with Lee Kuan Yew in the audience. But he sparkled in the question-answer session.48 When asked about the Indian economy, Rao—in mock humility—pointed to Montek Singh Ahluwalia and Lee Kuan Yew, and said that there were many Oxbridge intellectuals on stage who were better equipped to answer. The evening’s most memorable moment was when the Pakistani high commissioner, present in the audience, asked Rao a brusque question on Kashmir.49 Rao did not condescend to reply, telling the high commissioner that he was wrong, and the Indian high commissioner to Singapore (i.e. his counterpart) would give him a fitting reply. His answer was greeted with applause from the partisan audience.
Lee Kuan Yew, an astute judge of leadership, said that he had rarely been so delighted and impressed by a foreign leader.50 But it is to his successor Goh Chok Tong that the credit for furthering Indo-Singapore relations goes.51 As Congress leader Jairam Ramesh puts it, ‘India can look East all it wants. But the East also has to look back. Goh played a critical role in that.’52
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