As the Lok Sabha debates the drafting skills of Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh this week, here is a story on joint statements from Jawaharlal Nehru's days.

One of Nehru's close political associates was a Menon whose first name was Krishna. As India's relations with China turned sour in the late 1950s, Defence Minister Krishna Menon was caught in the eye of Delhi's political cyclone.

As he reflected on the tragedy of Sino-Indian relations a few years later, Menon remembered objecting to the bad drafting of the now famous Panchsheel agreement when it was signed by Nehru and Chinese premier Zhou Enlai in 1954.

Menon's reputation as a wordsmith was legendary and his rhetorical skills were awesome. Krishna Menon felt "the five points, as you can see, are not very well drafted... It is tautological in places, repetitive, and not very well constructed."

When Menon complained, Nehru said, "what does it matter; it isn't a treaty or anything, it's a preface to this Tibetan business". (See Michael Brecher, India and World Politics: Krishna Menon's View of the World, Bombay, Oxford University Press, 1968, pp. 142-43.)

Nehru's advice not to read too much into Panchsheel might shock the 'Nehruvians' of our time. Menon, then the leading Nehru acolyte, had a good understanding what Panditji was saying.

Menon affirmed that Panchsheel "came out of in the course of a conversation (between Nehru and Zhou). It was rather like a communiqué. It was not a revelation. It was not a creed or part of a formulation of our foreign policy."

... contd.