Opinion Drafting Diplomacy: Pandit Nehru and his Menon
As the Lok Sabha debates the drafting skills of Shivshankar Menon and PM Manmohan Singh this week,here is a story on joint statements from Jawaharlal Nehru's days.
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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.”
That is exactly what Dr Manmohan Singh and his foreign policy team is saying now about the Sharm el-Sheikh press statement. But his critics on the left and right,however,think text is everything and context matters little.
Krishna Menon had a good sense of India’s obsession with words rather than foreign policy outcomes. Talking about the deification of the Panchsheel in India during the late 1950s,Menon said,”quite frankly it was only afterwards that the Five Principles emerged as a mantra,a slogan,a prop.”
So prepare yourself for much sloganeering and drama in the Lok Sabha “on loss of India’s sovereignty and honour” and the “abandonment of foreign policy principles”.
This week’s sound and fury on the nation’s diplomacy may signify nothing. For the rules of India’s foreign policy charade have not changed. The Communists will attack anything India does with America but will never say a word against China. The BJP will reach out to America and Pakistan when in power but will attack anyone else doing the same thing.
Former Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha will forget the denunciation of BJP’s drafting when former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee did not refer to Simla Agreement when he signed a statement with General Pervez Musharraf in January 2004.
Leader of the opposition L K Advani will not recall any of the vituperation showered on him for saying something reasonable about Pakistan’s founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah during a visit to Karachi four years ago.
When you tune into the Lok Sabha debate on India’s foreign policy,don’t look for logic; just enjoy the Kabuki.
(C Raja Mohan is a professor at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies,Nanyang Technological University,Singapore.)
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