Haider, Not Quite Thither

SO India will now have a new high commissioner in London. At the third in well under a year, this is change at prime ministerial speed. Ah well, we need someone to sit in that Rolls Royce and to stand before those NRI mikes. But Indian diplomats in London are beginning to see their relative redundancy, and so no doubt will His Incoming Excellency.

With Britain these days, diplomacy is dead. The choice of high commissioner to Britain that has recently been controversial is becoming largely irrelevant. You cannot have both Robin Cook and diplomacy. The last of Salman Haider's six months in London, cut to a quarter of the two-year term for which he was appointed, gave evidence of this new reality.

There are questions whether Haider did his bit. But beyond that is the question now whether anyone can do much even if they do their bit. It's the problem of trying to talk to someone who has shut their door in your face. The new non-diplomacy was in evidence at a dinner hosted by an NRI group. Cook was chief guest. Arrangements for the evening were informally managed, some might say manipulated, by industrialist Swraj Paul, a tireless salesman in Cook's cause with the Indian community. It was a dinner that served up the new impossibilities in relations with Britain, and the new impossibilities for any high commissioner to Britain now.

Robin Cook grabbed the opportunity to launch once again into a lecture about how India had done itself no good by conducting the Pokhran nuclear tests. He kindly offered help to Britain's "erring" friend India. In short: that India should now do as Britain says. But more than what he said, it was the terms on which he spoke that spelt the end of diplomacy. For this Cook relied on Swraj Paul.

According to the order of speakers for the evening, deputy high commissioner P.K. Singh was to have spoken after Cook (Haider has stopped attending public functions). This was the Indian representative's chance to reply to Cook. He didn't get it. After saying his piece, Cook walked out from the dinner. So did his deputy Derek Fatchett. Singh was simply dropped from the list of speakers as printed. As Cook left and guests began to leave assuming that the evening was over, Singh insisted on replying to Cook's harangue. "We hope that Britain will understand that like any sovereign nation, when it comes to matters of security, we alone must decide what is and what is not good for us," he said.

But Cook wasn't around to listen. The stated reason for leaving was parliamentary business. Not quite true, officials said. His wife was surprised when he suddenly got up to leave; she had no idea there was parliamentary business, and she was his parliamentary secretary. For the British only their high commissioner to India Sir David Gore-Booth remained, that too because of his wife. He too had made as if to depart, but his wife pointed out that Singh had got up to speak, and so he sat down again.

British diplomacy, once renowned for its subtlety, is now down to "brazen badtameezi (rudeness)", an Indian official fumed. An Indian high commissioner in London today will be hard put to find someone British who might listen, or even stay on in the same room if he begins to speak.

Given Cook's continuing zest to show India down, the dinner undiplomacy was not a one-off snub but emblematic. The decision in South Block to skip Britain in opening negotiations on the CTBT last week is the Indian reply in non-diplomacy. Discussions are being initiated with the US, Russia and France. Britain, or Cook as this has come to mean in diplomatic terms, has been pointedly excluded. With the upshot that a new high commissioner to Britain—most likely the present secretary, (west), ministry of external affairs, Lalit Mansingh—will find it easier to present his credentials than his case.

Haider leaves amid allegations that he did the one and not the other. But officials argue that he was simply not attempting the impossible. Haider's difficulties in London pre-date the nuclear issue by several months. All of his six months in London have been shaky, not just the last two. Haider was on an awkward extension from I.K. Gujral's days into A.B. Vajpayee's, and it showed. Among other things, he found so much time for the press that something had to be wrong. And there are reports that just before taking up his posting, he had met Vajpayee (who was then the leader of the Opposition) to check whether he should proceed, as Gujral's fall was imminent. Vajpayee, however, was said to be non-committal in his response. More predictably, Haider seemed to be appreciated more by British diplomats than his own. The angry NRI from Southampton might have misspelt the name more meaningfully than he intended when he addressed a letter to "Salmon Heather".

THAT Salman Haider was rather English in his ways was never the issue; the point was that in him India had a high commissioner in London who seemed to have the respect more of the British Foreign Of fice than of his own. To the Foreign Office he was the right man for the wrong government; to South Block he was the wrong man for the right government. His early and awkward departure ends a phase in diplomacy when the British could deal in India with someone more or less like their own. It ended with an avoidable, if predictable, progression of shoddy moves and shouldn't-have's. Haider should never have accepted the appointment by a government that was going; he should not have continued after the government changed and especially after the new PM remarked that all political appointees of the previous government should quit; he should not have waited until as late as May to offer his resignation. Once he did, the government should not have sent him back asking him to continue; and then it shouldn't have decided two months later to accept his resignation.

"For all those six months," a senior official told 바카라, "he was there and not there, and nobody knew whether he was here to stay or go, least of all himself." Pokhran seems to have decided it. Haider, who had been in a clear hurry to take up the London posting, was in Delhi during the tests and this time seemed in no hurry to return immediately. And while he sat on, waiting in vain for an appointment with Vajpayee, the headless high commission was lost for words to speak for India.

BBC TV made several requests to ask for the Indian position on the tests. When nobody came forward it fielded the far from convincing Hinduja brothers to face suave Pakistani attacks. Haider returned later to present a very proper defence on Sky TV and some other programmes. Many thought it an exhibition of the correct minimum rather than the most possible. In fact, sources close to him claim that Haider, who prefers playing by the book, was never cut out for the aggressive diplomacy warranted by India's tests anyway.

When the BJP government wanted to speak to the British, it wasn't through Haider. He knew little about the one move made by the Indian government to recover slipping diplomatic grounds. Brajesh Mishra, Vajpayee's special emissary, was sent to meet Prime Minister Tony Blair, Robin Cook and a host of senior officials. By all accounts the British did more talking than listening. But it did mean that the high commissioner was left with no role to play, and no information either about what went on in the conduct of what should have been his job. "For the British establishment that reduces the High Commission to some sort of visa office," the Indian official said.

바카라 웹사이트It's hard to tell what damage the silence of the high commission might have done, or to tell what might have been said then that could have made a difference to anything. But nobody in Delhi was sitting down to weigh the pros and cons. Personal equations came into play quickly, as they do. Haider's opponents—and his abrasive ways with colleagues means there are many—set up a volley of charges against him. And so the pending resignation by Haider offered in May, a resignation offer which was really a request to announce his continuation, was accepted. He got that phone call from Delhi when he thought it wouldn't now come. Haider possibly did not do the most he could. Now the most that anyone can probably won't do.