Guess, who all came to dinner?

MK Bhadrakumar, A former ambassador

MK Bhadrakumar, A former ambassador

When someone, anyone, like me who is not a power seeker says he can no longer trust the credibility of the Indian Prime Minister, it is indeed a sad day. When politicians are in power, their persona blends with the hallowed office they are sworn to preserve. Simply put, Prime Minister Narendra Modi brought discredit to the office he holds, because no one would want to think of the head of government of this flourishing democracy as untrustworthy. 

During the past three-four days of the PM's election campaign in Gujarat, he made such sly innuendos about his predecessor, which transgresses political morality and brought forth a pointed rejoinder already, demanding his recant and apology. The PM cavalierly sidestepped the truth, which is truly frightening because he is also the custodian of India's national interests. At the very least, it is below the dignity of a PM to start discussing at public meetings a social event in South Delhi at a private residence to which he wasn't even invited. 

Besides, what was that social event about? Mani Shankar Aiyar organised a dinner in honour of his old friend from Cambridge days who was visiting India, who also happens to be a former foreign minister of Pakistan — Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri. Put differently, he inter alia provided an occasion for interaction on India-Pakistan relations. Period. 

But the outlandish version that PM gave is painful to read. None of those horrible, shameful things of betrayal or treason that PM claims actually took place at that social event. That is the plain, honest truth. Those of us who attended the dinner talked about a whole lot of things under the sun, including the India-Pakistan relationship. A senior colleague and I even discussed how to organise a vacation for him and his family in Kerala. Are the Munnar teagardens preferable to Kovalam beach, or is it the backwaters that merit the description of Kerala being God's own country? Frankly, Kasuri himself arrived rather late since his flight to Amritsar was delayed. 

As the evening wore on, the conversation needed intellectual uplift. The guests were by and large lamenting about time past in India's troubled relations with Pakistan. Any post-mortem ceases to be interesting beyond a point. I was most interested to listen to what former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh would say, because he is a rare Indian statesman who made a sincere effort to cut the Gordian knot of India-Pakistan tensions — and almost succeeded. But Manmohan Singh, instead, chose to listen. Kasuri himself mostly spoke about the book he wrote in a painstaking effort through four years on the India-Pakistan relationship.

More than half the invitees were former foreign service officers and, predictably, they have a way of getting away by saying airy nothings eloquently. Ironically, if anything, the Indian invitees might have ended up irritating Kasuri at times by harping on the famous Kissinger question to frame the perennial Indian predicament vis-à-vis Pakistan: whom to dial up in Islamabad as an interlocutor. I found even the irrepressible Prem Shankar Jha shelving his grave skepticism of what the Modi government is doing in J&K, to focus on how Pakistan can help India to end the suffering of the Kashmir people. I have no doubt that our last High Commissioner to Pakistan TCA Raghavan simply reveled in the lavish admiration he got from everyone present at the dinner for that fantastic book he authored, The People of Next Door: The Curious History of India-Pakistan Relations, which traverses with sensitivity the ridge that separates creative writing from political analysis, and makes a profound contribution to peace in the subcontinent.  

Personally speaking, I tried (in vain) to inject some liveliness by casting one eye at time on future - how India-Pakistan relationship is being buffeted increasingly by geopolitics that crept into regional politics. But the conversation stuck to hackneyed themes — voyeuristic at times, and mostly anecdotal. By the way, Kasuri himself makes an outstanding raconteur for a diplomat. It was a perfect evening for someone who wants to write a book on why India-Pakistan relations remain frozen in time. 

All in all, therefore, it came as a shock to me that India's Prime Minister raised such a hullabaloo over Aiyar's dinner. What PM said had absolutely no relation to what transpired at that dinner, which ended early due to Kasturi's haste to depart for the hotel. The only solid fact in the PM's fanciful account was that the dinner over drinks, endless strings of kebabs and great food lasted three hours. Make no mistake, no secrets were traded; there was no tradeoff in India's national interests; no one brought 'instructions' from Pakistan; and, most certainly, no one uttered the word 'Gujarat' through an entire evening.  

Therefore, why the PM conjured up from thin air such an appalling narrative is for him to explain. He probably resorted to what Napoleon would have done under frayed nerves — a feint attack in the fading light of the Gujarat election campaign. But nothing can justify what he has done.