From midnight tantrums to PowerPoint: Evolution of Indian diplomacy

India’s diplomats have never quite faced a challenge like Donald Trump. Erratic, performative, and impervious to nuance, he treats geopolitics like a real estate deal — announcing imaginary oil finds one week, sulking over India’s refusal to sign a lopsided trade agreement the next. One moment he’s praising Prime Minister Narendra Modi at a rally, the next he’s floating energy pacts with Islamabad as if the subcontinent were a game show set. For a diplomatic service steeped in restraint and history, the Trumpian world is disorienting. Strategy gives way to theatre; alliances must be interpreted rather than negotiated. It wasn’t always like this. I remember an older world of diplomacy — often eccentric, sometimes absurd, but never empty. A world of midnight tantrums and gifts delivered in Daimlers. I encountered it as a journalist, and sometimes as a child, in drawing rooms, embassies, and odd corners of London and the Middle East. This is a portrait of that world. A time when diplomacy had a soul — and, occasionally, a stolen chicken.

After Independence, Jawaharlal Nehru saw diplomacy as performance — India, a new actor on the world stage, needed to be seen. Embassies bloomed from Washington to Warsaw, Nairobi to Tokyo. The challenge was staff. There simply weren’t enough trained diplomats to match Nehru’s ambition. Into this gap stepped a patchwork of “political appointees”— retired politicians, princely grandees, loyal civil servants. Some were patrician relics; others, idealists from the freedom struggle cast in unfamiliar roles. They became India’s first foreign cast — poetic, theatrical, flawed, occasionally inspired. I remember the Maharaja of Patiala arriving for lunch at our home in Ambala, stepping out of a gleaming Cadillac — a car so rare in India it felt like Hollywood had rolled up to our front gate. Fabulously wealthy and faintly amused, he later served as ambassador to Rome. Like many of his class, he had inherited the manner of command but not the machinery of governance.

Then there was the Maharaja of Jaipur, posted to Madrid, who became a legend for serving Scotch whisky in the first round and Indian whisky in the second — discreet thrift dressed as royal hospitality. Nehru’s sister, Vijayalakshmi Pandit, India’s first female envoy, brought a different kind of grandeur. In London, she ruled from a grand, multiple-bedroom mansion on Kensington Palace Gardens — “KPG” to those in the know — lavishly furnished with Danish imports. She could summon staff at midnight to complain about blocked drains and preferred young male assistants. At diplomatic parties, she swept through like a monarch in exile. Rumours trailed her from Moscow to Mexico — about loneliness, unrequited romances, and a lifelong feud with Indira Gandhi. She believed she deserved the presidency. She never got it. But her legend lingers.

Some early envoys came from the Indian Civil Services, others from the freedom struggle. One, the stately Dr Jivraj Mehta, a former Chief Minister of Gujarat, was famous for dozing through state banquets, his snores louder than the speeches. Not all fit the bureaucratic mould. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, philosopher-statesman and future Vice President, stunned Soviet audiences with Sanskrit quotations and long silences. His presence reminded them India’s authority ran deeper than politics. Even Mrs Pandit, for all her flair, couldn’t match that blend of intellect and mystery.

One young Foreign Service probationer I met years later in Lebanon once spoke of founding a left-wing party. He won Yasser Arafat’s trust and seemed surprised others found him prickly. I met him again as a state governor, quoting Nehru as scripture, still convinced his genius was unrecognised. Later came a wave of quieter professionals. One, stationed in Colombo during the Tamil conflict, arranged for me to be smuggled into Jaffna in the back of a fruit truck. That journey — through roadblocks and wary villagers — remains one of the most surreal of my reporting life. He entered politics and now holds a senior Cabinet post. Another, with a PhD in strategy, rose to become Foreign Secretary and then External Affairs Minister. A cerebral tactician with steel, he still steers Indian diplomacy.

More recently came the gentleman-diplomats — fluent in literature and tennis, equally at ease on the op-ed page and diplomatic circuit. They translated poetry, avoided theatrics, and preferred nuance over noise. If the Service had more like them, it would need fewer press briefings. Best to leave their names unspoken —their stories still unfolding.

Some impressions came from more intimate corners. PN Haksar, later Indira Gandhi’s advisor, once served in London. When I was a boy, he was a family friend. While others brought whisky or roses, he arrived with lumps of candle wax, instructing me to mould animals. When I travelled to boarding school in the UK, it was Haksar who arranged for the High Commission’s limousine to meet us at Gatwick. That ride, all polished wood and leather, felt like a state visit in miniature. As he rose to power, the warmth faded. No more wax — but never a hint of ideological doubt.

In Islamabad, Ambassador Shankar Bajpai once invited me to lunch. As I arrived, guards were running, weapons drawn. I thought we were under attack. It turned out his long-legged greyhound had jumped the embassy wall, stolen a roasting chicken from the Pakistani soldiers outside, and returned with it clamped in its jaws. It took another chicken and some swift diplomacy to calm things down. The dog was not invited to lunch.

Yes, some ambassadors were eccentric. A few were creative with inventory. But many were memorable — flawed, human, sometimes brilliant. They served in a time when diplomacy allowed for personality, when a misplaced tiger skin could cause scandal and a “tanpura” played over the Nile could cast a spell.

Today’s Foreign Service practitioners are sharper, cleaner, more professional —many of them fluent in tough negotiations and subtle persuasion, quietly helping India navigate a fractured world. In place of the grand gestures of old, the Service today offers something else — deep knowledge, careful calibration, and a moral seriousness that reflects India’s growing role in the world. Yet in the rush to modernize, something vital may have drained away. Poetry gave way to PowerPoint. Risk was replaced by restraint. The soul of diplomacy, once visible in eccentric gestures and moonlit music, now hides behind bulletproof glass and managed optics.

Even so, one still meets the occasional ambassador who carries faint echoes of that earlier age — gracious, grounded, capable of speaking not just for a government but for a civilisation. In an era of caution and careerism, they remind us how statecraft once allowed for memory, style, and meaning. Yet now, in a world of tariffs, tweets, and imaginary oilfields, Indian statecraft endures. Its finest practitioners still draw on memory — of predecessors who were theatrical, imperfect, but never forgettable. Trump may reduce diplomacy to theatre, but its soul — measured, layered, oddly human — has not entirely vanished.

The writer is the London correspondent of The Tribune.