NEWSMAKER: ShivShankar Menon

The consummate diplomat

When Shivshankar Menon was appointed Foreign Secretary superseding 12 other Foreign Service officers, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh took a calculated risk but stood steadfast, ignoring the outcry.

He’s now been vindicated. With the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) clearance to the Indo-US Civil Nuclear Agreement, India is now part of an elite club through sheer force of diplomacy without having fired a single shot.

US Ambassador in India, David Mulford, confessed on 10 September at a celebratory lunch he held for Ambassadors of the European Union nations that hours before the crucial meeting of the NSG, he’d thought it wasn’t going to happen.

Menon candidly admitted, also on 10 September, that there were several moments when he thought the deal wouldn’t go through. Forty-eight hours before it was cleared, he almost rang up his wife Mohini to say: “It’s over, it isn’t happening, I’m coming home.”

In the well-ordered world of diplomacy, hurricanes hardly happen. But with two key protagonists in the nuke deal drama giving up hope almost simultaneously, NSG clearance to the deal is nothing short of a miracle. “It’s fantastic. India has told the world with dignity and confidence that it can be trusted. The world is ready to trust it,” the Ambassador of a Nordic country told Business Standard.

Obviously, it was a team effort and Menon waved away any credit. But he explained the mechanics of how it was done: “It was like a game of jujitsu, where you use the combined weight of your opponents to topple them.”

Few know that the US didn’t know China was going to support the deal until India told it. “Are you sure?” the Americans asked incredulously until India showed their team the messages from Beijing. Reports about US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice speaking to Chinese leaders Hu Jin Tao and Wen Jia Bao and making them change their mind into securing their support is not an accurate recollection of the events, foreign office sources said.

If the docket that says “Indo-US Civil Nuclear Agreement” has now been cleared from Menon’s desk, another one has landed on it: Setting the neighbourhood right. At a time when Nepal, Sri Lanka and Pakistan are not clear about what their internal politics is going to be, there is great danger of India becoming the focus. This challenge has to be fended off without exposing the argument for what it is: Disingenuous.

Menon has good credentials for using tact to solve problems. As India’s envoy in Pakistan, Sri Lanka and China, he has chosen the JN Dixit approach of ‘neighbourhood first’. At the same time, as a middle-level officer in Vienna and later as the Ministry of External Affairs representative in the Department of Atomic Energy, Menon found no difficulty in getting his head around complex disarmament and proliferation issues.

In dealing with politicians, he has shown he is clever as well as wise. When Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee was in Colombo for the recent Saarc meeting, in the absence of a routine briefing, reporters were anxious to hear what his Pakistani counterpart had to say and Mukherjee saw no harm in sharing the information. But this didn’t particularly suit the foreign office and the minister had to listen to his secretary: “Sir, I’m sure they would rather be at the bar”. “Yes, I forgot,” said Mukherjee jovially. There was no unscheduled briefing by the minister that day. The foreign secretary made no friends among reporters that day.

When the NSG meeting was concluded, the MLA from Palakkad – who happens to be from the CPI(M) — called Menon. “You’ve done Palakkad proud” he said, oblivious to any irony.