बदलते हुए राष्ट्रपति भवन का शनैः शनैः अवमूल्यन : The President At Home – K.P.Nayar

THE PRESIDENT AT HOME

– Tradition and change at Rashtrapati Bhavan

 K.P. Nayar

My favourite Rashtrapati Bhavan story  is about a visiting head of state who stayed there, successfully escaped its  confines and restrictions, which inevitably come from being a state guest,  and was then unsuccessfully shamed by his hosts for having attempted a  shocking escapade. This head of state, a hero of his country’s independence  movement and a close friend of Jawaharlal Nehru, also had a reputation as an  irrepressible womanizer. True to that reputation, on the second night of his  stay at Rashtrapati Bhavan, this state guest persuaded his ambassador to  smuggle him out in his diplomatic car after his hosts had retired for the  night and take him to a woman on G.B. Road, the only red light area of Delhi  in those years. An alert member of the guest’s local security detail noticed  the visiting president’s departure and within minutes an emergency meeting  was called by his higher-ups who were concerned about the guest’s safety.

After  all, the visitor was a global pioneer against anti-imperialism, and decolonization  was still a dream for many countries. Moreover, only months earlier, there  had been an assassination attempt, which the leader narrowly survived, one of  many before and after, plotted by his enemies at home and abroad. Human  intelligence at the disposal of the government had no difficulty tracing a  diplomatic car parked on G.B. Road, although the ambassador had the  discretion not to fly his national flag with his president travelling in the  vehicle.

A  dynamic, young Indian Police Service officer who was in charge of guest’s  security decided that when the ambassador’s car returned to Rashtrapati  Bhavan with the visiting president, the lights would go up along the  vehicle’s route keeping pace with its advance until the guest alighted in the  presidential porch. Moreover, the entire route along Rashtrapati Bhavan would  be lined by policemen who would salute the guest at regular intervals like a  guard of honour.

The IPS  officer, who told me the story also confessed defeat. The state visitor was  unfazed and the attempt to shame him was like water off a duck’s back. Many  decades later, when I narrated this episode at a party in Moscow, a Russian  friend confessed to a similar defeat. The same president, whose identity  diplomats of my generation would have no difficulty guessing, was a guest at  the Kremlin and the Soviets saw to it that he smuggled a woman into his  suite.

The  female, a willing Russian spy, and her lover were secretly photographed and  the pictures were then shown to the visitor who was acting difficult with the  Soviet leadership since he was a nationalist to the core and unwilling to be  a satellite in the manner of East Europeans. As in New Delhi, this state  guest disarmed his hosts in Moscow when he asked for more of those  compromising photos insisting that his stock would go up among friends back  home if he flaunted them.

Foreign  guests began fleeing Rashtrapati Bhavan in the early 1990s. Russia’s Boris  Yeltsin and Britain’s John Major were the last among the big power leaders to  spend nights there. The exodus started with Helmut Kohl of Germany, and the  process was cemented when Jacques Chirac of France firmly said no to his  host, and Bill Clinton followed some years later.

The change  had nothing to do at all with restrictions that the hero of my favourite  story chafed at. It had everything to do with the deterioration in standards  at the president’s estate and the inability of Rashtrapati Bhavan to keep  pace with the demands of a 21st-century state house. I recalled my favourite  story at this time, however, because one of the less publicized initiatives  by Pranab Mukherjee, as he observes his first anniversary as head of state,  relates to his interaction on the president’s estate with interlocutors from  abroad.

At  embassies in Chanakyapuri, there are many Indophiles who are on their second  or third postings in India after intervals spanning many years — in some  cases, several decades. Privately, almost all of them regret the damage which  K.R. Narayanan inflicted on the presidency in terms of its diplomatic  identity. Ambassadors posted to New Delhi used to look forward to the day  they would present their credentials to the president — until Narayanan  stripped the occasion of most of its ceremony and splendour. For envoys from  small countries or those with little more than formal ties with India, the  pomp of the credentials day, beginning with the grandeur of an individual  reception in the Rashtrapati Bhavan forecourt, was something to tell their  grandchildren and show off with photographs, long after their retirement from  the diplomatic service.

For  others with substantive engagement with India, from the Bhutanese in the  neighbourhood or the Japanese in the Far East to the Canadians in North  America, it was sometimes the only chance for a private chat with the  president during their entire tenure in Chanakyapuri. Narayanan destroyed the  diplomatic sanctity of the tete-à-tete. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam had  other priorities in office and Pratibha Patil had no interest in doing  anything to correct it. Indeed, she had little interest in any substantive  aspect of statecraft or was incapable of dealing with such issues.

Mukherjee,  it is clear at the end of a year in Rashtrapati Bhavan, remains a diplomat at  heart. Two stints as external affairs minister aside, among India’s defence  ministers he had the most globalized vision of all. Even as finance minister,  Mukherjee brought to the job a high level of international outreach, bringing  about unprecedented changes in North Block’s engagement of international  financial institutions.

Yet, his  personality militates against any drastic perestroika —   restructuring — in Rashtrapati Bhavan’s foreign outreach, lest it be  interpreted as an attempt to denigrate his predecessors even as he gingerly  introduces a diplomatic glasnost — openness — within the  presidency. Mukherjee has decided, for now, to continue the practice of  ambassadors presenting their credentials to him in groups in a single day  with each envoy walking up to him individually to hand over the letter of  credence. But thereafter, Mukherjee has made time for each ambassador or high  commissioner to meet him individually and have a private conversation. The  worst change that Narayanan brought about, which his two successors did  nothing to remedy, was to have several envoys presenting their credentials on  a single day and then also call on him in a group.

That  arrangement discomfited everyone and left a bad taste in the mouths of new  envoys, for whom it was one of the biggest days of their posting to be with  the host country’s head of state. Understandably, Pakistan’s high  commissioner may not want to say something to the president within earshot of  his counterpart from Bangladesh, or the Japanese ambassador would not confide  in anyone in the presence of his Russian counterpart. Throughout New Delhi’s  sprawling diplomatic enclave, the change initiated by Mukherjee has been  widely appreciated and it has restored much of the meaning of the  credentialing occasion in Rashtrapati Bhavan.

It is still a far cry from the  practice in Beijing, where presentation of credentials is like a huge  celebration: an entire embassy turns up, along with the ambassador, to meet  the president. After all it may be the only time they may meet China’s head  of state in such proximity during a three-year tenure. Hopefully, Mukherjee  will gradually restore the bar that was set for such occasions by Jawaharlal  Nehru and Rajendra Prasad. If that happens and his plans to inject efficiency  into the functioning of Rashtrapati Bhavan by a programme of modernization  and optimum utilization of resources bear fruit, a time may come when state  guests once again look forward to staying on Raisina Hill instead of checking  into hotels, a practice which robs state visits of some of their camaraderie  and tradition.