Derecho de Alimentos en la Legislacion Chilena

t was not until 1977, after Morarji Desai had become Prime Minister, that his not-so-benign shadow crossed my professional path. At the time I was Deputy High Commissioner in London. A top-secret telegram arrived on 24 March 1977 telling the High Commissioner, B.K. Nehru, that I should immediately be asked to proceed on leave and hand over charge. This entailed considerable upheaval for my wife and our two little children.

In June, the Commonwealth Summit was held in London and Morarji Desai decided to attend. He stayed with Indira Gandhi’s cousin, B.K. Nehru, at 9 Kensington Palace Gardens, one of the most elegant addresses in London. This surprised me. B.K. Nehru, like me, had defended the Emergency. I learnt that as soon as Morarji Desai took over as PM, Fori Nehru, B.K. Nehru’s wife, had written him ingratiating letters. Mrs Gandhi was livid when she learnt that her second cousin was playing host to her principal political opponent. As I was on compulsory leave, I kept out of the way of the Prime Minister. One evening, I got a telephone call from B.K. Nehru telling me that the Prime Minister wished to see the High Commissioner’s ‘Discretionary Grant’ register. Important diplomatic posts have such funds at their disposal and I, as Deputy High Commissioner, had charge of the Discretionary Grant. B.K. Nehru asked me how much of the grant we had utilized in the past one year and how much was sanctioned by the government. I told him to send for the grant register and show it to Morarji Desai. The amount sanctioned was five thousand pounds, of which five hundred pounds had been utilized. The rest had been surrendered.

I was later told that the Prime Minister was quite beside himself on hearing this and accused me of hiding facts. He had apparently been told by some of his admirers in London that Mrs Gandhi was in direct touch with me and vast amounts of foreign currency were sent by diplomatic bag to me. In retrospect, this sounds farcical and fanciful. It was not so pleasant at the time.

Obviously Morarji Desai had not the vaguest idea of what a diplomatic bag contained.

Diplomatic bags are not used to smuggle currency. Category A diplomatic bags are used to send secret dispatches, confidential records and the like, while Category B and C bags carry newspapers and other unimportant items. No cash can be included in these bags. The bags are opened under the supervision of a First Secretary. Since Morarji Desai could not prove his claim, he calmed down.

A day or two later, B.K. Nehru called again. ‘Natwar, the PM tells me that on 26 June [the day the Emergency was declared] you threw a champagne party at the High Commission.’ This was preposterous. I reminded Nehru that on the 26th, he and I were together at the High Commission throughout the day, answering queries mainly from the media. I could not resist telling him, ‘Bijju Bhai, are you sure you did not give a champagne party at 9 K.P.G?’ B.K. Nehru had a sense of humour and enjoyed the joke.

Some weeks after Morarji Desai was sworn in as Prime Minister, I was posted as High Commissioner to Zambia. In the Janata establishment, all African countries were considered punishment postings—Kala Pani. Had Morarji Desai been aware that I knew President Kenneth Kaunda rather well since 1962, he would have posted me elsewhere. I got to know Mr Kaunda when he appeared as petitioner before the Decolonization Committee in New York and I was the rapporteur of the committee.

We left London on 10 August 1977, arriving in Lusaka the next morning after a ten-hour flight. I had been to Lusaka twice, with the UN Committee on Decolonization, but this was my wife’s first exposure to the African continent. Our two children, Jagat and Ritu, were nine and seven years old then. We sent them both to boarding schools in India.

Lusaka was a leisurely place, with an amazing climate. Zambia at the time was the frontline state against the apartheid regime in South Africa and the Ian Smith government in Southern Rhodesia. It was a hospitable destination for exiled Southern African freedom fighters. The leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa, the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), and the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) spent most of the time in Lusaka. I got to know and admire them. They were fighting against heavy odds. The Western democracies were supporting the racist South Africa and the Ian Smith regimes. He proclaimed that not in a thousand years would Southern Rhodesia have elections on the principle of one man, one vote. In fact, it was all over for Ian Smith by April 1980. South Africa had to wait for another ten years to put an end to Apartheid.

Nelson Mandela was released on 10 February 1990. That day Africa changed.

I was also accredited to Botswana, led by President Seretse Khama. In 1950, Sir Seretse Khama married an English girl while at Oxford, and this became a cause célèbre. The British government opposed this marriage, and his uncle, the Chief of Botswana, disowned him. Sir Seretse Khama did not bend or bow. After ten years, he made a triumphant return to Gaborone, the capital of Botswana.

President Kaunda of Zambia was deeply religious, happily married and hero-worshipped Mahatma Gandhi. He was a genuine friend of India. He and Indira Gandhi had a close relationship.

When Indira Gandhi lost the 1977 elections, President Kaunda said to me, ‘Natwar, Indira has lost the elections. She has not lost my friendship. Tell her so in whatever way you can.’ Kaunda had an Indian

‘guru’, Ranganathan, who had come to Zambia as a teacher. Ranganathan had a remarkable facility; he could describe future events with astonishing accuracy and Kaunda consulted him before taking decisions of vital national interest. Thanks to Ranganathan, I was the best informed diplomat in Zambia and could also meet the President at short notice. No other Head of Mission had this privilege.

Joshua Nkomo was a well-recognized leader of Southern Rhodesia. He had come as a petitioner to the UN in 1962. India fully backed him in the Committee on Decolonization. I was the Indian representative on the committee and got to know him well. From 1964 to 1974, he was imprisoned by the Ian Smith regime. As soon as I got to Lusaka, I established contact with him. The first news he gave me was of his abortive meeting with Morarji Desai in London, a few months earlier, at the Commonwealth Summit. The Prime Minister had called him a terrorist. One of the leading freedom fighters of Southern Africa, Joshua Nkomo, had been deeply offended and had terminated the meeting.

I got to know him well in Lusaka. He enjoyed Indian food. We had long and lively political discussions. He improved my knowledge of the situation in all colonial countries in Southern Africa.

Morarji Desai had no notion of what was happening in South Africa, Southern Rhodesia and Namibia; neither did he personally know the leading luminaries of Africa, south of the Sahara. He

made no effort to get to know them either. Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, on the other hand, knew many of them personally. African leaders looked up to India and held Gandhiji, Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi in high esteem.

A few months after my arrival, I wrote to the Ministry of External Affairs that Joshua Nkomo wished to visit India. He would be accompanied by three senior leaders of ZAPU. He asked for first-class air tickets from Lusaka to Nairobi and to New Delhi. I assured him that his wishes would be respected. Such invitations do not involve any policy decisions. We were spending millions on humanitarian assistance to almost all freedom movements in Africa; four first-class air passages would be no burden on the ministry’s budget. The response from the ministry was as unexpected as it was wooden-headed. The government would sanction first-class air travel only for Joshua Nkomo;

his colleagues would be given economy-class air tickets. I sent a coded telegram to the head of the Africa division in the ministry, conveying my views on treating a popular and courageous leader in this demeaning manner. I also injected a bon mot as a teaser: ‘Having swallowed camels we are now straining at gnats.’ My telegram was shown to Prime Minister Morarji Desai by the Foreign Secretary. The Prime Minister, who probably did not understand the phrase, remarked that I was being impertinent and disobedient.

I told Nkomo that the present time was not suitable for the Indian government to receive him.

Perhaps later, mutually convenient dates could be worked out. What else could I tell him? He was too seasoned a man not to see through my diplomatese.

In February 1978, I came home on leave for two months. I naturally met Mrs Gandhi and gave her President Kaunda’s and Nkomo’s greetings. I was shadowed by the IB when I went to meet her at her new residence at Willingdon Crescent.

During my absence from Lusaka, Prime Minister Mainza Chona of Zambia wrote a long letter to The Times of London about the ill-treatment of Mrs Gandhi by the Morarji Desai government. The matter was taken up in Parliament. Although I had nothing whatsoever to do with the Zambian PM’s letter. Prime Minister Morarji Desai linked my name with the Zambian Prime Minister’s letter. The clamour soon died down, however.

On my return from leave, an unpleasant ‘gift’ from Morarji Desai awaited me. During my leave, President Kaunda had written to Prime Minister Desai regarding the crisis that was unfolding in Southern Africa, with particular reference to Southern Rhodesia. He concluded his letter with an exceptionally generous reference to me:

Finally and on a different subject may I say, as a mark of sincere appreciation, your new envoy to Zambia—His Excellency High Commissioner Kunwar Natwar Singh—is settling down very well. I am very pleased with his rare political insight and the fast speed at which he is clearly grasping the complexities of the current Southern African crises.

I must say I was somewhat apprehensive when I heard you were taking out your previous High Commissioner, a man I had found to be very wise and capable. I did not, of course, know the replacement you were going to send us. To my great satisfaction you have just sent us the right man.

As it happens, I have known His Excellency Mr Kunwar Natwar Singh since the days of Zambia’s struggle for independence. While he was at the UN he was extremely helpful to me when I had to present Zambia’s case for independence to the United Nations in 1962.

You could certainly not have picked [...] a better person as your envoy in this region at this time of complicated liberation issues in Rhodesia, Namibia and South Africa.

Prime Minister Desai, in his reply, had this to say:

I have read with interest your views regarding our new High Commissioner. I hope that Natwar Singh comes up to your expectations. He has been keeping us informed of the developments in Southern Africa.

I felt that the Prime Minister had let his High Commissioner down. On 15 May 1978, I wrote to him:

Dear Prime Minister,

On my return to Lusaka, I saw your reply to President Kaunda’s letter of 18.12.1977. The President referred to my work in generous terms. Normally government should have welcomed this. The extreme austerity of your reply must make my task in Lusaka infinitely more difficult. I am sure it was not your intention to belittle or undermine the position of your High Commissioner in Zambia, but such an inference can be drawn and is being drawn. This is not a personal matter.

Having been called a ‘distinguished and trusted citizen of India’ in my letters of credence, I continue to hope that I have your fullest trust and confidence, without which no diplomatic agent can discharge his duties and responsibilities.

The Prime Minister replied on 23 May 1978:

Dear Natwar Singh,

Please refer to your letter no. H.C/3/78 of May 15th 1978. I am surprised that you should attach so much importance to certificates from foreign dignitaries. They are entitled to their opinion as we are entitled to ours and they cannot expect us always to endorse their opinions without any reservation. I do not see why anything that I wrote in my reply to President Kaunda’s letter should embarrass you in the discharge of your duties. You are needlessly sensitive about this matter and I am wondering how this sensitiveness fits in with the discharge of your duties as High Commissioner. There can be no question of lack of trust and confidence in representatives in a foreign country. If there were any such lack of confidence or trust, they would not be there.

Yours sincerely, Morarji Desai

I had some friends in the ministry who kept me informed of the sordid state of affairs. Those who had crawled before Indira Gandhi when she was PM were now abusing her and prostrating before Morarji Desai. I also learnt that my telegrams and letters to the PM were taken as acts of wilful insubordination, which they indeed were. My reply to Morarji Desai’s letter on 1 June 1978 was sufficiently insolent to annoy him.

Dear Prime Minister,

I am most grateful to you for your prompt reply to my letter of May 15. Parts of your letter do grave injustice to me. Constituted as I am I cannot but respond. I do so with the utmost humility and respect.

I completed twenty-five years in the Indian Foreign Service on 14.4.1978. Five of these were spent on the staff of a great Prime Minister (It is for this that I have been singled out for special treatment. But I cannot and will not deny my past). During these two-and-a-half decades, I have never needed nor sought certificates from any one. I would consider such activity contemptible and degrading. However, when the distinguished Head of State of a friendly country speaks well of your representative in his capital, the least we can do is to thank him for it. You will, Sir, agree with me that President Kaunda is not just any ‘foreign dignitary’. He has presided over the destiny of his country and people for fourteen years. A somewhat longer tenure at the helm compared to some other Heads of Government.

In your letter you say that I am being ‘needlessly sensitive’. Sensitivity is an attribute of refinement of character.

Finally, Prime Minister, I am comforted to learn that I do have the confidence and trust of the government over which you preside.

With respects

I received no reply. I did not expect one. The only result was denial of promotion.

T he Commonwealth Summit was scheduled to be held in Lusaka in July 1979. By then I had completed two years in the Zambian capital. The economy had deteriorated; the national currency, Kwacha, was on a downward slide. Earlier in the year, Southern Rhodesian troops had attacked ANC cells in Zambia and had burnt down Joshua Nkomo’s bungalow in the centre of Lusaka without being challenged by Zambian troops. Regardless, Kenneth Kaunda’s authority and popularity was unchallenged. One item on the Commonwealth Summit agenda was the election of the Secretary General of the Commonwealth. Shridath ‘Sonny’ Ramphal’s five-year term was ending in 1980. He was seeking a second term and had informed President Kaunda about his intention. I knew Ramphal well. He had been an excellent Secretary General and was well liked. I took it for granted that he would be unanimously re-elected.

In early June, the British High Commissioner casually said to me, ‘So, Jagat Mehta is your candidate for the Secretary General’s post. You must have been asked to sound out the Zambians.

What was their response?’

I was astonished. The ministry had not informed me of this. I immediately sent a telegram to the Foreign Secretary. He did not reply.

President Kaunda, as host, was to preside over the summit. He sent for me and asked why India was opposing the reelection of sonny Ramphal. It was news to me, I told President Kaunda, adding that there must be some communication gap or misunderstanding. Dr Kaunda asked me to check with Delhi and report back to him.

As luck would have it, Moni Malhoutra, Special Assistant to Secretary General Ramphal, was due in Lusaka in a couple of days. We had been colleagues for five years in Indira Gandhi’s office.

Moni Malhoutra confirmed that India was opposing Sonny Ramphal’s re-election. ‘Who is India’s candidate?’ I asked.

‘The Foreign Secretary, Jagat Mehta,’ he replied.

‘Had New Delhi not informed you?’

‘No.’

We both shook our heads in disgust, if not despair. Lusaka was the nerve centre for the Commonwealth Summit, and the Indian High Commissioner was being kept in the dark.

A circular reached me on 17 June, stating that Jagat Mehta would be India’s candidate. The letter also said that all Commonwealth countries had been informed except Guyana, Ramphal’s homeland.

In league with Kaunda, I followed the Indira Gandhi line to give Ramphal a second term.

Through my sources, I got some notion of the administrative chaos in South Block. My telegrams were not being circulated. Worse still, Indian missions in all Commonwealth countries were asked not to send any communication to Lusaka. Even Prime Minister Morarji Desai was being kept in the dark. As a matter of fact, he was being informed that I was working against India’s interests.

Despicable sophistries were being concocted to convince Morarji Desai that I was sabotaging Mehta’s candidature. The Prime Minister was being further misled by the Foreign Secretary that his own candidature had majority support.

The advance party of the Indian delegation arrived in Lusaka a few days before the leaders. The

officials had been handpicked by Jagat Mehta and given suitable instructions.

By now, President Kaunda and Sonny Ramphal had the latest tally. Ramphal had near-unanimous support.

Prime Minister Morarji Desai was to lead the Indian delegation. I can’t say I was enthusiastic about this development. Morarji Desai’s eating and drinking peculiarities were well known. His diet requirements were conveyed to me before his arrival. These certainly did not indicate a poor man’s fare, nor that of an ascetic. Indian sweets (prepared from cow’s milk) such as sandesh, peda, chamcham, gajar halwa formed part of it. Some ‘Gandhian’ diet!

Political events in India took a dramatic turn in the meantime. A week before the summit, Morarji Desai lost his job. That came as a great relief to the Zambians, the Commonwealth Secretariat and me.

After the resignation of Morarji Desai, Chaudhary Charan Singh became Prime Minister. He had minimal knowledge of diplomacy or foreign policy and was wise enough to recognize his limitations in these fields. However, he made a serious error in appointing Shyam Nandan Mishra as External Affairs Minister.

S.N. Mishra arrived in Lusaka on 1 August 1979. The same evening President Kaunda met him.

He informed S.N. Mishra of the latest position regarding the election of the Secretary General.

He informed S.N. Mishra of the latest position regarding the election of the Secretary General.