HVK Archives: Made in the USA
Made in the USA - The Telegraph
Posted By Ashok V Chowgule (ashokvc@giasbm01.vsnl.net.in)
10 May 1997
Title : Made in the USA
Author :
Publication : The Telegraph
Date : May 10, 1997
Satah Teshabayev was furious! An apparatchik in the Soviet era,
Teshabayev had been catapulted from a middle level officer in the USSR
foreign service to the top of the Uzbek Foreign Office following
Uzbekistan's independence from the Soviet Union. A recipient of the
Nehru Prize, it was Teshabayev's India connections which partly helped
him to zoom to the top in the early '90s when Uzbekistan's nascent
foreign service was on the lookout for diplomats with experience.
But suddenly, Teshabayev's carefully cultivated strength as an Indophile
was under serious threat in the murky neo-Communist oligarchy in
Tashkent.
And the man who was undermining Teshabayev from far-away New Delhi was
Bhabani Sen Gupta, the shortlived officer-on-special duty in Prime
Minister I.K. Gujral's office, the centre of a storm in Parliament this
week.
In his spacious, book-lined office in the Uzbek foreign ministry in
Tashkent's Istiqlal Square, Teshabayev angrily rolled a copy of The
Hindustan Times into a ball and flung it at a corner On second thoughts,
he walked up, retrieved the newspaper and spread it in front of his
Indian visitor. "Just look at what Prof. Sen Gupta has done,"
Teshabayev said in exasperation, pointing to the main article on the
paper's editorial page. "He has written an entire article on Uzbekistan
mixing up the facts with Tajikistan. How will I make my foreign
minister understand?"
Teshabayev was right. Sen Gupta's article was all about Tajikistan and
the civil war there: he had built up a complete thesis of how dangerous
the situation had become and pontificated on the threat of a spillover
into Afghanistan and all of South Asia.
The problem was that he thought he was writing all this about
Uzbekistan. Perhaps the across-the-board criticism of Sen Gupta in the
Lok Sabha this week, led by two former Prime Ministers, was not
surprising after all.
The man who could not distinguish between two countries vital to India's
strategic interests had been handpicked by Gujral to provide advice on
foreign policy. But the Prime Minister has long been acquainted with
Sen Gupta's controversial views. Throughout the last 11 months, when
Gujral held office in the United Front (UF) administration, Sen Gupta
has been constantly at his side, tendering sensitive advice, writing
position papers for Ale guidance of the ministry of external affairs
(MEA) and functioning as an extra-constitutional authority in South
Block. Yet, Gujral has got away scot-free for having accepted Sen
Gupta's views and translated these into policy.
Gujral's association with Sen Gupta goes back to the time when the
former was an elected official in Delhi's civic body several decades
ago. An editor in the capital, who is also popular in the seminar
circuit, recalls that many years ago he had asked Gujral to write an
article for his publication.
He promptly complied with the request and the article appeared under
Gujral's name.
A few months later, the editor and Sen Gupta were together at a seminar
in the US and those who had read the article were surprised that not
only was Sen Gupta's paper at the seminar the same as Gujral's article,
but he expanded on its theme with authority.
Sen Gupta's world view was shaped in the '70s during the seven years
that he spent at Columbia University in New York as a senior fellow.
They were reinforced during the years when he taught at Hunter College,
New York, before returning to India to found the Department of
Disarmament Studies at New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU).
A Ph.D. of the City University of New York, Sen Gupta's stay at JNU,
then a bastion of the Left, was far from comfortable, since his views
were at complete variance with the large body of opinion there.
Sen Gupta soon left JNU to work as research professor at the Centre for
Policy Research (CPR) in New Delhi, where he stayed for 13 years. At
that time, the CPR was being actively promoted by those who wanted an
institution to rival the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses
(IDSA), which was considered too conformist and hardline on concerns of
Indian security
Sen Gupta has published 12 books and over 50 papers in scholarly
journals (and also several potboilers in Bengali under the pseudonym
'Chanakya Sen'), But his magnum opus is India: problems of governance,
the result of three years' research on the declining standards of
governance in this country.
Once CPR became as hardline as IDSA on Indian security concerns, Sen
Gupta's stay there became untenable. He left the institution to found
the Centre for Studies in Global Change.
To his credit, Sen Gupta has remained remarkably consistent in his world
view, acquired in New York, that the US is always right. He was a
forceful critic of China until the 1970s when Richard Nixon decided to
make up with Mao Zedong. He similarly took the stand that India's
friendship with the USSR went against this country's democratic
principles. Sen Gupta believes that India's federal polity is too
centralised: in plain language his recipe for this problem is the break
up of the Indian state. He also believes that India should respond to
Washington's worries about its nuclear and missile programmes. But what
has consistently angered South Block's professionals are his views on
Pakistan, which they maintain are a replica of the US state department's
thinking.
Indian diplomats recount with horror their experience of Sen Gupta's
visit to Islamabad in 1989 as part of a goodwill delegation from CPR.
On that visit, sitting in the Indian High Commissioner's drawing room,
he actually told his interlocutors that he is moved to tears by the
repressive rule of the Indian army in Jammu and Kashmir.
They insist that the only reason why Sen Gupta could not influence the
V.P. Singh government's Pakistan policy - when Gujral was foreign
minister - was because Kashmir blew up so badly that softliners both in
the administration and outside were quickly marginalised.
For those who know the extent of Sen Gupta's influence on Gujral, his
resignation from the Prime Minister's office is not the end of the
matter. From all accounts, Sen Gupta will continue to advise the Prime
Minister on policy from outside the way he has been doing for almost a
year.
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