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Being a reporter in a foreign country may seem glamorous, but to do it properly is hard.
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Every country is impossibly complex, and every new reporter starts out knowing next to nothing.
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It is tempting to cut corners and report second-hand news.
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It is tempting to just carry press releases from the government.
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It is tempting to adopt one simplistic framework or narrative, like maybe national interest,
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But some people do the hard yards.
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They embrace nuance, verify all information, see both the big picture and the small details.
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And if they are on the beat long enough, they can even become experts in their subject,
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perhaps more so than actual experts, whose views may be blinkered by too much specialization
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and conventional thinking.
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And maybe, like my guest today, they can write a book on it after more than 30 years of reporting.
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After three decades of doing the first draft of history, they can tell a comprehensive,
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It's a lot of hard work.
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There's no glamour till the work is over, and the work is never over.
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Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen.
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My guest today is Seema Sirohi, a respected foreign correspondent, failed rocker, blues
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fan, aspiring yogi, and all in all a solid thinker.
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Seema went to Washington as a foreign correspondent more than 30 years ago, and forgot to get
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a return ticket, which is great for us.
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She did three decades of fabulous reporting from there, fierce, independent, rigorous,
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and always so, so sharp.
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She became a specialist in foreign policy along the way, and I'll just come out with
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a superb book, Friends with Benefits, The India-US Story.
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It's a gripping narrative of how we went from 0 to 100 in US eyes, or 0 to hero as it were.
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This is the subject Seema knows inside out.
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This is the story Seema tells really well.
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I enjoyed her book, and I enjoyed her conversation.
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But before we get there, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Hey, the music started, and this sounds like a commercial, but it isn't.
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It's a plea from me to check out my latest Labour of Love, a YouTube show I am co-hosting
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with my good friend, the brilliant Ajay Shah.
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We've called it, Everything is Everything.
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Every week, we'll speak for about an hour on things we care about, from the profound
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to the profane, from the exalted to the everyday.
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We range widely across subjects, and we bring multiple frames with which we try to understand
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Please join us on our journey, and please support us by subscribing to our YouTube channel
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at youtube.com slash amitvarma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
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The show is called Everything is Everything.
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Please do check it out.
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Seema, welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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It's a pleasure to be on your podcast.
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No, I'm a big fan, and it's a bit surreal because I've been reading your byline for,
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you know, what feels like decades now.
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And I wanted to sort of start by asking you about the book.
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Like, of course, you wrote another book about 20 years ago, but this is a book that is about
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the core area of what you've been covering all this time.
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And I wonder how, you know, you managed and what you feel about this change in form,
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whereas you've, you know, normally either been doing a certain kind of rigorous reportage
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and sometimes you'd get the chance to do a Sunday feature or whatever.
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But this is the first time that, you know, you've really sat back and taken in the entire
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narrative arc over all these years and, you know, written it in the form of a book.
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So I'm fascinated by that process and how it was for you.
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So can you tell me a bit about that?
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Well, it was, you know, I had 30 years of reporting on this relationship and it was
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all just sitting there.
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The one good thing I did was to save all of my stories that I had done for The Telegraph
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when I was the Washington correspondent for them and for other outlets later on.
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I saved everything, had organized it by year and by month.
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So I had everything ready and then came the pandemic and I thought, why not?
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And a couple of my friends encouraged me.
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The process wasn't very different in my mind.
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I just thought it was just a very long story to tell.
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And I broke it up, you know, with each president, I covered it chronologically, so that made
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Yeah, the chronological arrangement does make it kind of simpler to follow.
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And I wonder what happens is that when you're reporting, you are writing what, you know,
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as the old saying goes, you're writing the first draft of history.
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And often one is writing in the middle of what is sort of a fog of war.
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You know, throughout this book, there are all these sort of seminal events like, you
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know, India's nuclear test in Pokhran in 98 or Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit
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in 2005 to do the nuclear deal and so on and so forth.
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It's full of these seminal events.
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On the one hand, you've got this insider view and all these inside stories which give us
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And the narrative looks so uncluttered and clear and clean from this distance.
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But at the same time, when you were actually in the thick of things, you know, it wouldn't
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quite have been that way.
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So this journey of sort of sitting back and looking not just at what happened, but the
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way you reported it, what you knew then and what you know now, you know, how did that
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sort of make you feel about the passage of time?
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Because your book begins with this, you know, very stark illustration of how bad India US
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relations actually were in the late 1980s and the kind of attitude they had towards
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us, towards us, which continued for a few years.
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And now, as you have pointed out, it's come zero to 100, like it's literally come from
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So tell me a little bit about how looking back on your journey, where you now have the
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benefit of hindsight and you can be the omniscient narrator, but you were also a participant
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in a story and, you know, in the moment, you know, you could not have known so much.
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So what was that process like for you?
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Because I would imagine that you're not just looking back at India US, you're also kind
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of looking back at yourself and seeing yourself grow through these years.
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So when I first came here in 1988, things were so different, I cannot even begin to
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So the main problem was to not get so taken in by either the anti-American feeling in
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India or the anti-India feeling in Washington.
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That was my main objective, to stay sort of outside that fray and not let that come into
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So you might notice in the book, there are many times when I'm critical of India and
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I'm very critical of the US all along, because the US had very little interest in India those
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And it used to baffle me that why such a big country, a democracy, etc.
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We have so many things in common.
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So many Indian Americans were already here in the late 80s, early 90s, and they were
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doing really well, yet they had no political clout, sort of.
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So they couldn't affect policy in any way.
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So in the process, I mean, basically, I just tried to be true as a reporter and give both
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sides to the best extent possible and glean through the biases of both sides.
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Because don't forget, the American narrative was, oh, India is bad, India doesn't listen
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They only want to, you know, mess with all that we are trying to do in the world, all
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the good that we are trying to do, quote unquote.
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And Indian perspective was, look, we have so many problems here.
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Firstly, a poor developing country, two major enemies on either side of India, Pakistan
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and China, who are collaborating with each other, yet the Americans seem oblivious to
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Or actually, they were not oblivious.
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They just chose not to sort of focus on that, because it didn't suit their policy objectives.
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So it was tough at times, because sometimes you wouldn't get information even.
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So you had to go to other sources, experts, or to Capitol Hill, try to talk to the politicians.
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Politicians are always somewhat more willing than bureaucrats, you know, to talk to you.
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So I remember interviewing Senator Moynihan once, you know, and he was he had a good feeling
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He had been ambassador, etc., to India.
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So there were all these, you had to try to pick moments, you had to try to pick your
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stories in which you could bring out the best or at least more fairly than normal.
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I think I accidentally skipped a bit ahead in the story.
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So I want to take you back to your childhood and kind of talk about, you know, tell me
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Tell me about your parents.
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What were your early years like?
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I was born in New Delhi.
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My parents, we lived in UP actually.
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So she had just come to, my mother had come to her parents, my grandparents for the childbirth.
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So I grew up in UP, Kanpur, Allahabad, Lucknow, Banaras.
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My father was in the UP government service.
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He was a labor commissioner.
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So I remember many times we had protests outside the house and we moved every two years.
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So it was kind of tough.
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My school changed every two years.
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I sometimes was in a Hindi medium school because it just wasn't possible to get into a good
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convent school, quote unquote.
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So I did the best I could.
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It was kind of disruptive whenever I would make friends and then I would just move.
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Then at the age of 12, my father passed away.
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He passed away rather young.
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He was only 50 years old.
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And then we moved to Delhi.
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So I finished my high school in Delhi, went to college.
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So it was kind of tough, I would say, growing up all over in different towns in UP.
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And I guess when we are moving from school to school and all of that, you have that sort
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of itinerant life brought upon by circumstances, there are two ways for a kid to react to it.
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One way is you could just get into your own shell and sort of build a life there and build
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Maybe withdraw into books or whatever, something that an introvert like me would be more naturally
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And the other way is that you become better at making friends, at negotiating that outside
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world, at taking those initiatives and going outside of yourself and so on.
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So looking back, how do you feel you reacted and what is it that came naturally to you?
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What are the efforts that you had to do, not just during the time that you traveled in
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UP when you were a kid, but even later when you were in Delhi, where the big city also
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must have been intimidating and you must have felt the pressure to fit in with all these
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city slickers, as it were.
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So what was that sort of like, that process of the simultaneous process of both fitting
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in and also with kind of finding yourself and becoming comfortable in your skin if such
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a thing is even possible at such a young age?
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Oh, it's totally not possible at that young age.
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But I was in the latter category.
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I always wanted to make friends.
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I was not an introvert.
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I just like people as a policy, shall I say.
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And that kind of helps me in my profession as well.
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So it was hard moving to Delhi was a really big challenge because, of course, we used
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to come for summer holidays to Delhi to our grandparents.
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But that was just different.
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You were not going to school there.
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So adjusting to that and learning to be quote unquote smart, you know, in the way you
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dressed, in the way you spoke, in the way you, you know, picked up things.
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So what I managed, I would say I was pretty well adjusted.
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I had a lot of friends in high school that I stayed in touch with for a while.
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Then, you know, college was another kind of challenge.
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I went to St. Stephen's College.
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God knows how I got in, but I did.
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I did well in high school.
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So I got in and we were the third batch of women.
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Women had just begun to be admitted.
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So the first batch was in third year when I joined.
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I cannot tell you what a misfit I was in St. Stephen's College.
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Everybody's dad was somebody in the government, you know, Secretary of the Navy, Army Secretary,
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Cabinet Secretary, their kids were studying there.
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So again, I didn't really fit in, but I loved my professors.
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I loved going to class and all of that, but I didn't really fit in with the city slickers
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and they were all city slickers.
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Then I made, again, a very kind of seminal decision.
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I said, this is not my scene.
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I used to hang out with the losers, quote unquote, you know, the the Cherokee crowd.
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I wasn't a Cherokee, but, you know, they they were, but they didn't have that many problems
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in, you know, hanging out with people who didn't belong to this very elite class.
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So I decided I had to go to something entirely different.
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So I went to JNU and I just loved it.
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I mean, JNU was very different then compared to what it is today.
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And got into, you know, a little bit of student politics and nobody asked me what my dad did.
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Nobody asked me, nobody asked me where I lived.
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I was a day scholar because, you know, we were living in Delhi.
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So the only experience I missed was living in the hostel in JNU.
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So very, very fond memories of JNU.
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And at that time, what is your conception of yourself?
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Like, you know, what do you want to do when you finish college?
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You did sociology, I think, in JNU.
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So was it just because, you know, you were interested in it at that time
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or that's what you happened to kind of get into?
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Did you look very far ahead?
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And, you know, you mentioned before that, that you were studying English literature.
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And Stephen, so, you know, were you a reader?
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Did you have aspirations towards writing, for example?
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Give me a sense of your influences and, you know, the what was going on through your head in those days.
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So I did English honors and I really enjoyed the literature, you know, all that we studied.
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Shakespeare, Shelley and T.S.
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Eliot and all of that, Thomas Hardy.
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But I wasn't into being a novelist or a professor of English or anything.
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What I felt I wanted to be in at that time was to write somehow.
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So in my very young, innocent way, I thought I'd be a copywriter.
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So after this was actually before I joined JNU, after Stevens and in between,
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there were like two, three months holidays, I joined an ad agency, really, you know,
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low key, low class ad agency trying to write copy for shoes, how to sell shoes.
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And I realized that advertising was not my scene.
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And I needed to study more.
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I needed to be a student for some more time.
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I wasn't ready for the working world.
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I didn't want to take the responsibility.
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And as for studying sociology, there was no English honors or literature there in JNU.
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So I thought, why not expand my mind and learn a new subject, which is not sciences,
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And so I went into sociology, to be brutally honest, that was also the one subject in
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which I could get admission, because you won't believe how competitive it was to get into
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JNU, especially as a day scholar, because the university was designed to encourage
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students from other parts of the country, encourage students who hadn't had such a
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privileged sort of education.
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And here I was coming from St.
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Stephen's College, trying to claim a seat in JNU wasn't easy.
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There was, apart from your test and the academic council that approved your admission,
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there was a representative of the student union also on that council who would approve
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disapproved, so I had to pull all sorts of strings, so that they would disregard my
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St. Stephen's background.
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And I mean, I could claim some points because of financial need, because we were on a
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pension. My mother was just supporting us through pension.
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Both my brothers were still not working.
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They were older than me, but they're still not working.
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They went to college themselves.
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So, you know, I got in.
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It was such a great experience.
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And tell me more about your JNU years.
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Like you've written a little bit about it in your book, where at one point, perhaps tongue
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in cheek, you described it as, quote, our very own castle of fairness and freedom, stop
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quote. And, you know, JNU, of course, was always sort of a good place for an idealist
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to be. You know, it gave you plenty of scope for idealism even back in the day.
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So tell me a little bit about what those years were like and how you came to sort of
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fructify your idea of what you wanted to do after this.
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So I, you know, there was the SFI and AISF and Freethinkers.
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So they were very active and all the SFI student leaders were very attractive, both
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men and women. So everybody had a crush on them.
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And Sitaram Yechuri used to come to speak and things like that.
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And all the discussions were so passionate.
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People actually believed they could change the world.
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So, you know, when you're 19, 20, you also believe that or you want to believe that.
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And I didn't get deep into student politics, but, you know, I would go for all the
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rallies and campaign speeches and things like that.
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All of the groups would try to come and lobby you for your vote.
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It was very serious business.
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You know, here I thought, who am I?
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I don't know anything, you know, from left to right.
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But I am just a student trying to get by.
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And they would come and try to convince you, make you sit down drinking, you know,
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endless cups of tea. And so it was all very exciting.
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I felt I grew, grew up a lot, learned a lot and gained a little bit of confidence,
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which I didn't have, you know, moving all through my childhood.
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St. Stephen's wasn't a confidence building exercise for me.
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So I would say that I wish I'd gotten more involved in politics, but I didn't.
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Didn't have the commitment, I guess.
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Did the confidence come from, you know, being among people who would accept you
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as you were and you didn't feel the way that you did in Stephen's that you didn't
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belong? Or did it also come from, you know, gradually building a frame through
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which you look at the world, like one part of growing up, which I find
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interesting in all my guess is how they form their frames of looking at the world.
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And there is always, of course, a danger when you're young that you get a
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dominant frame and then that becomes a one hammer with which you beat every nail
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for a while. And then you encounter the real world and then you find yourself in
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a different place. And in the public part of your career, what one can access,
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you know, all your journalism and everything, you're incredibly even handed.
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One cannot really make out per se, you know, what your stance is, though I think
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at one point in one of your one of your bios that I read online, I think it's a
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Times of India bio, you had the line, she takes sides whenever necessary.
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But by and large, you know, you're reporting as a model of good journalism
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where you can't really make that out.
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You're, you know, examining every side of every issue.
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But, you know, when you were younger, what was the part, you know, what was your way
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of understanding the world?
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What kind of frames did you adopt?
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You know, was it a dominant sort of way of looking at the world that the JNU was an
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impact on? And then when you encounter the real world after that, does it
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Give me a sense of how that changes through the years and what role
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circumstances play in it, because I imagine as someone who has covered
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foreign affairs and understood it to the kind of depth that you have, you know,
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that would also be a moderating influence in one direction.
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Whereas if you had taken some other direction and become an academic
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somewhere or something, it could have been something else entirely.
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So give me a sense of your evolution in that way.
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So when I went to JNU and nobody was stuck up on the status of your family or your,
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you know, station in life, I that gave me confidence because it was the first time
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I was meeting students from Bihar, from the inner lands of, you know, remote states
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and northeast and all that.
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And everybody kind of seemed equal.
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Maybe there was also a hierarchy in JNU, but at least it wasn't as blatant as I
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So and given my own circumstances and the hardship that my family went through, I
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went through, you know, economically, I felt I always might then, you know, I
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came became a little left just because of that, because I felt, you know, it's
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just unfair that some people are just so rich and some people have to struggle so
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hard. I mean, some of the students when met in JNU, they would tell you really
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care raising stories, what hoops they went through to even reach the stage, to be able
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to come to JNU for a master's.
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So all that informed me.
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So you could say roughly that my sympathies always lay with the underdog.
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That evolved a little bit.
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Now I see more evenly, but that came much later, much later.
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I don't know if I mentioned that I came to the U.S.
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to do my master's in journalism.
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And that was a very major experience.
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It was the first time I ever sat on a plane.
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I went out of the country, landed in nowhere, Kansas, which even Americans used to
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joke about. How come you chose the University of Kansas?
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So I would have to explain that, look, it used to this was pre-internet, pre-computer
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days. You had to go to the American Center Library to look at all the universities,
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choose a few, apply to a few, because each application cost money.
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And so the University of Kansas was the first to respond.
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And I just took it because the whole process of getting all those forms back from the
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U.S. government, I think it was called I-95, I forget.
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All that took one year of the process.
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So once I was at the University of Kansas, I lived in a dorm and that was quite a very
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different experience. All the foreign students were dumped in one dorm.
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And the Americans used to call it the zoo.
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But I made some lifelong friends there so that that gave me a little bit more confidence
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that I could be in another country and manage and do well in my studies.
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And, you know, the professors were all very good.
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Turned out, just by luck, I had landed in one of the top five schools of journalism at
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that time. So it was the best professor of editing was at our school.
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So it was really fascinating.
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I remember the last name, but not the first.
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So he would always pick on me in class because my grammar was better than the other
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students. And he would then make an example out of it because and spellings, you know,
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they make some of the students, the spellings were very poor and he was so strict.
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So I would credit him for helping me sort of learn how to write well, short
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sentences, clear sentences, so the reader doesn't have to struggle to understand what
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you're saying or trying to say.
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So all that was amazing.
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Then I came back to India.
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I didn't want to stay in America, by the way, and my brother's first comment was,
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Everybody wants to stay.
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You should have just stayed.
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And you came back and you didn't even bring a computer.
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Yeah, you know, I'm just a few years younger than you, but I totally get all these
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attitudes and what it was like in the 80s.
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You know, we had sort of, you know, going abroad was such a big deal.
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And I just all I knew when I was in college is that I want to be a writer.
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And I figured that, OK, my choices are either I become a journalist or I become a
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copywriter. And as it happens over my career, I did both, though the, you know,
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copywriter was really brief and, you know, without really having a notion of it.
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And the way I kind of look at my life is like I'm 49, so I'm sort of in that
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generation, which grew up half with half before the Internet, where we had
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communities of circumstance and had, you know, the only means of learning are those
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that serendipitiously we happen to have, which, of course, as a child of privilege,
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I was luckier than most.
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And then the second half is all about the Internet, where you can form communities
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of choice and you are exposed to the whole world.
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And I'm just wondering that at that time where you make the choice to go to the
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University of Kansas, you go through Kansas, sorry, not Canvas, and you go
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through the whole application process and you fill in all those forms and all of
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that, you know, there's no Internet.
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Our sense of the world is completely, you know, not a fraction of what it is today.
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Like, you know, even the resonant bit where you said you flew for the first time,
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that was the first time in a plane, you know, and again, today one can, you know,
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go online and experience what a plane is like through these great YouTube videos,
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which are full ASMR emersions into that sort of experience as one particular
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channel where, you know, when I'm listening to an episode of my podcast,
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when the edit has come back, I'm listening and my ears are engaged, but
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visually I don't know what the hell to do.
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So I'll go on this luxury travel channel and there'll be this one hour video
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about what first class is like and all of that, but that's a digression.
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In your case, A, what was the impetus which made you sort of want to study
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journalism abroad, because my impression growing up in the 80s also was that
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journalism and advertising, you don't really need to study for that, that stuff
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that you pick up on the job.
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In fact, I had a pretty negative view of journalism.
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My sense of journalism then was that people who fail in absolutely everything
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else become journalists, which is why, you know, I used to think that was my
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theory for why it was so largely mediocre with a few outlier exceptions.
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But in your case, one, what was the impetus that made you want to go
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abroad, A, to go abroad, B, go abroad to study journalism specifically.
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And the second part of my question is that what was then that experience
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like, because everything must have been so bewildering.
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Unlike today, where you can kind of experience a world vicariously, you
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would have been, you know, just how do how do you talk to people with different
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accents? How do you mingle?
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How do you introduce yourself?
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All of that must have been so this thing.
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So give me a deeper sense of what that journey was like.
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So I decided to go abroad to study purely because my sister encouraged me.
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She is the oldest of us four.
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She was teaching at Maulana Azad Medical College.
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She's a doctor and she said, Seema, there's so many Iranian students I have,
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so many students from the Arab world I have.
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Why don't you go and study abroad?
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She really encouraged me.
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And then first time I thought about it.
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So I decided, OK, let me give it a try.
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Why not? It's a big adventure.
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And she said she would support me.
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And my mom was OK with it.
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I originally decided to study, had decided to study advertising
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because still in my head, I was thinking copywriting so romantic,
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you know, so exciting and be so creative.
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So I went enrolled in the school.
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Fortunately for me, in that course, in that master's program,
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you had to take some reporting courses, you know, compulse.
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So I enjoyed those courses much better.
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And I hated the advertising courses because it was all about business.
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It was very finance oriented.
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I really didn't have the acumen for it at all.
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So I said, when am I going to learn how to write creatively?
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This is all about business.
#
And another very big thing came to my mind.
#
And I said, I don't want to fool people into buying things.
#
That is just not that is just the most dishonest thing I could do.
#
So I shifted my major into reporting.
#
And that's how I graduated with print journalism,
#
degree in print journalism.
#
So and I was very happy with that. Very happy.
#
I thought I'd found my calling.
#
I could write. I could write about issues.
#
I thought were more important than selling shoes or ice cream or whatever.
#
And like you said, many people thought, why go and study journalism? Right.
#
I will tell you, I completely disagree.
#
You can study journalism when you read all the bad writing in newspapers.
#
Don't you feel that you wish they had, you know, more training
#
or they wrote more carefully, et cetera?
#
They won't tell you what happened.
#
They write a big story, but they won't tell you the original reason
#
why this investigation has taken place or why the government has ordered
#
this investigation anyway.
#
So I came back and I applied everywhere.
#
All the news agencies, all the newspapers in Delhi, everywhere.
#
I got responses from most places,
#
but everyone said, we'll give you a job on the desk.
#
Again, a very big decision in my mind I already had made.
#
I'm not going to be on the desk.
#
I want to be a reporter because I didn't want to, you know,
#
work on the desk for years on end, depend on the whim of some guy,
#
because they were mostly guys then in powerful positions
#
that he would graduate me to reporting and then put me on some beat,
#
you know, some silly beat.
#
Got an interview with The Telegraph, the Calcutta paper.
#
Esteemed editor said exactly what you said
#
when he took my interview.
#
He said, why did you go to America?
#
I could have taught you all this in two months on the job.
#
So I'm thinking in my head, of course, I didn't have the guts
#
to say it out loud that, look, it was an experience for me.
#
I got to meet so many different kinds of people
#
from so many different countries.
#
I made lifelong friends.
#
I have a French friend.
#
He comes and visits with his family.
#
I have a friend in Germany.
#
Like, we've been friends for 40 years, you know,
#
and I've gone and visited them and just the growth,
#
personal growth, you know, going and managing on your own in a new country.
#
So anyway, the editor said, you can I'll give you a job as a reporter,
#
but you'll have to move to Calcutta.
#
I don't want to move to Calcutta.
#
I've just come back to Delhi, my home and my family is here.
#
I hung on, hung on and got an offer from a very
#
sidey magazine called Delhi Recorder.
#
And I took up that job.
#
They were willing to make me a reporter, say
#
they had an office in Nehru place.
#
Then within three months or so,
#
I got an interview call from the AP, the Associated Press.
#
I had applied there also, but the bureau chief at that time
#
didn't pay any attention to my resume.
#
Didn't care that I had a degree from an American university, nothing.
#
New bureau chief came, a woman, and she called me for an interview.
#
She said, she put me on trial for one month.
#
So I was working two jobs for one month.
#
I would go in the evening to AP, work till midnight, go home,
#
get up in the morning, go to Nehru place, work at Delhi Recorder.
#
Then after one month, she offered me a job.
#
So that was my first really good job.
#
And I worked there for about four or five years.
#
Yeah, you know, when I asked you, why did you go abroad to do journalism?
#
I was sort of, you know, in a sense, recounting the popular impression
#
people had at the time, like, frankly, my lament that so much of journalism
#
was so mediocre is actually a reason to actually study it, because I feel that
#
if you learn it in the job, which is entirely possible,
#
it would be an unstructured kind of learning.
#
And a lot of the impetus would have to come from within.
#
And there would still be things that would be left out.
#
I mean, that whole logic of asking you to be on the desk is something
#
I totally understand, because they would need people on the desk
#
who know grammar, for example, which a lot of the reporters didn't.
#
You know, it was a cliche in my time, certainly in journalism,
#
that, you know, the reporters would not have any pressure to write well
#
or even to write grammatically.
#
They just file whatever copy it was.
#
And then the desk would kind of get to work.
#
I remember one superstar reporter, a wonderful guy.
#
He's sadly no more, but somewhere in a cricket press box in,
#
you know, while we were covering a test match, circa 2005, 2006,
#
he came to me and he asked me, you know, Amit, can you tell me
#
is nevertheless two words or three words?
#
And, you know, that that was and it was nobody's fault.
#
It's just the way that it was like today.
#
I teach an online clear writing course, and sometimes I think to myself
#
that, my God, I was such a bad writer in my 20s.
#
I wish I had done a course like this when I was 21.
#
My whole life could have been different.
#
So, you know, tell me a bit about those early days in journalism.
#
Like the Delhi recorder was brief, as you point out.
#
But then you were with AP and all of that.
#
So, you know, what were those experiences like?
#
What kind of stories were you sent out to do?
#
Because certainly in Indian journalism,
#
a lot of the other reporters of that age have spoken to have born this out
#
that women would be expected to do softer stories and not do hard news,
#
which was left for the men.
#
Like, how can women go and cover crime and work late and all of that nonsense?
#
And I guess in AP, that would really not be so much of an issue.
#
But take me through your early days of journalism.
#
Like, what were your expectations and what was your learning there?
#
Because I imagine in university in Kansas, you would have learned craft
#
and how to frame sentences and how to structure stories and all of that.
#
But there are other deeper on the ground
#
learnings which would have been happening once you actually started reporting them.
#
So give me a sense of what your early days as a reporter were like
#
and what kind of things were you learning, what took you by surprise?
#
OK, just to clarify about the university, when I was in Kansas,
#
we had to go and cover the city council and things.
#
So we had a lot of practical experience.
#
Also, there was a university paper in which I was a columnist.
#
I wrote about Palestine, you know,
#
because always there was some flare up right in the Middle East.
#
So I remember writing columns very passionately about the PLO and all that.
#
So coming back to the AP, I joined in 1984.
#
It was the biggest news year, kind of, you know, Punjab was burning up
#
Mrs. Gandhi was assassinated.
#
Anti-seek riots after that.
#
Then the Bhopal gas leak.
#
And I was sent on all the stories because so our office was really small.
#
The bureau chief was Victoria Graham.
#
Then there was another American reporter
#
and they were two Indian reporters, including myself. So.
#
So the office was open from 7 a.m.
#
to midnight or later, depending on what's happening in the news, etc.
#
So there was no choice but to send even a greenhorn like me on big stories.
#
So I learned very quickly and a lot.
#
And she was such a fantastic boss.
#
She was, you know, have you seen the movie The Front Page?
#
I'm afraid it's about journalism.
#
It's one of those classic journalism movies with Jack Lemmon.
#
And so, you know, all these smoking kind of guys in a newsroom,
#
banging out stories on a typewriter and news is breaking and all that.
#
She was like, you give her a copy.
#
And those were typewriter days. Right.
#
So she would give it a read and put new paper in her typewriter.
#
Bang, bang, bang. Completely.
#
You know, improve it hundredfold.
#
You know, so because I was still new, I was struggling to write well.
#
And what was the most important newsy point from a news agency's point of view?
#
So, you know, which would get more play abroad in more newspapers.
#
So she's thinking like that.
#
So she sent me out on every story.
#
I remember the anti-seek riots.
#
Oh, my God, going to Trilokpuri and places like that.
#
It was outside our office.
#
There was people running around with Lattis and things.
#
So our office was next to Jantar Mantar.
#
There used to be a small, old Latian style building called Narendra Place.
#
Now there's a big building there, DLF or whatever.
#
And it was a single story building and
#
just people running mobs everywhere.
#
And it was scary because, you know, actually not as a woman, it wasn't scary.
#
But one of our male friends, he was a Sikh.
#
He cut his hair and his beard and everything.
#
He was a journalist, too.
#
So that was one big story.
#
then the Golden Temple, when Mrs.
#
Gandhi ordered the storming of the Golden Temple,
#
the Indian army, you know, had blocked the whole area.
#
I remember General Brar.
#
I sweet-talked him into taking me with him into the compound.
#
He said, OK, I can take you.
#
But how you get out is your problem, because my juniors will be in charge.
#
I said, OK, I'll take my chances.
#
Sure enough, you know, I go in.
#
This is after the operation.
#
I go in and I'm immediately taken over by a young captain
#
and put in a room and said, you're not supposed to be here, et cetera.
#
So, you know, I was detained for a few hours, no big deal.
#
But they were very kind, offered me food, water.
#
I said, no, I was being made.
#
No, you have no right to detain me.
#
I'm not going to drink your water.
#
Finally, I got out of it.
#
And then covering, you know, the whole insurgency,
#
going to villages, talking to people.
#
You know, you learn so much
#
that how the how many people had been killed.
#
I mean, the death toll that we were reporting,
#
it was much higher in in real life.
#
the Bhopal gas leak was another very major story I went on.
#
And I remember this guy,
#
he Union Carbide head was a guy called Warren Anderson.
#
So there was a lot of pressure on the government of India to,
#
you know, file a case against him and everything.
#
How many people died over there?
#
Again, the death toll, official death toll is much less
#
because people kept dying later on.
#
The gas, methyl isocyanate is such a strong gas.
#
And not in just in the immediate vicinity of the factory, but
#
through, you know, quite a big radius of Bhopal
#
And people everywhere, you know, just suffering.
#
I covered that story for quite a while.
#
Came when I even after moving here,
#
because the case was going on against Union Carbide.
#
Ultimately, it was settled out of court for
#
real little amount of money compared to
#
how much they would have paid had the victims been
#
in the West, you know, somewhere.
#
Yeah, and that Bhopal tragedy just reverberated in many different ways
#
for decades. I have a great episode on that with Shruti Raj Gopal
#
and a link from the show notes.
#
My next question is about what the experience of writing
#
for AP itself must have been like.
#
Like I remember in the early 80s, I did a fair bit of writing
#
for foreign publications like The Guardian, for whom I wrote on cricket
#
and other stuff, and for the Wall Street Journal, for whom I wrote opinion
#
pieces and all of that. And I came to hate it.
#
And the main reason I came to hate it was that when you're writing
#
for a foreign audience, you really have to simplify everything.
#
You can't just say BJP.
#
You have to say BJP, India's Hindu nationalist party or blah, blah, blah.
#
And you kind of simplify everything that reduces the space that you have.
#
And you can't really go into nuance.
#
And after a point, I said, no, even if they pay much better,
#
I just didn't feel like it.
#
But I realized that there is a flip side to it also.
#
Now, when you were writing for AP, you were in a sense
#
while learning the craft with Victoria Graham, like you said,
#
and you've pointed out how she was such a good editor.
#
And I worked with editors like that who can be so transformative.
#
But on the one hand, AP copy was really meant for foreign eyes.
#
And that could mean perhaps catering to the foreign gaze.
#
So one, I wonder what that was like.
#
But B, the flip side of that is that it could also have made you look closer
#
at things that you would otherwise take for granted
#
because you're in India and we've normalized so much around us.
#
But when you're writing for a foreign eye,
#
you have to denormalize it as it were and write it in a way that they understand
#
and cut to the heart of what they're talking about,
#
you know, what you're talking about and, you know, get to the essence.
#
So tell me a little bit about what that was like,
#
because in a different sense, in the opposite direction,
#
you spent a lot of your career doing kind of the opposite of that,
#
where you're writing about America for an Indian audience.
#
And again, there would have been that sort of problem.
#
So tell me a little bit about what that process was like
#
and these different pros and cons, which weighed more on you
#
and what you felt about that.
#
I'm so glad you asked me this question.
#
I struggled with that writing for the foreign audience,
#
you know, trying to exaggerate the words of India
#
and hide the the good parts, you know, almost.
#
So it was very aggravating.
#
And there was kind of a formula.
#
Every story, if you're writing about Punjab, the insurgency, the militancy,
#
you had like three, four paragraphs at the bottom,
#
which were identical in every story, you know, which gave a bit of history.
#
And when you were doing like, you know, new lead,
#
you just raised the death toll. And that's about it.
#
And I would argue with my boss if she changed things too much
#
to suit the American audience.
#
And I remember one time
#
we were all having a get together at her place.
#
She lived in golf links.
#
And she was going out with the bureau chief of Reuters at that time.
#
Both of them were major drinkers, you know.
#
And so the Reuters bureau chief
#
And I knew that Vicky liked me.
#
I mean, she really didn't have a problem with me.
#
And I don't know, after a couple of drinks,
#
I got into an argument about precisely this.
#
And the Reuters bureau chief, her boyfriend, was really offended.
#
And he apparently told her later that she should fire me because,
#
yeah, because I thought so differently.
#
And, you know, I am so biased and this and that.
#
So I almost lost my job because I argued so hard.
#
But in in terms of writing, I had to follow
#
what they wanted me to write about.
#
There was not much compromise.
#
It was my first real job.
#
I didn't want to lose it.
#
Although I must say, after about two years, three years of working at AP,
#
I so wished I was working for an Indian newspaper.
#
And being a reporter, you know, and doing covering the same stories.
#
But that was not to be.
#
So, yes, that's a very good point.
#
And I resent the way we are forced to write.
#
I must say, they've improved a lot over the years.
#
It was so formulaic back in the 80s.
#
Now, I think Reuters and AP write a little more differently.
#
They have many more Indian reporters working for them.
#
So I guess by a process of osmosis.
#
Yeah, and also, you know, the there is almost an assumption
#
that foreign readers are stupid and they need so much context
#
by the bucket loads trust on them.
#
And that's really not the case.
#
Like a similar parallel trend that really irritates me in literature
#
is, you know, when you'll translate every damn Indian word that there is.
#
So, you know, you'll have like instead of idli, you'll have steamed whatever
#
steamed rice balls or whatever the hell it's called.
#
And, you know, and it is so fake and horrible.
#
I remember when I used to read, you know, Russian literature as a child,
#
they would not translate Samovar for me and so on and so forth.
#
You know, you kind of got a sense of what it is.
#
And I feel what is now happening is that foreign readers are,
#
they are getting more sophisticated if they already weren't.
#
And we, you know, underestimated them and also perhaps, you know,
#
writers from South Asia are sort of pandering less
#
and just embracing, you know, whatever their authentic language is.
#
There's so many Indian American writers here who write fiction
#
with that kind of writing, you know, where everything is explained.
#
And, oh, God, it's like
#
written for sixth standard or something.
#
Yeah, exactly. And, you know, as a as a as a reader,
#
when I come across something like that from anyone, I just want to like,
#
you know, like, please respect me. I'm an adult.
#
So continue taking me through your journalistic journey.
#
You know, you grew in AP, you spend the time that you spend there.
#
What was next and how did you eventually land up in Washington?
#
OK, so, yeah, I worked for about five years in AP.
#
And then I sort of started going out with this American diplomat.
#
That's how I moved to Washington.
#
AP refused to transfer me because I was a local hire.
#
And in those days, local hires were not transferred
#
from their country of origin to any other country.
#
So that was a frustrating.
#
So I landed up in Washington late 1988, and I floundered for a bit.
#
I worked for India abroad for a couple of months, three months.
#
And then I got a job with The Telegraph.
#
So Shekhar Bhatia was the editor.
#
And he said, yeah, I'll give you a try because the person
#
who was working for them, she was an American.
#
And I found out about that.
#
And I so immediately applied.
#
Again, remember, it's all snail mail.
#
and it takes 10 days to get there.
#
So then I started with him on a trial.
#
And the very first story he asked me to do, you'll laugh at this.
#
He said, go and buy a copy of Playboy.
#
There's an interview with Jerry Adams of Sinn Féin.
#
Write a story about that, because those days, the Irish
#
thing was really in the news.
#
And I don't know why my editor was or the Calcutta readers
#
were so interested in the IRA, but they were.
#
They're interested in all things British, I suppose.
#
So therefore, I was I said, OK, I was taken aback a little bit.
#
So I went to the National Press Building where we used to all hang out
#
because there was this foreign press center, which the U.S.
#
government runs for all the foreign journalists.
#
You can read the newspapers.
#
You could. And you had computers as you could just like a place to be.
#
So I went there and then I went very early in the morning.
#
As early as I could get up and went to the bookstore in that,
#
you know, magazine stall, quickly bought Playboy,
#
shoved it into my bag and ran home like I went home straight.
#
I don't want to read it in the foreign press center. Right.
#
He was happy because, you know,
#
it was the first interview to an American outlet by Jerry Adams.
#
So that was my first assignment.
#
And after that, I got the hang of it.
#
He my shaker wanted all of the U.S.
#
India stories, all interesting American stories.
#
So he is quite an eclectic taste in his demands.
#
And like he and a very good, again, very good at a very nice person.
#
I've been blessed with very good bosses.
#
I must say that has been the luckiest part of my whole professional life.
#
I've never had a problem with anyone.
#
And I worked for the Telegraph and the ABP group for 14 years.
#
And Avik Sarkar was the overall boss, the owner and publisher.
#
So nice. I mean, he he was just a good boss to have.
#
Never quibbled about expenses.
#
I had an expense account.
#
I could take people out to lunch and not many of the correspondents could do that.
#
So, you know, it was good.
#
You know, your playboy story reminds me of this almost ironic line.
#
You know, I read I buy playboy for the stories.
#
And the idea is I actually used to do that sometimes because
#
they're not just for that, but definitely for that, because
#
they invested a lot in publishing great literature.
#
I remember I first discovered Haruki Murakami because I bought this anthology,
#
the playboy book of short stories, because he had a great record of publishing
#
great short stories, almost parallel to the New Yorker in a sense.
#
So tons of literature there.
#
So, you know, from that, I mean, if I remember correctly, that anthology
#
had people like Abdi, Conceiver and Murakami and Kundera
#
and various other sort of great literature in this period.
#
You know, what were your models for how you write like now?
#
Because in a sense, it's an inversion of what you were doing earlier for AP.
#
Here you're reporting events in America for an Indian audience.
#
And at the same time, there can't be too many models of this for you
#
because nobody else is doing precisely that. Right.
#
So, you know, to what extent do you explain something?
#
To what extent do you assume that your audience is familiar?
#
Do you decide to follow your own interests and your editors' interests?
#
Or do you set yourself an agenda for what is a quote unquote important story
#
and what is not? How did you kind of navigate that?
#
What was your sense in the early days of figuring out what to write about?
#
So in the early days, the relationship between India and the US
#
was not friendly at all.
#
I mean, it was like, you know, we occupied different planets almost.
#
The Americans were always just sort of coming down hard on India.
#
So it was easy to decide to do those stories because they always made news.
#
Right. And everybody wanted to know what the Americans were saying, because
#
India wanted America to understand India's point of view.
#
So in return, whatever the US said from the State Department
#
or the White House about India was, by definition, a story for for our readers.
#
Then the other thing I had to explore was the US Congress,
#
which is a gigantic place, you know, 435 congressmen, 100 senators.
#
There's no way you can get a handle on all of them.
#
Fortunately, there were very few people who were actually interested in South
#
Asia and who would say things about South Asia.
#
Many of them were kind of pro-Pakistan in the sense.
#
Remember, the Afghanistan war was going on.
#
The Soviets were there.
#
So the whole big thing in Washington those days was the covert war in Afghanistan.
#
And Pakistan was extremely important for US policy goals.
#
India was nowhere to be seen in that context.
#
In the largest national project of America, we had no role
#
because and besides, India hadn't condemned the Soviet invasion in so many words.
#
So those the Pakistanis were so smart.
#
I mean, I have to give them marks for how well they have used
#
the American system over the years.
#
Now they're in a very different place.
#
But for about 20 odd years that I've been here
#
for 20 of the 30 years that I've covered this relationship, they loomed large.
#
They whatever they wanted was God's own truth as far as America was concerned,
#
because the Americans didn't want to annoy the Pakistanis in any way at all.
#
Even the democracy project in Pakistan suffered greatly
#
because the Americans didn't want to question the Pakistan army ever.
#
So that was that all those were stories.
#
There were many congressmen who would at Pakistan's prompting,
#
would hold hearings about the Indian army and its, quote, unquote,
#
occupation of Jammu and Kashmir and human rights violations.
#
And they would put up gory photographs.
#
Same with the Khalistan movement.
#
So they'll get these huge, gigantic photographs from Punjab, blow them up.
#
And they would be lined up in a congressional hearing meeting hall.
#
And so you India was always at the receiving end of all this.
#
So all that was news, not very difficult to decide.
#
In fact, there was just so much to cover.
#
And in those days, you had to actually go to Capitol Hill to cover.
#
Now you can listen to the hearings online.
#
I mean, it was a whole day's, you know, project.
#
You would take the metro, get there and, you know,
#
in the maze of buildings, find the right room.
#
And another thing I remember,
#
the Khalistan movement here was led by a guy called Gurmeet Singh Ollock.
#
He would always wear an orange turban.
#
He was omnipresent on Capitol Hill, you know,
#
and the Kashmir thing was led by a guy called Gulam Nabi Fai.
#
He was ultimately indicted for being an ISI agent,
#
but they were just very active.
#
They would have annual conferences to which prominent Indian journalists,
#
from senior ones like Kuldeep Nair came for one of them.
#
And Kuldeep was like one of my mentors.
#
And big human rights activists from India would attend these conferences
#
only later that it came out that these were all funded by ISI.
#
So I did those stories.
#
Then you had to keep an eye on weapons transfers from the US to Pakistan.
#
That was always a big story.
#
The Indian embassy would keep track of that.
#
And you had to stay in touch with the embassy to find out,
#
you know, what was happening.
#
State Department, you had to cultivate officers there.
#
Sometimes they were very nice.
#
They would talk to you, other times not.
#
There was one particular press officer.
#
He had so much contempt for India.
#
And he was civil service.
#
So that meant he would never get transferred.
#
He wasn't a US Foreign Service officer.
#
So he was there for years and he had one favorite reporter
#
to whom he used to plant stories,
#
complete American point of view.
#
And the guy would just reproduce verbatim
#
whatever the guy was saying with no context, no questions asked,
#
no Indian point of view, nothing.
#
Give me a give me a sense of what your engine room was like.
#
Like today, you know, if you're a young reporter,
#
you've got the internet to begin with.
#
You can watch the congressional sessions online, etc.
#
But you are sort of alone there.
#
Did you work from home?
#
What was your, you know, how did you manage to set routines for yourself?
#
Because a lot of what you did had to be self-directed.
#
There wasn't an office structure where you go nine to five
#
and somebody is giving you assignments.
#
But you are, in a sense, self-directing all of this.
#
So where did you get information from?
#
Did you rely on the local newspapers to pick up things from there?
#
Did you have sources you would speak to regularly,
#
whether in the State Department or the Congress or whatever?
#
And how did you navigate that minefield
#
where everyone who's talking to you could be talking to you
#
with particular incentives, with a particular purpose,
#
you know, like you mentioned that other gentlemen,
#
the civil servant planting all those stories, you know,
#
and obviously, everybody wants to play journalists
#
and, you know, give their perspectives and their whatever.
#
And, you know, you've also got to learn the ways of the world
#
and wisen up to all of that.
#
So give me a sense of a working day or a working week for you.
#
What is it? Who are you calling?
#
How often do you call your sources?
#
How often do you go to Congress?
#
How is that process kind of playing out?
#
How many stories do you file? What is the frequency?
#
Give me a sense of what that life was like.
#
So basically, you began your day with the New York Times and the Washington Post
#
and you read them cover to cover,
#
make sure if there's anything on South Asia that you, you know, read it carefully,
#
see if you can take the story forward,
#
see if you can get more comments,
#
because mostly the New York Times would give the US point of view.
#
They would try to call the Indian embassy,
#
but Indian embassy is always reticent to talk to American journalists for some reason,
#
now even more so than in the past.
#
So you began your day with the newspapers.
#
Then if there was a hearing on South Asia,
#
you went to Capitol Hill, that would always take priority.
#
You monitored the State Department briefing.
#
And since there was no online, you know, stuff at that time,
#
you actually had to go there.
#
So you kind of tried to, you had to guess which days would be more productive, right?
#
Because the briefings are geared towards the most,
#
the biggest stories for the American journalists, right?
#
Not necessarily for South Asians.
#
So if you had a question to ask, then you would go for sure.
#
Then you went to think tanks, you stayed in touch with them.
#
You would call your sources at least once a week,
#
and sometimes you wouldn't be able to talk to them
#
because of whatever reason, you know, they're busy or they don't want to talk to you.
#
If the thing is too sensitive, they don't want to talk to you at all.
#
So then you have to beg the Indian embassy guys to give you some perspective.
#
So yeah, but you managed. It wasn't that difficult.
#
You learn on the job, you figure it out.
#
It becomes kind of predictable in a way, but you have to have very organized.
#
You have to have an organized mind, like your executive function should be strong.
#
You can't be lazy or, you know, procrastinate about anything.
#
Once I had kids that it was difficult.
#
So I again, I made a seminal decision.
#
I said, even if my salary goes into a babysitter, I'm going to get a babysitter.
#
So I had a wonderful lady from Sri Lanka who would come in the morning, leave at five.
#
And her husband, who was the driver for the Sri Lankan ambassador, would drop her and pick her up.
#
It was just wonderful. You know, I was so lucky again.
#
So even though I worked from home, so she was there, she was taking care of the kids.
#
And I could just shut the door to my room and concentrate, write or make phone calls, etc.
#
So yeah, worked out nicely, luckily.
#
And was it easy to sort of compartmentalize?
#
Because there are many different areas of your life where I guess you have to compartmentalize.
#
One, there is the fact that your husband himself is your then husband was actually, you know,
#
working for the government and, you know, there could have been a kind of conflict there in your book,
#
you mentioned these parts where he's talking to someone, but they're doing it in whispers
#
and they're making sure you don't hear because you're the pesky journalist.
#
And I guess that's one part of compartmentalization in your personal life.
#
And you probably need another kind of compartmentalization,
#
which I guess every good journalist learns, where you don't let your feelings get in the way of the story.
#
And there are different ways in which feelings can come into play.
#
Perhaps there are issues in which you feel really strongly, like even now, for example,
#
you've been doing this passionate reporting on the Biden administration's response to what's happening in the Middle East.
#
Now, that is a subject about which I imagine you might well have strong feelings.
#
But in the course of the reporting, you can't allow that to come out and you've got to be chill equally.
#
Like you pointed out that, you know, there might be someone in the civil service who really hates Indians and makes it obvious.
#
But you've still got to do your job and you've still got to be objective and instrumental in, you know,
#
the information that you're getting out of him and the relation that you're maintaining.
#
So what are these different kinds of compartmentalization like? Did they come naturally to you?
#
Are they something that you had to learn in the process of going through that period?
#
So actually, it happened over time that with my ex-husband, he was in the State Department.
#
And at one point of time, working actually on India, he was the director of the India office.
#
So it was dicey. But in terms of talking about India or what's happening in India, that didn't suffer.
#
You know, we could talk because most of the other times he was dealing with other countries.
#
So it didn't matter. So I'd let him know, you know, I'm so pissed off.
#
The Americans said this about India today or whatever.
#
So all that really wasn't a problem for us.
#
We were able to sort of keep our professional lives separate.
#
He never gave me a single story.
#
You know, I remember one of these ethnic newspapers that come out, you know,
#
you get them at the Indian grocery store here in the US.
#
One guy wrote a column.
#
He was a friend of the Hindustan Times correspondent at that time.
#
This is in the early 90s.
#
He wrote some column and saying, implying that I get my stories in the bedroom.
#
Can you believe it? It was just so aggravating.
#
But people are like that, you know, very they make assumptions that because you're a woman reporter,
#
you must get stories a different way, not the regular way.
#
I mean, it's so funny, the little bit that I talk about in the book,
#
the genesis of this Strobe Talbot Jaswant Singh dialogue that happened actually on my deck.
#
I did not know about it because my ex and the now ambassador to the US Taranjeet Sandhu,
#
they were going puss, puss, puss, puss on the deck.
#
And I had no idea nor was I like trying to listen in because I was hosting the party
#
and I was looking after the food and all that.
#
Only after, only when I started to write the book did I learn about this.
#
When I called the ex to double check, he says, oh, I don't remember anything.
#
So even to this day, he's maintaining, you know, that.
#
So I respect that. I have no problems.
#
I mean, that's his job. He cannot be giving me stories.
#
Just like I cannot be revealing stuff to him that I might have learned from my Indian sources.
#
You know, so that actually didn't pose a problem for us.
#
The only time I would say I'll tell you about one incident after the nuclear tests in 1998,
#
when the Americans really were very, very critical and they condemned the test and every
#
where you looked, somebody was screaming at India about something on a daily basis.
#
The State Department spokesperson, his name was James Rubin.
#
He was a political appointee.
#
He was just saying the most vicious things, you know, it got to me.
#
I have to say that time it got to me.
#
It's the first time, I think, as a reporter and as an Indian reporter, things got to me.
#
So I remember there was a briefing in which the Assistant Secretary of State was talking about
#
the sanctions that they had imposed on India and what they were planning to do next.
#
After the briefing, I summoned up my courage and I went to him.
#
He was also a political appointee, not a Foreign Service officer.
#
His name was Inder Firth.
#
I went up to him and I said, Mr. Inder Firth, I have to tell you something.
#
The relationship has just started improving and you, this kind of, you know, daily condemnation
#
can take everything back by a decade before you know it, because we've just started to come out
#
of this knee-jerk anti-Americanism and I belong to that generation.
#
I grew up, you know, pretty JNU-style anti-American.
#
So, and but now I look at it in a more nuanced way and what is the purpose of this daily berating?
#
You know, you're turning the people of India against you.
#
You can come down like a ton of bricks on the Indian government.
#
But this is like you're sending a message to the people of India.
#
You're not allowing Indian scientists to come here for random, innocent conferences.
#
You're japtifying repairs of, you know, there were some planes being repaired here.
#
They just confiscated everything, you know, just, you know, because they could.
#
So there was, the sanctions thing was so broad and randomly applied with no thinking through.
#
It was very destructive.
#
So the relationship really came down at that time.
#
And in fact, you know, you also made an argument the other way on May 19th, 1998.
#
You wrote this great piece where you spoke about Pramod Mahajan and who was in those days boasting about,
#
you know, how India's nuclear tests has made us proud and we will bow to no one.
#
And you wrote this piece arguing that, you know, every time he opened his mouth,
#
India lost millions of dollars because the US was just reacting to that bellicosity with,
#
you know, a bellicosity of their own.
#
The sanctions got really bad.
#
H1B visas were denied in your book.
#
You have these heartbreaking stories of scientists who were in no way related to all of this suffering a lot.
#
And my next question is also about sort of this tendency, because what is also what I kind of realized,
#
you know, was reminded of while reading your book and I've realized while reading other great journalists do what they do,
#
is that on the one hand, many of the people that you're writing about and dealing with are specialists in what they do.
#
So you have the foreign policy experts who know foreign policy.
#
You have the politicians who know politics.
#
You have the, you know, the bureaucrats who, you know, know their domains.
#
And one could say that for a journalist, you are necessarily a generalist.
#
And then it, you know, becomes a tightrope to a walk that you have to know enough about each of those domains to be able to make sense of it.
#
And one could say that that's a challenge.
#
But at the same time, you have something that none of them have, that a lot of them seem to have this sort of tunnel vision where they only know their own subject really well.
#
And they get stuck in that silo.
#
Like you, you know, referred to Carl Enderforth, I think, you know, saying the things he's saying without realizing the impact it will have on the Indian people.
#
And Pramod Mahajan saying what he's saying without realizing the impact it will have on the American government.
#
And you, as a journalist covering all of this, kind of have the full picture and you can see what all of these people are missing.
#
So is that sort of a correct characterization that over a period of time, you could see broader and wider than many of these people and that many of these people we regard so highly.
#
And, you know, think of them as esteemed experts in their field are actually, you know, clueless in certain other domains and are not quite there.
#
I don't want to call them clueless.
#
They are experts in their domains.
#
These are my words. I don't want to imply that you would agree with these.
#
But, you know, in general.
#
In general, yeah, they are very siloed.
#
They are obsessed with their little narrow area of expertise, like the non-proliferationists here in Washington.
#
It's a religion, you know, I think it was Brijesh Mishra who called them ayatollahs, non-proliferation ayatollahs.
#
They kind of are the way they tried to, you know, kill the nuclear deal.
#
It's not funny. And they could have at many, many points.
#
They came very close or, you know, they tried to saddle it with so many conditions and they did saddle it with a certain amount of conditions that the Indian side was not at all happy with.
#
Yeah. So they had this just one narrow view.
#
They were proved totally wrong. Right.
#
The politicians had a better view.
#
They had a broader view that these two countries need to get closer.
#
This is the one problem that prevents us from getting closer, because every time we want to do something in any domain, the nuclear question comes to the center that India has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
#
That is hindering, you know, technology transfer in any any other domain.
#
Close cooperation is impossible. So let's deal with that.
#
How to deal with that? They did this nuclear deal.
#
So the politicians understood it, but the area experts did not, at least 99 percent of them.
#
One of them is my neighbor. Lovely guy.
#
George Berkovich is a big nuclear expert.
#
He wrote a book on India's nuclear program, a very seminal book.
#
Anyway, so I joke with them because they thought that if this nuclear deal is signed, every other country is going to go the same way, demand a nuclear deal or pursue a nuclear weapons program, neither of which happened.
#
So we are many years down the line from 2005.
#
So, yes, I mean, journalists, you're right.
#
We have to be generalists. We have to know a little about everything.
#
So there is a downside to it. You're a jack of all trades, master of none.
#
But I I try to read up as much as I can from both the left and the right on a particular topic before I decide to write, especially if I don't have my own opinion on something.
#
If it's a topic that I haven't pursued closely for a while, then I read from both sides.
#
And you learn so much. You know, I mean, I was not aware why the left looks at the Jewish community in America as as sort of part of the colonizers movement.
#
I mean, they paint them with that brush. Therefore, they don't support Jews.
#
And that's why American Jews are under attack in all the college campuses and all that.
#
I wasn't aware when I read about the very strange, twisted logic of the left on that because American Jews are financially successful.
#
So therefore, automatically, they are the oppressors, part of the oppressing classes.
#
And they forget all the anti-Semitism, Holocaust, everything.
#
Yeah, I was just thinking that sounds kind of familiar.
#
And it sounds like, you know, you saying I went to JNU because these rich people at Stevens, I couldn't stand them.
#
And, you know, I guess it's a common kind of instinct.
#
So after the break, I'll, you know, we'll deep dive into India-U.S. relations, which is the subject of your book.
#
But before we go into the break, just to sort of complete your personal journey as well,
#
I also want to ask you about how you've kept yourself fresh and energetic and, you know,
#
still looking forward to your work after all these years of, you know, more than 30 years you've covered, you know, India-U.S. relations.
#
Because I think what happens is that, you know, a friend of mine has this saying that he likes to repeat,
#
which is that, you know, the days are long, the years are short.
#
And I was just paraphrasing that in the context of history and thinking that, you know, we move really slowly in the immediate moment.
#
But, you know, things happen really fast before, you know, it, you know, seismic changes have taken place.
#
I guess at any given point in time, maybe except for 2005 and except for 98,
#
it must have seemed to you that there's really no movement, everybody's kind of fixed in their positions.
#
But when you, you know, take the longer view looking back, you realize that shit, so much has happened.
#
But my question is, in the moment, in the day-to-day business of just calling up your sources,
#
figuring out what's happening, anything new that has happened is just an incremental change on what came before,
#
you know, 99 days out of 100.
#
You know, how do you then motivate yourself to do the kind of work that you do with, you know, the kind of intensity that you do it with?
#
Again, I am just lucky. I love my work. I just love being a journalist.
#
My daughter is so jealous. She feels, she wishes she was in a profession that, like, you know, she got up every day excited about the news.
#
So I don't know. And meeting people, I just love meeting new people and not be intimidated by them,
#
whether they are politicians or, you know, big time experts.
#
The only time I've been nervous is when I interviewed Howard Zinn.
#
I was so nervous because he is like somebody I admired so much.
#
I was faltering, you know, when I was asking the questions.
#
So I would say just every day can be different in news like that.
#
The US is involved in so many conflicts and problems everywhere.
#
What it says and does is kind of important.
#
Even on the US India beach, you'd be surprised how many twists and turns still take place.
#
Remember the Canada flap recently?
#
So something or the other happens where there is problem, there is trouble, and then you have to find out what's going to happen.
#
Is it going to take the relationship back or is it not going to affect it?
#
So I don't know. I just like being a journalist. That's the simple answer.
#
One thing I do miss being in Washington, since I cover only policy stuff most of the time,
#
rarely do I go out and, you know, cover a protest or something like that.
#
I did that during the Black Lives Matter movement and all that.
#
I miss being in India for that because in India, there are a thousand stories you could write,
#
which are very different from policy or the impact a certain policy has on real people.
#
No, I could write about US policy impacting American people,
#
but that's not of interest to my readers in India for my column in the Economic Times.
#
So, yeah, that's the one thing I miss.
#
I have done a few travel stories for Telegraph.
#
I had a larger mandate, which kept life interesting.
#
So anytime we took a trip, I'd write a story or I went to a concert,
#
like the Rolling Stones concert, I did a big story.
#
Yeah, I mean, that's a digression I can't get away from because on your Twitter bio,
#
you describe yourself as a failed rocker, blues fan and aspiring yogi.
#
Were you ever part of a rock band? Kindly explain.
#
No, I wasn't. I wasn't.
#
In my dreams, I was. I always wanted to be a rock star, actually.
#
I wanted, I always imagined myself like singing like Bob Dylan, playing the guitar and holding.
#
You know, everybody mesmerized just by the amazing lyrics I wrote.
#
So that was all in the dream world.
#
So that's how I used to escape from the drudgery of life when I was feeling down,
#
you know, not fitting in in St Stephen's College or whatever, or when I was homesick in Kansas.
#
But I love music. Yeah, I do love music.
#
So a final question before the break. I lied.
#
The last one wasn't my last one, but this one just came to me from the,
#
you know, from the distance that you're at, having left India in the late 80s
#
and coming back here every once in a while, writing about it all the time.
#
What do you make of it now?
#
Because, you know, for someone like me, I've been, you know, living through these years right here.
#
So all the change happens by osmosis on a daily drip, drip, drip kind of basis.
#
But, you know, your perspective, you know, you'd be updating it a few months or however frequently you come here and so on and so forth.
#
What is your big picture take on what you see of India?
#
Like we'll talk about, after the break, we'll talk about your big picture take on India-U.S. relationships.
#
And, you know, your book is incredibly nuanced and insightful there.
#
But in India per se, so much has happened since 1988.
#
What is your sense of all of this?
#
I think India has changed to an extent that in some aspects it frightens me.
#
And it's not the India I grew up in at all.
#
And sometimes I worry about India as to what's happening.
#
I think there was a lot of euphoria after the economic reforms that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and that time finance minister did.
#
And there was just that enthusiasm.
#
Now people say there is enthusiasm and I feel it.
#
I go every year to India and I spend at least a month or six weeks at least.
#
I can see there's a lot of energy.
#
But what frightens me is this, the diminishing space for another point of view.
#
Like people come at me on Twitter for the most simple retweet I may do where there's a joke about the BJP.
#
I think I tweeted yesterday that somebody had said that when Prime Minister Modi is doing some tilak of,
#
mitti ka tilak or something, that somebody had tweeted that photo saying it looks like India is run by Ekta Kapoor or something.
#
So I just retweeted it with a smiling emoji.
#
My God, the kind of nasty responses.
#
People have lost humor.
#
That is one big thing under the new government.
#
There is no sense of humor at all about anything left.
#
I've noticed that with diplomats.
#
Indian diplomats have become like this.
#
It's just they are ramrod straight.
#
They're afraid to talk.
#
Very different, very different from what I remember, the earlier generation.
#
So, but India, they say, has transformed, whether for the better or I don't know.
#
I cannot judge, but from what one reads in the press, it's worrying.
#
Indeed. And you know, you mentioned diplomats from a previous generation in your book.
#
You have this great quote, if I remember correctly, where you quote an American diplomat as saying of his Indian counterparts that they chew my brain more than they chew the food.
#
But we'll talk about that and much more after a quick break.
#
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Welcome back to the Scene on the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Seema Siravi about her life and her wonderful book, Friends with Benefits.
#
But, you know, in the break, we were talking about freedom of the press and so on.
#
And you said something that's really provocative and I want to ask you to double click on it,
#
which is that nobody really believes in freedom of the press, whether in India or the US.
#
So, you know, kindly elaborate.
#
I just feel that freedom of the press is always projected as a major thing in democracies.
#
But in my experience, I think democratic governments just suffer the press.
#
They don't actually believe in it.
#
They don't ever make it easy for us.
#
OK, there might be some very amazing things some governments have done, like the Right to Information Act
#
that has been used effectively by Indian journalists to bring out information.
#
But in everyday life, the idea is to hide information, not to share it.
#
The people's or the public's right to know is just something they say.
#
I don't think they actually believe or practice it unless it's being, you know,
#
and they share information if it is against some other person or another entity, another agency.
#
Here, the Department of State might share something against the Department of Defense
#
or the CIA might leak some information that they are upset about because the executive branch
#
is not moving on a certain policy.
#
I've noticed that over the years.
#
So they leak it to the New York Times and then everyone's talking about it.
#
So they use the press rather than actually believe in the people's right to know.
#
So I have sort of a two part question, and I'm going to kind of dig into this
#
because it's like a subject to mine as well.
#
And part one of my question is, is that what is the dharma for journalists?
#
Because on the one hand, we've been brought up to, you know,
#
phrases like afflicting the comfortable, comforting the afflicted,
#
speaking truth to power and blah, blah, blah.
#
First draft of history.
#
And there is a sense that there is a higher calling,
#
that there is a sense of values, that you play an important part in society.
#
And all these are, you know, part of what some of us have imbibed.
#
At the same time, the bottom line is that anyone who is running a publishing outlet,
#
you know, has to make a profit and they have their own imperatives
#
and they have to cater to that.
#
And ultimately, supply has to cater to demand.
#
Otherwise, where are you?
#
And I find this a really difficult question because in my idealistic way,
#
I do tons of things like this podcast for a significant part of the time it ran today.
#
Thankfully, it's profitable.
#
But, you know, for the first three or four years, I didn't make any money.
#
It was a labor of love, but I wanted to do it.
#
And so you find people within the landscape who do things.
#
And I can obviously speak to Indian examples like old news, news laundry,
#
all of those people, independent media, scroll, the news minute,
#
who sort of have a higher sense of purpose to what they are doing.
#
And they do it regardless.
#
But there are others who will tell you that, listen, at the end of the day,
#
it's a business, it's supply meeting demand, et cetera, et cetera.
#
And so how do you think about this?
#
And, you know, this first part of my question, I can itself break it up into two parts.
#
And I can ask you, what do you feel is your dharma as a journalist?
#
And do you think that there is something called the dharma of journalists,
#
that there is something beyond that instrumental sense of give people whatever they want,
#
whatever will help the institution survive?
#
How does one think about these, especially in these times where even if lip service
#
is played to freedom of press, the reality isn't always that easy?
#
I think there is a higher calling, higher objective for a journalist,
#
at least that's how I try to do my job.
#
I have never taken favor from anyone that I can recall.
#
Even, you know, going on government trips that sometimes is kind of problematic,
#
but there's no other way to get to those places unless you go with the prime minister on the plane or something.
#
But by and large, I think most journalists would agree that your job is to tell it as truthfully as humanly as possible.
#
Otherwise, why be in this profession?
#
The public depends on us to know what's going on.
#
And you have to tell that story honestly, to the best of your capacity, capability.
#
Yes, it's a business at the end of the day.
#
But I see newspapers, you know, doing honorable things to still make it successful.
#
After all, you know, this whole online thing, at least in the US, so many firstly,
#
so many newspapers have died in the US, all small town newspapers are pretty much dead.
#
Everything is gone online, but the major newspapers that still survive,
#
they're trying to make it interesting, trying to lure young readers with online content and serious doing a seriously good job sometimes.
#
New York Times has this amazing photo essays that they do very skillfully put together.
#
So after a point, I don't buy that excuse if Indian newspapers and Indian news journalists are saying that firstly,
#
Indian news websites are so bad, they're like really bad.
#
You try to read any story on your phone here on an Indian newspaper website.
#
The ads keep coming all over and you have to keep clicking out of them.
#
It's a hassle. So I try to read only on the computer.
#
But can we be a little more honest than simply just giving in and becoming taking the easy way out the lazy way out that,
#
oh, somebody is giving me a bottle of scotch.
#
So I'm going to write that story.
#
That just is not what I believe in.
#
I think about all the small town journalists in India who are doing amazing stuff against all odds and being threatened and being killed.
#
So if those guys can pursue an objective, honestly, why can't big city people do?
#
You know, they're being lazy, I think.
#
So here's another thought.
#
Like one big change that I've seen in the last 25 years or so is that the means of production have now become open to all.
#
So earlier, what used to be the case is you had a consensus on the truth that was decided by the few mainstream outlets that,
#
you know, had the means of production and therefore were gatekeepers to information and knowledge.
#
And, you know, so New York Times and Wall Street Journal might have slightly might be different on the margins.
#
They have minor differences, but there is a consensus on the truth.
#
It does go around the sun, et cetera, et cetera.
#
And today it has completely vanished.
#
But that consensus and where these engaged in these narrative battles.
#
But the flip side of that and what I think makes it all a net positive is that no one needs to rely on gatekeepers anymore.
#
You know, I would imagine that earlier you could define journalism in a narrow way that if you think about what it is beyond going out there and reporting news,
#
it's really a broadly put pursuit of truth.
#
There is information in the world.
#
You're making more and more of it available to people so that they can join dots and paint clearer pictures of the world.
#
And while you needed journalists and authors and filmmakers to do that once upon a time today, anyone can do it.
#
And that's great. And more and more I find and I was an early blogger, of course, in the 80s,
#
but more and more I find that blogging was liberating because while I was a mainstream journalist and editor,
#
what blogging allowed me to do is I could break away from the constraints of form.
#
I would no longer have to write 800 words. I could write 80 or 8000.
#
I would not have to follow a news cycle. I could write about whatever took my fancy.
#
And over the last few years, what technology now allows you to do is connect directly with your readers.
#
So you no longer need to sort of sell your work to a mainstream outlet and they'll aggregate eyeballs and sell it to advertisers.
#
And then you see a tiny chunk of that.
#
You can reach your readers directly once you build up some kind of following and do the kind of work you want to do.
#
And that makes sense. So a lot of the writers that I respect today are either bloggers like the Marginal Revolution guys,
#
if you're talking about economics, or they are on Substack where a lot of people are doing really interesting work with newsletters like Yasha Monk, for example.
#
And I find that there is a lot of hope there that, you know, even if mainstream media seems confused,
#
sometimes seems to flounder, sometimes does some good things, but in India is beholden to all kinds of other issues.
#
Like there could be a big newspaper here where the owners also own a chemical factory, which could get raided tomorrow by the ED.
#
So what do you do? You have those pressures on you.
#
But that doesn't stop individuals from going out there and creating whatever they want to create and so on and so forth.
#
Now, I'm sort of only familiar with perhaps a narrow sliver of this, which is based on what my interests are and therefore what I'm aware of.
#
But what is your sense in the larger world of sense making out there?
#
Because in a sense, what you do falls within the rubric of sense making. You are a sense maker for the world.
#
So within that rubric, do you feel that that's been democratized a bit? Are they dangerous to that?
#
You know, if you were 20 today, would you take the kind of part that you have taken?
#
What are sort of your thoughts on that?
#
It's certainly been democratized. No question about it.
#
But at the same time, I think dangers have increased with all this fake news and things.
#
Today, to be a reader has become not just a simple task, but to be a reader, you have to discern.
#
You have to be more discerning, more intelligent, more sort of sift through more things to figure out what is the truth and what is fake news, et cetera.
#
That's kind of frightening. Yes. But then the world always becomes more complicated with time.
#
Right. The Cold War was simpler to decipher. Now it's the world is much more complicated.
#
So I think that I all the things you mentioned, you know, I go to those blogs, up stack amazing stuff.
#
In fact, there is this fountain of information, this plethora of information is very difficult to keep on top of it.
#
Already stay living in America, in Washington, there is a surfeit of information that I, as a journalist, I forgot to mention that was one of the more difficult tasks.
#
You asked me about how I sort of managed to read through what is publicly available is just mind blowing.
#
It's impossible. You can find a hundred more stories if you read through every hearing, you'll find something of interest to India.
#
Now that is multiplied. But I'm not sure whether all of it is for the good.
#
Are people just mouthing off because they can because they can easily create a platform or they take this quote unquote job seriously and read everything, figure out the history and geography of things before they write.
#
So now I see a lot of people depend on TikTok for information in the US.
#
In fact, the Democratic Party is very worried.
#
They are not they are trying not to ban TikTok, even though they are under pressure from the Republicans.
#
Why? Because it's such a great medium for them to reach the young.
#
So come election time, they want to be able to use it.
#
So even though Chinese own it and all that, that's all been set aside.
#
Now, I've heard I can't say that I watch TikTok a lot, but oftentimes my daughter would send me some stuff and I watch it just to keep abreast of all the new things that are happening in the world.
#
Much of it is very simplistic.
#
It's boiled down to like, you know, very basic stuff.
#
I keep encouraging both my kids to actually read newspapers still if they want to know something properly.
#
And they try to do that. My son's a very serious reader of newspapers and I'm very happy about it.
#
And he's 26, so he's still reading the New York Times and the Washington Post and all the Italian newspapers for soccer.
#
My daughter depends more on TikTok, but she also reads more than an average young person.
#
I'm not sure that that's a good thing to depend only on these very brief little nuggets that people put out, depending on their whim, you know,
#
for knowing what's happening in the world or to understand an issue.
#
My sense of that actually is I would throw in a note of optimism there and I'm not known for throwing in notes of optimism,
#
but I will nevertheless throw in one saying that people contain multitudes.
#
So we all have a read book mode and we all have a TikTok mode.
#
And there are times I just want to scroll and swipe endlessly.
#
And there are times I really want to dig deep into something.
#
And I think the number of serious readers in every generation has really been really small.
#
Most people don't read seriously anyway.
#
So I don't think that that number has gone down.
#
If anything, it's probably gone up.
#
My publisher friends tell me that book sales are as healthy as before.
#
But perhaps, you know, everybody else is kind of more visible.
#
And in an Indian context, which is a very different context from the American context,
#
but in an Indian context, I thought TikTok was revolutionary here.
#
You know, it came to India at exactly the time at around the time when Jio expanded broadband use all across India.
#
So villages and towns across India got, you know, really cheap and ubiquitous broadband almost.
#
And TikTok became a really big thing here.
#
Until the Indian government in the show of Bravado died, we will show the Chinese just kind of banned it.
#
And just before they did that, I had in fact taught one cohort of a course, which I titled TikTok in Indian society,
#
because I thought it was incredibly fascinating.
#
It was empowering so many people who earlier did not have a voice.
#
And not only like if you're a person of an alternate sexuality in a village, for example,
#
you would feel alone and isolated and not find others like you.
#
But not only do you see people like you expressing themselves on TikTok,
#
but there comes that magic revolutionary moment where you turn the camera around and you're one of them and you can start creating.
#
And initially, it might be the simple standard copycat memes.
#
But later on, there's a flourishing of creativity.
#
And I saw so much of that happening and it breaks my heart that we no longer have it.
#
But I won't go on and, you know, bore you with more of that.
#
No, no, I stand corrected.
#
You obviously know much more about this than I do.
#
Yes, TikTok was very, very empowering in India.
#
I read about that. Yes.
#
Yeah. No, I mean, what I meant was, I don't know, American TikTok.
#
So I can't comment on that.
#
But maybe someday you should sit with your daughter when she's browsing TikTok and just check out some of what she's liking.
#
You know, before we go on to, you know, the subject of your book,
#
Another question that was sparked by what you were saying about how a free press has paid lip service to and not necessarily respected.
#
And what I thought there was, you know, I use the phrase dharma of a journalist equally.
#
Even if we, you know, take the idealistic spin there and say that, yeah, there is a dharma, there is a higher calling that we believe in.
#
We could turn that phrase to many of the people that we interact with and say that, you know,
#
there is also then the dharma of a politician and a dharma of a diplomat and so on and so forth.
#
And none of those dharmas necessarily involve telling the truth, right?
#
A politician has to serve his political interests.
#
Why the hell should he give you information beyond what serves him?
#
And the two diplomats who also have their sort of incentives to balance.
#
What's your response to that?
#
No, I totally, I totally get your point.
#
But then don't give me the press release that, oh, freedom of the press and, you know, public's right to know.
#
You do what you want, compulsions.
#
I understand the compulsions of a politician or a diplomat.
#
I mean, what is the problem with the U.S. most of the time is the press release.
#
It's that, you know, we are the force of the good.
#
But then you're doing all these things where people are, you know, really shocked by your being.
#
If this is the force of the good, then what is the force of the bad, you know, that kind of thing.
#
So, yeah, I totally get the compulsions of a politician.
#
I totally take your point on that.
#
I don't have patience with all the fluff that they put around it.
#
I'm doing this because it's in my interest.
#
Do you see more and more fluff around you as the years go by?
#
No, no, actually, it's just about the same.
#
No, I mean, do you see more of it?
#
I'm sure the fluff is the same.
#
But do you see more of it?
#
Not necessarily. Not necessarily.
#
I mean, a couple of times I personally experienced this whole freedom of the press thing.
#
And that's why I have this opinion and that I have very little patience for all the verbiage that goes with it.
#
Because, you know, diplomats will use journalists.
#
Politicians will use journalists to get something out there only for their own purpose.
#
But they should be willing to take the truth telling themselves also, you know.
#
Please don't give me this rosy picture.
#
I agree with you entirely.
#
Let's talk about India-U.S. relationships.
#
And you just sort of mentioned simplistic narratives and the American arrogance and etc, etc.
#
And that is so much more visible and in play in the 1980s where you move there,
#
where you have these excellent opening chapters in your book where you describe what it was in the early days.
#
You speak about how, quote unquote, an air of forced tolerance was there between Indian diplomats and American diplomats.
#
And you also spoke about the simple binaries that prevailed when it came to narratives.
#
And India was vis-a-vis the U.S. in pretty bad shape because, one, you had the Soviet war in Afghanistan.
#
And the Americans needed Pakistan for that.
#
And Pakistan was like a client state, therefore.
#
And equally, they were trying to cozy up to China because that is the, you know, Cold War imperatives.
#
That is the other big communist giant they want to play off against the Soviet Union.
#
So give me a sense of what was going on at that time in India-U.S. relationships in the late 80s when you got there.
#
So in very simple terms, India didn't matter for U.S. policy goals at all.
#
We were not important for them in any of the international objectives they were pursuing.
#
If anything, India was a giant headache for because India was always on the opposite side.
#
Even on issues of non-proliferation, we were completely on the opposite side.
#
Then Pakistan was so useful. It's incredible.
#
The ISI became so powerful and arrogant that they started to do missions inside America.
#
That was the situation.
#
And Indians and Americans basically scored points off each other.
#
That was all the dialogue consisted of.
#
Either the Americans were telling us, don't do this.
#
It was always, don't. It's never, let's do something.
#
No, don't do this. Don't do that.
#
Don't do a missile test. Don't pursue a nuclear weapons program.
#
Support us on this initiative in the UN, et cetera.
#
Like the Department of Commerce here in Washington was the Department of Denial.
#
Any technology India wanted. They said no. Why?
#
Oh, because you haven't signed the NPT, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
#
Well, they're merely sharing everything with China simply because they had signed the treaty,
#
but they were proliferating like mad.
#
But that is, you know, too much detail for the Americans.
#
Then terrorism. That was another issue that really kind of bothered the government of India.
#
There were attacks in India that were traced to Pakistan-based group all the time.
#
And the Americans would just simply not accept that there were these Pakistani groups
#
that were sending terrorists and Pakistan was training terrorists, et cetera.
#
Even though their own intelligence was telling them the same thing.
#
So that's when I learned that how two-faced a country can be.
#
I mean, that was like part of my growing up about covering foreign policy.
#
You know that so many people have died.
#
There's evidence linking X to Y to Z.
#
And your intelligence is telling you the same thing.
#
Yet you are telling me, no, no, no, we don't see any evidence.
#
There's the State Department.
#
And you feel aggravated.
#
I mean, I could sense the frustration of Indian diplomats.
#
So many times they felt that the Americans were close to declaring Pakistan a state sponsor of terrorism.
#
And every time I would tell them, no, boss, it's not happening.
#
We haven't reached that state yet.
#
Even today, they haven't declared them.
#
Even after finding Osama bin Laden living in comfort in Pakistan next to a military academy,
#
they didn't declare them a state sponsor of terrorism.
#
Because too many other stakes were involved, too many other equities for their own national interest.
#
So that's where India was.
#
Kind of in the netherworld, they spent time, you know, sort of playing with each other,
#
screwing each other in little tiny ways, cutting telephone lines, reducing the number of telephones,
#
stuff like that, denying delegations to come here.
#
And similarly, India denying delegations protocol was made into a bigger issue than it need be.
#
So we were in a very bad place, actually.
#
Tell me a little bit about, you know, foreign policy people will often speak about values versus interests, right?
#
And one would imagine that over here, what you have is that America does have shared values with India
#
in terms of their both sort of liberal democracies, as it were.
#
India, of course, hadn't yet embraced markets at that time in the late 80s.
#
But the democracy thing was certainly a big deal.
#
If you look at us, we are Pakistan and China and so on.
#
But those are values. But at the same time, there are interests and their interests,
#
you know, whether it is needing Pakistan's help in Afghanistan or wanting China as a buffer against the Soviet Union.
#
Those interests are what they sort of privilege.
#
And it seems to me that if you are playing the long game, then the values should matter.
#
And interests will arise naturally out of those.
#
And there is a sense in which America might have figured it out now or maybe just their interests have changed.
#
But if you're not focused so much on the long game and you go from short term interest to short term interest,
#
then any talk of values is really lip service.
#
It's like lipstick on a pig. I mean, like you said, it is what it is.
#
You can use all the fancy language you want.
#
But at the end of the day, you know, it sort of is what it is.
#
And do you feel that within the Foreign Service, you know, and you've interacted with politicians, diplomats,
#
foreign service people, et cetera, et cetera, do you feel that there is a shortness of vision there,
#
that you cannot see the long game, that you cannot see why values are important?
#
And also, I think there might be a little bit of cognitive laziness in the sense that once you've decided on a narrative of the world
#
that India bad because not signing NPT, China good because we need them and Pakistan good because they're helping us in Afghanistan.
#
Once you, you know, grab a simplistic narrative rather than update your priors all the time and accept nuance,
#
it is much easier just to stick to that narrative and just kind of go with that.
#
So is that sort of an issue?
#
That's a very complicated question.
#
And I do not haven't come to where I fall on this one.
#
So when I look at U.S. India or U.S. Pakistan, U.S. China, interests dominated for a very long time.
#
If values were even a small part of American foreign policy, they would have given India some more attention,
#
you know, at least namke vaaste, you know, but they didn't, they barely did.
#
They barely recognize us, even though in the early days of, you know, the relationship in the fifties and all,
#
the fact that India was a democracy was a very big thing for Americans, American presidents,
#
because that was their biggest kind of debating point against communism and China,
#
that India is a democracy, a poor country can be a democracy.
#
They used it again in the kind of an interest driven way.
#
Now, when you say that values, if you take a long term view, values should come into play.
#
I can't think since I've been an adult where values have trumped interests and America has gone a certain way because of values
#
or India has gone a certain way because of values.
#
So I kind of, if you pushed me into a corner, I would say interests dominate when countries think about policy,
#
when they think about how to protect their citizens best to their best of their ability.
#
They think about national security interests.
#
And if values come with it, then it makes it easier.
#
So the other day, Ashley Tellis, one of the most important South Asia experts in this town, he's of Indian origin.
#
He said that my book event that the nuclear deal was easier for them.
#
He was part of the negotiations at that time in 2005 and later.
#
It was easier for them to sell the nuclear deal to the US Congress because India was a democracy.
#
If India had not been, he said, forget it.
#
We never would have been able to.
#
That made me really think.
#
And that's a very important point.
#
It came at a time when our relationship wasn't strong.
#
It was a very kind of minimal getting better, but not strong.
#
So this was a very seminal thing that happened, the nuclear deal.
#
But even though it was very difficult negotiations, very difficult to pass and everything,
#
the fact that the US Congress went along with it, according to him, the important thing was India was a democracy.
#
So now, if the same deal were to or another equally important thing were to happen,
#
and people talk about democratic backsliding in India under Prime Minister Modi,
#
I don't know if they will balk and not do a deal.
#
I think they will. They will.
#
Look at the kind of bow they gave in June when the prime minister came here.
#
They went out of their way to the extent that people here were upset.
#
You know, parts of the Democratic Party were really upset, the progressives.
#
Some of them refused to come to the state dinner.
#
Things like that happened.
#
But in the national interest, they have decided, the Americans, that is,
#
that to counter China, India is extremely important.
#
We can't afford to let India go.
#
So they will sort of overlook certain things.
#
So once again, interests over values.
#
So now, one would imagine that once the Cold War is over, the Berlin Wall has fallen,
#
the Soviet Union has been dissolved.
#
One would imagine that things kind of get better because at least one solid set of imperatives kind of falls away.
#
And yet it is not quite the case.
#
Like you have this telling sort of paragraph which I'll read out about the first President Bush,
#
where you write, you know, right after the Cold War is pretty much done with,
#
where you write, quote,
#
President Bush was flooded with advice on how to secure this unipolar movement.
#
He had already led a coalition of 35 countries against Iraq in the first Gulf War
#
to reverse the invasion of Kuwait.
#
Speaking to the military community at Fort Stewart in Georgia shortly after,
#
Bush said, and now these are his words,
#
the US has a new credibility in that what we say goes,
#
and that there is no place for lawless aggression in the Persian Gulf
#
and in this new world order that we seek to create and we mean it.
#
His quote stops and you end by saying swagger was in the air.
#
So tell me a little bit about this because what,
#
like on the one hand, your imperatives have changed slightly,
#
but people can still get wedded to old attitudes.
#
And also it would seem that American arrogance ain't going nowhere,
#
especially not now when you've basically won the whole game.
#
And so it seems, you know, end of history, et cetera, et cetera.
#
So what was that period like and what was it like in terms of US
#
India relations at that time and so on and so forth?
#
Again, you know, at that time, everybody was arguing
#
how to maximize the utility of this unipolar moment.
#
And Americans overreached, I would argue.
#
They could have used that moment to make more friends
#
and bring more people into their camp, but they didn't.
#
The swagger, the useless war against Iraq under George W.
#
Bush, because they felt some parts of the neoconservative movement
#
felt that they just wanted to establish American hegemony.
#
Nobody else had the right because the Soviet Union was dissolved.
#
They were a defeated power.
#
The Americans roundly defeated them in the Cold War.
#
Instead of coming home and celebrating,
#
they went about sort of, you know, humiliating
#
the Russians and they kept expanding NATO, et cetera.
#
So for India, India had to change gears very quickly.
#
See, existing in a bipolar world was somewhat easier.
#
You could go to either camp for whatever you needed.
#
And depending on their point of view, they would help.
#
Americans also helped us in the 62 war against China.
#
But against Pakistan, they did not.
#
So, but we were able to exploit the bipolar world in a unipolar world.
#
Indians really had to make a turnaround, a quick turnaround.
#
And I can tell you, some people in the foreign ministry were not
#
They still had this vision that Russians are going to be very powerful.
#
And it took them some time, but they did make an opening,
#
started to take this relationship, the US relationship, more seriously,
#
started to make unilateral efforts themselves,
#
you know, coming and engaging with the Americans, something which they didn't
#
used to do because Americans were not interested.
#
Americans, on the other hand, many in the Defense Department
#
at that time, saw India as a problem country,
#
kind of seeking hegemony in South Asia.
#
So there were parts of the Pentagon that argued
#
that India doing all these missile tests and all.
#
That's not good news for us.
#
We don't want the new hegemons to rise
#
because then we have to go out and, you know, counter them.
#
They weren't looking at India in a friendly way at that time.
#
So there was a lot of, you know, paths still to be traveled.
#
The arrogance was mind blowing.
#
You should. I quote, I think Krauthammer, Charles Krauthammer,
#
who just basically says, go rule the world, young man.
#
So that was the kind of arguments being made here.
#
And you had to wonder, wow, they don't realize how poor
#
the developing world is, how many problems there are in the world.
#
You can't win everything with military might.
#
Today, they're trying to correct that.
#
If you notice all the outreach to global south countries
#
by America is because for 20 years, they didn't care, really.
#
And they didn't engage them intelligently.
#
They were just, you know, they threw some money.
#
Sometimes there was not an engagement with respect.
#
Now they're changing. They're less arrogant today.
#
And I love the irony of America calling another country a hegemon.
#
And as you point out that, you know, that whole allegation
#
that India is a hegemon probably originated within the ISI
#
or some Pakistani academic paper or whatever.
#
Quick aside, before I go to my next question,
#
you mentioned a little while earlier that ISI was so brazen
#
that they were actually doing things in America itself.
#
Tell me, tell me a little bit about that.
#
So they put in money into certain groups.
#
One of the CIA, retired CIA officers they interviewed told me about it.
#
So it was a group called Something Al Farqa.
#
I don't remember the full name now.
#
And these groups, this group was dominated by black Muslim Americans.
#
So they were just they used this group to attack Hindu temples
#
and Sikh Gurdwaras and Sikh businesses.
#
So they were trying to sort of scare the Indian community.
#
The idea being they could the Pakistanis could see in the mid
#
to late 90s after the economic reforms of India
#
that India was in a certain trajectory that is going to outpace Pakistan.
#
OK, so let's create some trouble here.
#
Indian Americans are coming into their own.
#
They were coming and, you know,
#
there were motels owned by a lot of Gujarati Indians.
#
So the business people were doing well.
#
That's what the Pakistanis did.
#
I could not believe the chutzpah of the Pakistanis, but that's
#
the kind of courage ISI developed
#
because they had the run of billions of dollars.
#
They had the entire U.S. Congress arguing in their favor
#
to keep sending money to the Mujahideen.
#
And not too many Americans were trained in the art of even the language
#
or even the language or, you know, dealing with the Mujahideen.
#
So they let it they were happy to give it to the Pakistanis to deal with.
#
They had the money and they gave them the money.
#
Pakistanis distributed them.
#
They gave those weapons to the most radical elements of the Mujahideen.
#
The whole Afghanistan situation is such a tragedy.
#
When the Soviets left 89, I think it was
#
they left Afghanistan in the hands of a pretty OK guy.
#
If you compare him to all the radicals who came.
#
And today, the Taliban, they've taken Afghanistan back 50 years.
#
Right. Najibullah, I mean, he was willing to negotiate with all the groups.
#
But the Pakistanis didn't want him.
#
They wanted their agents, their, you know,
#
so they told the Americans this guy is a communist.
#
He is a former communist. Yes, but.
#
Yeah, I mean, I mean, just, you know, Najibullah in 1996
#
getting murdered by the Taliban within the UN compound is itself
#
like a metaphor for a larger game that sort of played out.
#
And even what you describe about the ISI peddling influence in the US.
#
And it seems to me such an ironic circular game where, you know,
#
many of the players may not even have realized they were being played,
#
where the people within the Congress will vote to give money to Pakistan.
#
And then some of that will come back in lobbying efforts
#
to make them vote again to give money to Pakistan.
#
I remember when I was traveling through Pakistan in the early 80s after 9-11,
#
someone said that, you know, they would refer to Al-Qaeda as Al-Faida
#
because of all the money that flooded into Pakistan,
#
And, you know, that was just nuts.
#
My next question is about, you know, this fascinatingly dramatic part
#
which you start your book with, where you speak about this 1991 conference
#
where a military company called General Dynamics laid out,
#
did the scenario planning, where they laid out a scenario
#
10 years from now where India and Pakistan are almost going nuclear
#
and America has to stop India and nuclear submarines
#
come into the Indian Ocean and, you know, various cities are bombed,
#
you know, Indian cities bombed by the US and all of that.
#
And laying out the scenario for the sole purpose of somehow selling their weapons,
#
because another thing that happens during the Cold War, as you describe so well,
#
is that the whole military industrial complex is like,
#
what are we going to do now?
#
You know, you get your 300 billion or whatever per year and funding
#
and et cetera, et cetera, and that whole economy is going to go to hell.
#
So you've got your army of lobbying groups and all the senators
#
and congressmen who will do your bidding and try and you're trying to create
#
new enemies, because new enemies is the only way that you can justify
#
And for a while, India is in that in the firing line.
#
Tell me how you came across that story, because that whole narrative
#
is also seems like such an interesting story, not just about India,
#
US military industrial complex, but even about you as a journalist,
#
because you break this incredibly huge story and everybody,
#
including the US State Department and the Indian ambassador is saying,
#
no, no, it's nonsense, it's fabricated.
#
And, you know, you're the journalist and you know, it's not fabricated.
#
And just take me through that period and so on.
#
Oh, it was it was very exciting to begin with.
#
But then it made me pass through some really tough times.
#
So there was a friend of mine who was visiting from Delhi,
#
a European think tanker whom I knew in India.
#
And he was coming through.
#
He called me and we met for lunch and we were just chit chatting.
#
And he basically said that he was at this briefing
#
where all this happened.
#
He described this general dynamics was trying to sell
#
a new version of the Tomahawk missile to the Pentagon
#
and was trying to develop a constituency of think tankers
#
and retired military officials, State Department
#
and just all the busybodies in Washington
#
to sort of argue their case and with the with the Pentagon.
#
So he told me that there was a scenario about India, Pakistan.
#
And the funny thing he found was that the US comes down against India.
#
I said, oh, my God, tell me more, tell me more.
#
So he just like gave me a whole set of briefing papers
#
that General Dynamics had produced.
#
I came home, read them, and I was like jumping.
#
Called my editor, told him about it.
#
He said, yeah, go ahead.
#
So I wrote the story where, you know, the scenario,
#
there were five scenarios, one of which was India, Pakistan.
#
Very believable scenario.
#
The tensions over Kashmir are increasing.
#
Both countries are on the verge of war.
#
The US has to intervene to prevent nuclear war
#
and to sort of secure its national interest
#
because oil flows and all of those maritime passageways
#
would get blocked if there's a real nuclear war.
#
So in the US intervenes, and of course, it uses the General Dynamics
#
newly built missiles and uses, I think, 146 or something.
#
And basically annihilates all Indian air bases,
#
naval bases, repair shops, even everything.
#
They don't bomb cities.
#
They just bomb military bases of India.
#
They make India unable to respond.
#
Basically, they finish off Indian capability to respond in this scenario.
#
And then they have like 96 missiles still left,
#
you know, in case more and more are needed.
#
It was on the front page and banner headline and above
#
the dissolution of the Lok Sabha, if you please.
#
So I think Telegraph went a little overboard, but be that as it may,
#
I was just the story was denounced as completely false
#
and exaggerated and egregious
#
and every adjective that you could think of.
#
And such were my colleagues, the Indian journalists,
#
instead of asking me, calling me like, hey,
#
do you have the documents to prove it?
#
Like, can you share the documents?
#
No, they just instead of taking the story forward,
#
as we are told in journalism school, they assume that I was wrong.
#
They printed all the denunciations from every department,
#
Pentagon State Department, General Dynamics, Indian Embassy.
#
Everybody was just freaking out.
#
I was a little taken aback.
#
I felt quite depressed that like, what's going on?
#
But at the same time, I was very confident.
#
I had the documents. I just waited.
#
Then I wrote another story.
#
The best thing that happened to me was K.
#
Subrahmanyam, the father of the current foreign minister, Jai Shankar.
#
K. Subrahmanyam was like the grand deity of strategic thinking
#
and all that in India at that time.
#
He wrote a piece basically repeating all of the information,
#
because obviously, I think the Indian Embassy sent him the documents
#
because they managed to get those briefing papers out of the company,
#
while denouncing me in public.
#
They were doing the job they're supposed to do.
#
So K. Subrahmanyam wrote.
#
And then I was saying, like, I'm home free.
#
I don't have to say anything.
#
I did a larger Sunday piece.
#
I talked to think tankers here and put it all in context.
#
Then I did the apology story.
#
General Dynamics actually was made to apologize to the government of India.
#
By now, the diplomats in the Indian Embassy were totally cooperating with me.
#
They gave me the the letter first.
#
So I had another exclusive, so that was all exciting.
#
But boy, did I learn some lessons.
#
I really can never depend on your colleagues to, you know, help you.
#
That's lesson number one.
#
That's very peculiar to Indian journalism, by the way.
#
Here, it doesn't happen that way.
#
If the New York Times breaks a story, the Washington Post doesn't think,
#
oh, this must be wrong.
#
Let's get a counter story.
#
No, they say, oh, WTF, we miss the story.
#
Let's get something more along the same lines.
#
Let's and they always acknowledge each other down the story.
#
They'll say first broken by the New York Times or HuffPost or whatever the outlet is.
#
I find that tradition to be very honorable.
#
And I like to follow it.
#
Many times I've given credit and my editors have cut it out of my stories.
#
It is the most bizarre thing that we do in Indian journalism.
#
It's that old cliche about crabs climbing out of a bottle and, you know,
#
other crabs bringing them down.
#
And I remember, like when I was managing a written trick and fool,
#
one thing that used to get my goat is we'd break these stories all the time.
#
And then times of India, Hindustan Times, they'd all, you know, repeat our story.
#
And then they'd have the words according to a website.
#
They wouldn't even name us.
#
And, you know, later, of course, when I became a Times of India columnist myself,
#
I would just name whoever I felt like and no one would mess with me.
#
But that approach is just so kind of terrible.
#
But, you know, to double into that issue of competing interests
#
with an American politics, like there is a military industrial complex
#
and they have a big sort of incentive in creating new enemies.
#
And India is kind of a logical enemy because why not?
#
We've always been enemies.
#
So what if the Cold War has ended?
#
You remember Nixon and Kissinger and blah, blah, blah.
#
And and also in American politics and much more in American politics
#
and in Indian politics, interest groups hold tremendous sway.
#
Like there's a great book by Jonathan Rauch called Government's End,
#
which talks about how lobbies and interest groups control so much
#
of the American government.
#
And it all comes down to that.
#
And of course, in your book, you have a section on why India never bothered
#
And we were like so late to the game way after Pakistan and all.
#
But apart from that, you know, give me a sense of how you gradually began
#
to figure out the different kind of incentives at play within the US
#
government, which could affect its attitude towards India,
#
like the military industrial complex obviously is one and there would be others.
#
And then you would think that, hey, then what is the point of talking about values?
#
All of that doesn't really matter.
#
That's just that's just a mockery, as it were.
#
So, you know, once the economic reforms happened,
#
I think there was a real interest from the business, the corporate sector
#
in the US. There was a big turning point.
#
Policy wise, I would say the Kargil War
#
was a turning point, because for the first time,
#
an American president took India's side
#
completely and openly and emphatically.
#
And then the American media were behind the curve.
#
They couldn't believe it. BBC and all like they couldn't believe it.
#
They were just saying, oh, India said this, Pakistan said this.
#
Not that the US president on the basis of his own intelligence
#
network is telling you the Pakistanis have crossed over
#
on the line of control Indian side.
#
And so that was Indians even couldn't believe
#
when Clinton came out so openly.
#
I think by then it was towards the end of Clinton's second term.
#
I would say the mindset started to change about India.
#
There were stakes being developed.
#
The Y2K problem was about to happen the year 2000.
#
They needed lots of computer software experts,
#
which India could supply at a very reasonable,
#
you know, cheap salaries by American standards.
#
There were a lot of things that came together.
#
Remember that when Narsimha Rao was prime minister,
#
it was then that Clinton came to power.
#
And after the financial reforms,
#
Indians really thought the Americans are going to embrace us like completely.
#
No such thing happened.
#
And Prime Minister Rao was really kind of disappointed.
#
He made many moves towards the Americans,
#
including the sharing of actual intelligence
#
that India had on the 1993 Mumbai blasts.
#
Just to develop trust that, look, Pakistan is doing all this.
#
Why are you such good friends with Pakistan?
#
They're killing our people.
#
So just for your listeners,
#
a detonator was found by Indian intelligence that had American origins.
#
So Prime Minister Rao told them to share it with American intelligence
#
to prove, like, look, we're not talking BS.
#
So the Americans looked at it.
#
They knew immediately it came from their stocks
#
because they were giving so much weaponry and stuff to Pakistan.
#
Some of it was being used for other purposes.
#
Not all of it was going to Mujahideen.
#
So the Americans looked at it, sat on everything,
#
made a kind of a silly report and then claimed
#
the detonator was lost in an accident.
#
They never returned the detonator to India.
#
So then the Indian intelligence never trusted.
#
I mean, it took a long time for them to develop trust for US intelligence people
#
because they did stuff like this.
#
They didn't want Indian intelligence to have any evidence in their hands.
#
So I would say Kargil was a big turning point.
#
Then the US business sector's interest.
#
India was growing at six percent.
#
All that started to resonate in Washington.
#
India had also hired lobbies by then, one democratic firm,
#
one Republican firm to reach both sides of the aisle on Capitol Hill.
#
So things started to gradually improve.
#
And nuclear deal happened in George W Bush's time.
#
But it was a story with a lot of back and forth,
#
you know, two steps forward, one step back,
#
a lot of heartbreak in the process.
#
You know, earlier you mentioned sort of the pettiness of a lot of the operatives.
#
And I remember the story when I was traveling with the Indian cricket team in 2006
#
through Pakistan and in Islamabad,
#
I met the only two Indian journalists who were there at the time.
#
I think there was Murali who was working for the Hindu and KJM Verma for PTI.
#
And I had a pleasant evening with them.
#
And they told me this crazy story.
#
They said that, listen, Amit, what happens here is that just like we two are here,
#
we have two Pakistani counterparts in Delhi.
#
Now, if I am to report to my embassy that someone broke into my house and stole my fridge,
#
then they will make sure that on the other side,
#
one of the Pakistani journalists will have his house broken into and his fridge will be stolen.
#
It will be that petty and that exact and that anal.
#
And I thought of this when I read in your book about how during the Clinton years,
#
we found this spy called Ratan Sehgal, who was an American spy.
#
And we kicked out two diplomats.
#
And immediately they responded by kicking out two diplomats or something like that.
#
And it's like just incredible that with all this high minded geopolitics going on,
#
you also have this incredible, you know, kindergarten pettiness almost.
#
And I want to ask about those Clinton years because it contains pettiness like this.
#
There is a continuation of the US adversarial behavior towards India.
#
And you would imagine that is going to get worse because Clinton starts cozying up to China.
#
You speak about how he wants like a G2 with China and so on and so forth.
#
And then the Indian nuclear blasts happened, which completely blindside the Americans.
#
Part of it is possibly ego because they didn't see it coming.
#
And they're like, how could we not know? We know everything.
#
We are the kings of the world.
#
And then they react with these incredibly crazy sanctions,
#
which are like a negative sum game.
#
And it's a downward spiral.
#
And tell me a bit about take me through those years and what it was like.
#
And did you have a sense during that time that things are going to change?
#
Because as you just pointed out, during the Kargil war, suddenly it does change.
#
Suddenly, Clinton is acting on, you know, with no other incentives in play.
#
Apparently, he is acting in favor of the values that were one kind of speaks.
#
About that, you know, democracy and Pakistan is the aggressor and blah, blah, blah.
#
So take me through that period and how, you know, the tides begin to turn.
#
OK, so the Clinton administration was the first, I would say,
#
the first term was very negative because he wanted to solve the Kashmir dispute.
#
Because the Pakistani is always that is their one time,
#
one point agenda in Washington in those days.
#
Solve the Kashmir dispute for all that we are doing for you in Afghanistan.
#
We want you to do this vis a vis India.
#
Yeah, you know, if I were a Pakistani, I'd do the I'd ask for the same. Right.
#
So Clinton had this assistant secretary of state called Robin Raffel.
#
She was a friend of a personal friend of Clinton's from the days in Oxford.
#
Bill Clinton was a Rhodes scholar.
#
And so was Strobe Talbot.
#
I mean, they were all together at that time,
#
and they all became somebody in his administration.
#
Strobe Talbot became deputy secretary of state, et cetera.
#
Robin Raffel was assistant secretary of state,
#
which is the highest officer dealing with South Asia.
#
His their naming system is somewhat different from Indian system.
#
So she was the biggest shot that Indian diplomats could reach.
#
In those days, we didn't have access to the secretary of state
#
or the deputy secretary of state.
#
Number one, two, three were out of reach.
#
So you dealt with your area guy.
#
In this case, a woman, she was she was a career officer.
#
She had been in Delhi when Clinton became president.
#
She jumped many ranks and became assistant secretary.
#
So there was a certain arrogance.
#
She said in an interview later that Clinton was looking for smart people,
#
They weren't too many of us around.
#
Anyway, in she comes and she from the get go is
#
pricking India, you know, every button she could push, she pushed.
#
She questioned the accession of Jammu and Kashmir to India.
#
Like it was something like, show me the document,
#
or just shut up, because I decide, you know, the Pakistanis
#
are filling her with all sorts of information.
#
So that, of course, led to a huge downturn in relations.
#
And Indians just totally freaked out.
#
And the White House was taken aback at the ferocity of the Indian reaction.
#
And she continued in the same vein, you know,
#
she was a personal friend of Benazir Bhutto.
#
She just when Bhutto became prime minister, she was just, you know,
#
India was on the outs and nobody was listening to the terrorism story.
#
And on the hill, on Capitol Hill, the same thing.
#
Only in the second term of Clinton
#
did things begin to change.
#
I would argue, I haven't said so in the book, but because I cannot prove it,
#
I would argue that the nuclear tests in 1998
#
made the Americans actually sit up and notice.
#
And why did India do those nuclear tests?
#
Because, you know, here's Washington, they decide what's going on.
#
They're the unipolar power.
#
And China and Pakistan are colluding on the nuclear front.
#
China is giving them delivery systems.
#
China is improving their centrifuges in their nuclear facilities.
#
China is selling them everything.
#
It's not that the Americans don't know it.
#
They listen to every call.
#
And yet they're turning a blind eye.
#
So Vajpayee, of course, the BJP came with the manifesto saying
#
we are going to do this nuclear test.
#
But Vajpayee also had had enough.
#
Nobody was sort of listening to India at all.
#
And so he does these nuclear tests.
#
And of course, the administration came down like a ton of bricks.
#
But it also led to the first
#
comprehensive dialogue between Jaswant Singh and Stroke Talbot,
#
where India said, look, boss, this is my neighborhood.
#
Do you even know what's going on?
#
Or even if you do know, why do you pretend not to know?
#
Because we know that, you know,
#
how long can a country keep ignoring and keep, you know,
#
looking to you to fix things?
#
So we've decided to sort of take matters into our own hands.
#
It was the first dialogue.
#
And I think for the first time, the American side,
#
at least at the top levels, understood how India looks at the world.
#
Then it percolated very, very slowly to the mid levels.
#
I'm not sure it has percolated down to every level even today.
#
So they started to look at us with little more, you know, the holistic view.
#
And also, you know, when you in your very entertaining section
#
on Robin Riffle in your book, you have the heading of you.
#
You have a subheading for one of the parts where you say
#
arrogance plus activism is equal to disaster.
#
And we can, you know, think of so many people who sort of match that.
#
And it's also, you know, sort of interesting that you quote Joe Biden
#
at the time the nuclear attacks happen.
#
He is, I think, the head of the congressional committee for foreign affairs or whatever.
#
And at that time, you write quote, Biden condemned the test, no doubt,
#
and asked India to sign all the treaties.
#
But he also said a nation of India size,
#
importance and stature cannot be isolated forever.
#
We will have to engage India.
#
He reminded the Congress that India was not.
#
And this is again his words, not a rogue state, but the world's largest democracy.
#
It is a country with which we should have good relations.
#
So tell me a little bit about the polls and pressures within American politics
#
also, because as the examples of Biden in 98 makes clear,
#
and you've also quoted him much later saying friendly things about India
#
and taking a much kind of broader view, what are the polls and pressures?
#
What are the sort of incentives happening within American politics?
#
Like, do we really depend on individuals like Clinton did during the Cargill War?
#
Do we really depend on individuals sort of turning the tide and, you know,
#
getting lucky with the right people at the right time in the right place?
#
You know, the great man theory and all that.
#
Or is this drift something that was going to happen anyway, given the fact
#
that the geopolitical situation had changed, that India now had a much larger
#
market for American companies to be interested in, that so many Indian
#
Americans were doing well in America and eventually heading their biggest companies?
#
You know, so was was a shift in relations that we'll continue to talk about.
#
Was a shift in relations something that was inevitable?
#
Or did we also have to kind of get lucky at different points?
#
Do individuals matter in this whole story that you've laid out before us?
#
So I would argue in a short answer is, yes, individuals and politicians matter
#
because the relationship hasn't reached a level like, let's say, the British,
#
the UK, US relationship or the US Canada relationship
#
hasn't reached the level where everybody in the system
#
thinks a certain way about India.
#
No, you need leadership.
#
You need major players to be acting at the right time.
#
So one thing I want to say about the then Senator Biden,
#
very smart, fast sighted person.
#
He he was a chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
#
Very important position.
#
And what he said was taken seriously.
#
When he spoke, people listened to him.
#
And he what he said was right.
#
In addition, you know, he was correct in pointing that out,
#
that not one size fits all.
#
You can't treat India the same way you treat North Korea
#
or you treat some other country that you call rogue.
#
India is a democracy, et cetera.
#
So that was very important.
#
At that time, other issues very soon started to come into play on Capitol Hill.
#
So the states that produce wheat in the US,
#
Kansas being a major state in that,
#
they wanted to continue to sell wheat to India, right.
#
Their farmers were up in arms.
#
So all that started to happen.
#
So the senator from Kansas became vocal about carving out
#
in this sanctions regime, carving out spaces where
#
things could be sold to India and not have this blanket ban on everything.
#
So different interest groups through the US Congress came into play.
#
This is why the US Congress is so fascinating for foreign countries
#
to understand and to work through.
#
They can go against you also.
#
But there's so many players.
#
You can go to some players.
#
And if he or she understands your point of view,
#
they'll be persuaded and they'll argue your case.
#
Or if their constituents
#
are agitating because they go to their congressman and senator immediately.
#
Right. OK, I'm hurting.
#
The Wheat Association of America says you've got to sell wheat.
#
My farmers are hurting.
#
So that way, the politics here are so in some ways kind of transparent,
#
not in every way, but in some ways, which foreign countries can play in,
#
you know, and they do very often.
#
So then Indian diplomats jumped on all that.
#
And they started to work on more congressmen and senators
#
to break this whole logjam on sanctions.
#
And then came George W.
#
Bush, who removed most most of the sanctions.
#
But during the Clinton years, it was not easy to remove all the sanctions,
#
especially against Indian defense establishment.
#
So, you know, there's an interesting swing from 91 onwards
#
where we finally embrace free markets to some extent.
#
And therefore, we want to cozy up to the US and the Cold War is also over.
#
And I can, you know, you've described Narsimha Rao's bevelledom
#
so much that, hey, why is the US not rushing to embrace me?
#
And what's going on there?
#
And and for us also, the geopolitical imperatives have changed.
#
But they kind of change back because George W.
#
Bush is in power. 9-11 happens.
#
And once again, they need Pakistan as an ally for them.
#
Al Qaeda is Al Fahda, as it were.
#
And, you know, again, the imperatives have changed.
#
And you would imagine that this is now getting complicated for India once again.
#
However, as time goes by, it actually turns out to be
#
I mean, that period of George W.
#
Bush in charge turns out to be pretty good for India.
#
So tell me a little bit about those years and what were the currents there?
#
And is it that there are many currents going in different directions
#
and you have currents going in a negative direction and suddenly you get lucky
#
and that, you know, the nuclear deal happens and good things happen?
#
Or is it that they're all kind of happening?
#
What is as someone who reported a day in and day out,
#
week in and week out during that period, what was your sense during that period?
#
Did you see that movement kind of happening in real time?
#
Did you get a sense that things are going to look up now?
#
Did you feel I won't say despair because it makes you sound like an interested party.
#
But did you feel that it's it's, you know, become harder for India?
#
What was taking through the Bush years?
#
So President Bush, as candidate Bush, had already talked very positively about India.
#
So the Indian side was very positively inclined towards him.
#
And he had also said somewhat negative things about China.
#
As he'd called China basically a potential rival.
#
So that was music to Indian years.
#
But then, as you said, 9-11 happened.
#
And I explained in the book that then everything just India went to the back burner.
#
But the key players in the Bush administration
#
were all very positively inclined towards India.
#
So when the Condoleezza Rice was National Security Advisor
#
in the first term and became the Secretary of State in the second.
#
And then Ashley Tellis was there, the person I talk about.
#
Then Ambassador Robert Blackwell, who was a U.S.
#
ambassador to India, he made it his life's mission, basically,
#
to break down the State Department's resistance towards India.
#
You know, anything like he would tell them, you're selling missiles to China.
#
You are de facto making China more powerful.
#
And yet you don't sell anything to India.
#
You know, what's going on?
#
And you have to have balance.
#
So in the first Bush term, what happened was
#
in the background, things kept improving.
#
And you also have to credit Prime Minister Vajpayee
#
for his very wise sort of
#
maneuvering through this difficult time,
#
because Pakistan was again important.
#
Yet you had to show that India is interested in this U.S.
#
relationship, that we are not so upset or so pissed off
#
that we are not going to talk to you anymore because you're talking,
#
you know, using Pakistan again.
#
So he he kept the thing rolling very wisely,
#
tempting the Bush administration,
#
Brijesh Mishra would come, you know.
#
And then, of course, the Pakistanis can't help themselves.
#
They had there was a major attack on Parliament, right?
#
that gave India a lever to make them understand,
#
look, this is a real problem for us.
#
And Brijesh Mishra came a couple of times during that time.
#
He was Vajpayee's national security adviser.
#
And he told the Americans in no uncertain terms, you know,
#
had that attack succeeded,
#
the entire government would have been finished on that day.
#
So the but somehow for Americans, things are not real
#
till they happen to them.
#
Basically, 9-11 made them more,
#
you know, aware of terrorism in other places,
#
but still not completely.
#
So anyway, in the background, things kept happening.
#
And a dialogue started between India and the US
#
called the High Technology Dialogue to figure out what is,
#
you know, what is the problem?
#
What is the bottleneck that keeps the two countries
#
from coming together, prevents US from selling technology?
#
And that developed into another initiative
#
called the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership.
#
It was all very difficult because Indian bureaucracy
#
was not easy either to deal with.
#
If America has these, you know,
#
very sort of determined bureaucrats, so does India.
#
And India looks at anything American with great suspicion.
#
So so the next step, NSSP, it was called.
#
The idea was we do one thing, you do something reciprocally.
#
If I open a door, you open a door in India.
#
So we get to the big door.
#
Indians took their time and, you know, very slow moving.
#
And finally, for I think J.N.
#
Dixit said, you got to move on this.
#
Just do it because the Americans said we can't go
#
and any more till you guys do something.
#
Then in the second Bush term is when they came up with the idea
#
that we got to cut this Gordian knot,
#
which is this nuclear null proliferation treaty.
#
The fact that India has not signed it,
#
India will never sign it because India considers this
#
an unequal, unfair treaty because it gives the right to five countries
#
to possess nuclear weapons and the rest can go to hell.
#
No. So India has had a very principled opposition forever and ever.
#
From the beginning, and it wasn't a BJP thing or a Congress thing,
#
it is just like a principal stand India took from the beginning.
#
So the Americans were persuaded that, OK, doesn't matter.
#
They haven't signed it.
#
They're not going to sign it.
#
Let's include them in this whole nonproliferation regime
#
by other ways, you know, bring them from outside.
#
So the nuclear deal was all about that.
#
There was a very, very major step forward.
#
I think without that, we wouldn't have got to where we are today.
#
If there is, you know, one date that is highlighted in your book
#
as a seminal date is July 18th, 2005, when Manmohan is visiting
#
and the deal kind of gets signed and done.
#
And I think a lot of my listeners may not understand
#
what an incredibly big deal it was at different levels.
#
Like what a big deal it was for India, how unlikely it was for the Americans
#
who were for the deal to actually get it through their domestic politics
#
and to get it approved over there.
#
And like you said, India being a democracy helped,
#
but, you know, it wasn't necessarily enough.
#
And what a big deal it was for Manmohan to get it through,
#
because, you know, the left was against it.
#
Sonia Gandhi really wasn't too keen on it and so on and so forth.
#
And Manmohan Singh eventually took a stand that I will step down
#
if you don't let this happen, because this is the biggest thing
#
And that's such a great chapter in our history.
#
And I want you to tell me a little bit more because you saw it
#
from really close up from the American side,
#
but you also saw the Indian side, of course.
#
So tell me a little bit more about that, because given everything
#
that we've been talking about so far, the constant distrust,
#
the reciprocated pettiness and so on and so forth,
#
it seems almost a miracle that suddenly this remarkable thing happens,
#
this breakthrough happens.
#
So tell me a bit about that.
#
So I would give credit to the American side
#
with having the courage to even propose that idea
#
that we have this in our minds about you.
#
So the first trip, Kondy Rice made to India
#
to present this whole plan that we'll do this nuclear deal
#
and we're going to separate India and Pakistan.
#
Pakistan will not get this deal.
#
Only you will get this deal.
#
And we're going to try to bring you in the mainstream.
#
The Indians were like shocked.
#
They didn't quite believe it when she presented this idea.
#
But then Natwa Singh came here and he tested them
#
and he asked them many questions and he came back,
#
went back to India, quite convinced that, yes, Americans are serious.
#
So at the top levels, there was a kind of a tacit understanding
#
or that at least they recognize that they are serious, both the top levels.
#
But the question was how to make it actually happen.
#
So, again, the Americans get the credit for having done the homework
#
for both sides, pretty much.
#
And Ashley Tellis did it, actually.
#
He did this whole report
#
on what America should ask for, what India should do,
#
how the nuclear program should be separated between civilian and military.
#
Because India was very adamant that we are not going to give up
#
the weapons program because we are not certain about.
#
We don't want anyone else's protection.
#
India has to be able to protect itself.
#
And we have two nuclear powers on our doorstep.
#
So then that report that Ashley did,
#
I wrote for Outlook magazine about it.
#
It gave all the details how things would happen.
#
So while it was all laid out, it doesn't mean that things were easy.
#
So many times negotiations broke down or almost broke down
#
and people went off in a huff.
#
Either the Americans went off in a huff or the Indians did.
#
Something or the other kept happening.
#
Americans, obviously, both sides wanted the maximum out of it.
#
Right. India wanted to keep
#
more nuclear reactors on the military side.
#
Because, see, the deal would allow India to buy fuel,
#
nuclear fuel in the open market, kind of, you know, from other countries.
#
And so Americans were suspicious that
#
if, you know, India buys too much,
#
they'll use it for military purposes.
#
And so they wanted it to be just right.
#
The balance had to be just right.
#
Also, for them to be able to sell it to the US Congress.
#
So they used some arguments
#
that at that time made sense.
#
And they all seemed very worthwhile and doable,
#
one of which was India would buy X number of nuclear reactors from America.
#
So there would be business opportunities in this nuclear deal.
#
So it isn't all esoteric that there would be actual dollars and cents involved.
#
So the Congress bought it.
#
Yes, that's a very good idea.
#
And it would allow the French and all to move in.
#
Also, it would make life easier for all of the P5 countries,
#
the five permanent members, the only people who were really upset
#
for the Chinese when India and the US did this deal.
#
Because they didn't want India to be included
#
in this high, you know, this super club of the five nuclear powers.
#
They wanted India to remain outside and struggle for every nuclear component.
#
Urza, purza, jo bhi kharita hai, like you have to struggle for it, right?
#
Now, with this deal, you can buy things legally.
#
You can go to the open market and things become easier.
#
So China did a lot of hanky panky at that time also,
#
you know, putting up giving fuel to the nuclear nonproliferation lobby here,
#
blocking at every step, like, OK, once the deal was done,
#
approved by the US Congress, it had to be approved in Geneva
#
by the Nuclear Suppliers Group, which is this consortium of countries.
#
Otherwise, we couldn't buy those things that we wanted to buy.
#
So there China blocked till the last moment.
#
And the Americans put, you know, all their might into getting it through.
#
Bush actually sent an emergency letter to Beijing and
#
told basically them to get back into the room
#
because the Chinese walked out of the room in Vienna
#
because this had to be done by consensus.
#
All countries had to be present.
#
So China's tactic was we walk out of the room.
#
Then there can be no consensus.
#
So urgent messages between Washington, Beijing and Vienna.
#
Get the guy back in that time.
#
You know, the US had enough clout with the Chinese to make them do stuff like this.
#
Chinese hadn't come into their own
#
quite the way they have now, where they don't listen to anyone.
#
And that happened after the 2008 crisis.
#
So that's how it happened.
#
It changed the entire paradigm.
#
I know it's a very dry subject for your listeners,
#
but it allowed so much more to happen.
#
We could cooperate in every domain possible.
#
Space, you know, high technology in the US
#
could sell things India really wanted.
#
India could started buying weapons.
#
The new defense framework agreement was signed
#
and under which the two militaries started to meet more with each other.
#
I don't remember the year exactly now off the top of my head,
#
but it was in the 2000s that the first time
#
the US Secretary of the Army went to India.
#
All these years since independence, nobody had gone.
#
I mean, some generals and all had visited,
#
but the top civilian official hadn't gone.
#
So I'm sort of thinking about motivations here, and it strikes me that, OK,
#
I get why Manmohan was so passionate about this,
#
because it was obviously so such a big deal for India.
#
I don't really understand why the left and Sonia were against it,
#
but one doesn't understand a lot of things about them.
#
What I want to ask you is about the Americans.
#
Like, why was Bush so much for it?
#
Why did Condi Rice, you know, show the kind of initiative she did
#
and kind of coming up with the plan and pushing for it?
#
You know, what was in it for them?
#
I can see what what what there was in it for us.
#
But what was in it for them that, you know, that they went all this way,
#
where they could just have let this go continue?
#
There are two, three things.
#
One was the China factor.
#
They had, it was the end of the Clinton term.
#
A lot of the Republicans had started to say that
#
you're selling all this to China, you're making China more powerful
#
and creating a rival for no reason, just because U.S.
#
corporations are making money.
#
So they ordered a lot of investigations.
#
I mean, Chinese, what they couldn't buy, they stole during the Clinton years,
#
including nuclear warhead design.
#
W88, a design, their smallest nuclear warhead.
#
They stole the design for it.
#
And the Americans found out only because when the Chinese tested,
#
And they said, boss, this is something is very wrong over here.
#
Yet, Clinton didn't sanction China.
#
I don't know. Clinton years were crazy, man.
#
They're completely crazy.
#
There's such kind of what you call it,
#
irrational exuberance about China.
#
You know, sell, sell, sell, make money, money, money.
#
That's all without any thought to security strategy, national interest, nothing.
#
The Republicans were watching, right, while Clinton was in power.
#
So Bush came with all that background.
#
His top advisors were not enamored of China at all.
#
Condi Rice had written a seminal paper in, forget the name of the journal.
#
And Blackwell was completely baffled by this wooing of China.
#
Blackwell was an important advisor.
#
There was a group called the Vulcans who used to advise George W.
#
Bush. They were all these thinkers and movers and shakers.
#
And they were all very worried about China already.
#
Before Bush came to power.
#
I think Paul Wolfowitz kind of led the group, if I remember correctly.
#
OK. There was the neocons.
#
No, no, he was also a neocon, but I had the impression.
#
But maybe I'm. Yeah, carry on.
#
So I don't think Wolfowitz was part of the.
#
I must be misremembering. Yeah, no, no, no.
#
So he made to what was I saying? Yeah.
#
So the one factor for the Americans to do the nuclear deal was a China factor.
#
Number two, to gain India's trust,
#
because we were coming from such opposite directions.
#
India needed America to do something.
#
And they thought this would be a big enough step for India
#
to start thinking of America as a positive force,
#
not as a country that only supports Pakistan, that only, you know,
#
has gone way out towards China, etc.
#
and has ignored India's security concerns.
#
So these were the two major factors.
#
Then third was probably business.
#
India was becoming a big economy.
#
So more American executive branch did for India.
#
The more Indian doors would open for American corporations.
#
So that was also a calculation.
#
So I would say these were the three major factors.
#
By the way, I just Googled Wolfowitz was part of the Vulcans.
#
Oh, sorry. No, no, I'm aging.
#
No, no, I'm also aging and I often get these things wrong.
#
So I am actually surprised that I, you know, that he was part of the Vulcans.
#
I know, because Wolfowitz was quite negative on India
#
during George H.W. Bush's time.
#
And he was in the Bush and George W.
#
Also, he was in the Pentagon and he was an architect of the East Iraq War.
#
The biggest blunder America has made in modern times.
#
Yeah, let's let's let's go on to talking about what comes after,
#
because after this, there is, of course, Obama becoming president.
#
And he's, you know, and he suddenly brings Kashmir back to the thing
#
and says, hey, we've got to solve Kashmir because Americans got to solve everything.
#
And he's also piling up with China suddenly.
#
And, you know, G2 is revived, as it were, as you mentioned in your book.
#
So tell me a little bit about the Obama years
#
and where is Indian foreign policy thinking at that point?
#
Because you would imagine that, OK, you know what Manmohan Singh's government
#
did was nuclear deal golden age of friendship between India and the US, etc, etc.
#
But it's never that simple, like you earlier said so eloquently.
#
It's often, you know, two steps forward, one step back, etc, etc.
#
So take me through the Obama years.
#
Tell me about, you know, what was the geopolitics like?
#
Because Obama, of course, is still continuing the war on Afghanistan
#
and a lot of those earlier imperatives of keeping Pakistan happy, etc, etc.
#
They are still in play.
#
So what's what's sort of going on here and what's that period like?
#
So everyone was really ecstatic when he became president, you know,
#
such a historic thing that happened, first black American, etc.
#
And because he had a reputation that he was very intelligent, very cerebral.
#
More so than Bill Clinton, that he would understand.
#
I mean, Indians always have this hope with presidents
#
that they'll finally understand India's problems properly.
#
There was this hope that, you know, he was so super intelligent, super smart
#
that he would at least see Pakistan for what it is,
#
how they're taking America for a ride, because by now it was quite clear
#
that the Pakistanis were doing many, many things in Afghanistan,
#
which was leading to the death of American soldiers.
#
I mean, they were directly responsible for deaths of American soldiers.
#
Yet the Americans were not taking action.
#
So Obama came again, Kashmir.
#
I think partly it was again, the Pakistan lobby,
#
partly the Democrats believe they can solve.
#
They have this idealism about themselves.
#
We can solve Kashmir, you know, what is Kashmir?
#
Another problem for us to solve without going into the depths of things.
#
They just they think the very weight of American presidency
#
will bring the two parties to the table.
#
Of course, one will happily come and the other won't.
#
But it happens to be a bigger country.
#
So, yeah, he then he revived the G2, which was shocking
#
because India thought this whole idea of a G2 where China and America
#
sort of divide the world and look after these parts
#
and giving sort of oversight powers to China over South Asia
#
was completely egregious from India's point of view,
#
anathema, unacceptable.
#
So even when Bill Clinton had proposed it,
#
India had gone up in arms and totally, totally said, forget it.
#
And Clinton had walked back and not really pushed it.
#
Chinese were, of course, disappointed.
#
So were the Pakistanis to be part of this G2 idea
#
because it brought China up to a level of America, right?
#
And the whole geopolitical weighting the weight game.
#
So what happens is that Obama says G2 again,
#
Indians have another freak out and many, many sort of representations
#
to the US embassy in Delhi and to the White House over here.
#
Americans claim innocence.
#
They claim I don't buy that story, but Indians bought it officially,
#
I think only officially that it was it was put in the last minute
#
in the joint statement.
#
The Chinese put it, we didn't know.
#
And they also claim to the Indians
#
that we hadn't consulted our South Asia department.
#
So only the East Asia division was dealing with this visit.
#
These are like these are all like dog ate my homework kind of excuses.
#
There's like when people say, oh, I was misquoted and you have the tape.
#
I mean, like, give me a break.
#
You know, please don't insult my intelligence and yours.
#
So, yeah, but in the game of diplomacy, people have to pretend.
#
So Indians pretended to buy the argument.
#
Americans pretended to make it,
#
pretended to say that, yeah, we didn't know Chinese pushed us to it and all that.
#
But there was enough of an uproar,
#
enough of a realization in the White House
#
that we need to be in better dialogue with the Indians.
#
See, the relationship still hadn't reached, despite the nuclear deal.
#
Obama didn't really take that forward, that momentum forward.
#
He was busy with Afghanistan and with his other projects.
#
And the people around him were very kind of they kept him in a bubble, I feel.
#
They were very controlling his.
#
He had a guy called Ben Rhodes.
#
He was the director of strategic communication.
#
I mean, put the worst spin on that term and you'll understand what you mean.
#
Strategic communication, you only communicate when you want to
#
and what he needs to see, he sees.
#
He doesn't get like, I think the whole picture.
#
Maybe I'm giving him too much benefit of the doubt.
#
But Obama really didn't take interest in India
#
until the very end, that too under duress kind of a thing.
#
Then we had a terrible incident during his time.
#
2013, we had the Devyani Kobra Gade incident in New York,
#
where an Indian diplomat was trip searched
#
for in a case related to not paying fair wages to her housekeeper,
#
a nanny she had brought from India.
#
So it's a long story, but relations went completely downhill
#
to the pits, to the extent where India
#
removed security barriers outside the US embassy in Delhi.
#
And the Americans were screaming bloody murder after that.
#
Oh, you're endangering our diplomats, blah, blah.
#
What is this? India is completely in the wrong.
#
And so bottom line, the way I look at that story
#
was completely unnecessary, completely avoidable.
#
But everyone was asleep at the wheel, partly Indians, completely Americans.
#
You know, the American embassy, the arrogance of the then ambassador
#
didn't bother, didn't want to fix the problem early on.
#
And could have been scorched at a very early stage.
#
India could have been told in no uncertain terms.
#
Look, this lady is in violation of US law.
#
Get her out. Otherwise, we declare her PNG, that is persona non grata.
#
And then it'll all become public.
#
And, you know, countries do that for each other so many times.
#
If a diplomat gets into trouble, the host country will tell
#
the sending country, take that person out.
#
But no, the Americans didn't.
#
Instead, they let it get to a stage where there is a court case.
#
There's whole tamasha, public tamasha, and
#
State Department is pleading helplessness that, oh, now it's gone into the judiciary.
#
We cannot say anything.
#
It's all a matter of law, blah, blah, blah.
#
So that was a very terrible time.
#
And they went on many peacemaking trips to India.
#
They sent their diplomats, but Indians were very pissed off
#
because Indian diplomats were very pissed off.
#
They said, look, we don't want to serve in New York.
#
Firstly, I learned that if you serve in a consulate,
#
you are under a different Vienna Convention.
#
If you serve in an embassy or in a different convention,
#
you get different levels of immunity.
#
So young diplomats are saying in Delhi, we are not going to New York
#
or any of the other consulates India has in the U.S.
#
because we don't we recognize this.
#
There is not enough protection, not enough immunity.
#
And they can put you under for anything.
#
The then the current foreign minister,
#
Jaishankar came as ambassador here mainly to fix this problem.
#
Manmohan Singh wanted to make him foreign secretary much earlier,
#
but somehow decided not to because he would have superseded many people.
#
So finally, Manmohan Singh got a chance to send him to this important
#
posting and told him, like, fix this problem,
#
because relationship kept going down and down.
#
The Americans, OK, one other example of bitterness.
#
Americans took away all the parking spots in front of the Indian
#
There were six parking spots on the road
#
on which the embassy building is.
#
They took away all of them.
#
And so the Indian diplomats had to all, you know, rent parking
#
spots in nearby hotels in their parking lots.
#
And that's very expensive.
#
Stuff like that happened.
#
Then when things started on the mend, started to get fixed.
#
I mean, Jaishankar came and basically managed to send this lady back home.
#
For the American side, they put some processes in place where
#
no one agency would let go the whole hog.
#
They had to be a more interregional approach among all the bureaus,
#
the many umpteen bureaus in the State Department,
#
so that everybody knows what the other guy is up to.
#
If things are reaching a certain point with the country, they have to inform
#
everyone so that they can take a different route.
#
So, you know, Obama was like, I would say, not interested in India.
#
Then all these terrible things happened.
#
He was said to be so cerebral, but he he didn't really take an interest.
#
And the funny thing is, he went to India as the Republic Day
#
guest, first time an American president has gone.
#
But all that was just, you know, outer covering.
#
Nothing of substance really moved
#
until the very end of his second term,
#
which was India being declared a major defence partner.
#
So that was the one thing one can say that he did.
#
The other major thing, sorry, I shouldn't take away all the credit.
#
Other major thing he did was or his diplomats did, was to
#
start the process of India being included in all these international regimes,
#
nuclear related regimes, where India is on the table.
#
So apart from the nuclear suppliers group, there are three others,
#
the Vasanar group and Australia group and one other group.
#
I mean, it's all too technical, but India became a member.
#
So by which you are allowed to buy
#
components for missiles and things like that beyond a certain range.
#
We are still not member of the nuclear suppliers group because of China.
#
China keeps blocking it because Pakistan
#
tells them to block it and they themselves want to block it.
#
Their point is that something some modus vivendi should be worked out for Pakistan.
#
Otherwise, India is not getting it. But India is OK with it.
#
We are part of three groups out of four.
#
It's fine. So that was the Obama administration.
#
It's a magnificent, masterful summary.
#
And of course, your book is a bracing read.
#
And I'm sure all my readers will go to that.
#
And you mentioned how India had such hopes from Obama because, hey,
#
But it turns out that the president under whom things really took a positive
#
term is not someone we think of as that's quite that cerebral,
#
which is, of course, Mr. Trump.
#
So tell me a bit about how that changed.
#
And also, I want to ask you, how did Modi coming to power in 2014 affect
#
the way India viewed the US, viewed India?
#
Because you would imagine that, you know, if you're looking through a values prism,
#
that it is something that might worry them.
#
He had earlier been censured.
#
I think he couldn't enter the US before that and et cetera, et cetera.
#
And how did it help that he was now in charge?
#
And thankfully, our relations between the two countries have just been on the up
#
and up, especially since Trump took over.
#
So take me through that period, because what it seems to me is that the swing
#
in these relations are still not exactly because of values.
#
You might use that language, but it's really because of interest.
#
Still, you want to counterbalance China and et cetera, et cetera, a whole bunch of it.
#
So take me through, you know, what changed during the Trump years.
#
And, you know, was Modi ever a factor?
#
You know, how did the Americans react to that?
#
OK, so I do want to mention during the Obama term is when Modi
#
came to power in 2014. Right.
#
So the Americans had to he was elected fair and square with the majority.
#
So the Americans said they sent many signals that we are OK.
#
Whoever you elect, if Modi is prime minister, he'll be welcome as prime
#
And the funny thing is the irony is it was George W.
#
Bush, whose administration had denied Modi a visa.
#
His visa, American visa, was revoked
#
because of the Gujarat riots
#
and the human rights concerns that arose from that.
#
And all of the people who became very active here in Washington
#
and pressured the administration to do that.
#
So once he was elected prime minister, the revocation
#
actually didn't mean anything because as prime minister of India,
#
he was head of government and he was welcomed.
#
So, yes, it was a very interesting time,
#
because while Obama was smart enough, look, it's a big country.
#
You can't, you know, just because they've elected someone
#
you may not like doesn't matter.
#
India is an important country.
#
So he was all OK with it.
#
But there were so many other little things that happened.
#
Like when Modi first came, this is speculation.
#
But Michelle Obama chose to be out of town.
#
So she didn't want to welcome, I guess,
#
didn't want to welcome him to the White House.
#
There was this very odd dinner.
#
Firstly, Modi was on a Navaratri fast.
#
And secondly, it was like everybody was eating.
#
There were only 20 people.
#
It was in one of those ceremonial big room dinners.
#
It was just like going to his house for dinner kind of a thing.
#
And so only 20 people were invited and they ate.
#
And Modi just drank warm water.
#
So different, like in so many ways, they let it be known
#
that parts of the democratic establishment was not at all happy
#
that they had to deal with Modi.
#
And and that story continues still today.
#
It can happen even in June when he came here last.
#
But Obama was, again, smart enough.
#
And the establishment was smart enough to make peace with the idea
#
that India now has a different kind of prime minister, a different prime minister
#
completely elected by the people of India.
#
So there's no way they can question anything.
#
So, of course, the Indians use the opportunity again.
#
Jayashankar was ambassador here.
#
They did this amazing summit, you know, like this amazing trip
#
where they got so many congressmen and senators to come and attend
#
that Madison Square Garden thingy where he spoke to the Indian-American community.
#
And they made them stand in a circle and wait.
#
I mean, everything about that visit was they were getting their back.
#
You know, they were getting revenge for their revocation of visa.
#
It was funny to watch at some level.
#
But, yeah, the Americans played along.
#
Obama took him on a personal tour of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial.
#
So Obama is showing him at this memorial, the statue and explaining and all.
#
That was all, you know, with an eye to the PR, the politics of it all.
#
To show the Indian audiences that, look,
#
the prime minister is embraced by the American president,
#
an African-American president, no less, who's taken him on a personal tour.
#
So it was very interesting.
#
And so you asked me about Trump.
#
Trump was very disruptive, but
#
some Indian-Americans got to him ahead of the, you know, elections.
#
And so by then, the BJP network here,
#
the overseas BJP supporters were quite active.
#
And one of them was a big donor to the Trump campaign.
#
And he started the Hindu Republicans' government group.
#
Trump became the first candidate to actually come to an Indian-American
#
And he said, oh, Hindus are my best friend.
#
India is my best friend.
#
I'm going to be their best friend, etc.
#
So we were all positive.
#
And within a few months of him becoming president,
#
Prime Minister Modi was able to come on a visit and they had a nice chat.
#
He was very, very friendly.
#
And he was quite transactional.
#
He understood that India wants to buy sophisticated weapons.
#
So he allowed that he gave permission to sell armed drones to India,
#
something that Obama had denied.
#
We had asked to buy these drones because these American drones
#
can be up in the air for 30 hours or plus.
#
And you can look at the oceans and terrain much more comprehensively, etc.
#
They increase your capabilities multifold.
#
So Obama had denied them because the State Department,
#
Obama himself was not interested, you see.
#
So State Department was calling the shots.
#
And State Department's basic logic is always
#
we have to keep Pakistan and India equal equal.
#
So if you give India something, we have to give Pakistan something.
#
Otherwise, don't give, don't sell.
#
It's like ancient logic that still survives.
#
So you need that political weight to break it down.
#
So Trump was already said, sell anything and everything, whatever they want.
#
So they had a very good first visit.
#
Then there were some tantrums Trump threw about Harley Davidson and all.
#
But I think the Indian diplomats handled it very well.
#
The external affairs ministry basically ignored most of it
#
and did not feel compelled to react to every outrageous statement he made.
#
You know, they just ignored it.
#
Only when he was he said something about again,
#
he also wanted to mediate in Kashmir because Imran Khan got to him.
#
Only when he said that, like then India said something to counter it.
#
But otherwise, quite OK.
#
I think I would give Indian diplomats full marks for managing the presidency.
#
They've managed it better than I would say the Europeans did.
#
Europeans felt so compelled to hate him and say all sorts of things.
#
You know, we are superior.
#
And, you know, who have you elected?
#
You, you know, crazy Americans.
#
India didn't feel that need.
#
India anyway is not in a position to say anything to the Americans.
#
India needs to get what it wants out of the Americans
#
for several more years down the line.
#
So it made its peace with Trump.
#
Generally, it went better than expected.
#
And it would, I guess, have helped that, you know, Trump went on
#
this anti-China rants that he did and so on and so forth.
#
And that brings me to my next question, like a worrying thing
#
that has happened in the last few years is that the world seems to have become
#
more and more insular, that free trade is, you know, on the back foot.
#
Some people even talk about, you know, the end of globalization, as it were.
#
Now, one of my good friends with whom I do a YouTube show, Ajay Shah,
#
he has coined this term called the third globalization.
#
And the way he defines that is that he says globalization isn't dead.
#
It is just the case that there is now a committee of nations among which
#
globalization is perfectly alive.
#
But there are others who are essentially rogue nations like Russia,
#
like China, like North Korea.
#
And for them, those rules don't apply.
#
No longer can anybody sell to anybody.
#
And I'm not entirely convinced about this, because my thinking there is that
#
then you can say it is determined by values, but it can be determined by interests.
#
And it is so easy for a country to be on the wrong side of this bargain.
#
You know, today it's fine that we are happy and America is selling everything to us.
#
But it is so easy to be on the wrong side of this bargain.
#
All the one hegemon that is there just has to get upset with you.
#
Even if you were once accused of being a hegemon yourself.
#
So what is your take on this sort of formula, this sort of way of putting it?
#
You know, do you feel that?
#
What are your thoughts on globalization?
#
Should we really not worry?
#
And in the global order, do you feel that India's place is something
#
that is now kind of settled?
#
We are more or less there.
#
There might be minor setbacks.
#
Or do you feel that you can never take anything for granted?
#
There is still a lot of work to be done.
#
I think I agree with your friend that because officially also we argue the same thing.
#
A different version of globalization is what's needed, where
#
the different people call it different by different names.
#
You know, resilient supply chains.
#
What does it mean? It's code for minus China.
#
What where I would make one point is that it'll take a much longer
#
than all the talk we hear from people on the ground.
#
The story I hear is that all this
#
creating alternate supply chains is much, much more difficult
#
than you realize, because it took, let's say, 20 years for China
#
to dominate every segment of the market, whether it's clothing,
#
whether it's technology, whether it's whatever, computers or iPhones,
#
whatever have you, it's taken them a while.
#
People are so dependent.
#
I mean, India is dependent for pharmaceutical in such a major way
#
What are they called APIs?
#
So I think it'll take a long time.
#
I cannot say for sure whether the commitment to keep China out will remain
#
that strong, whether the coalition of nations that has come together today,
#
that is America, Australia, India and all the Western powers
#
somewhat come together.
#
Even there, there are different points of views in Europe.
#
Germans are thinking this way.
#
Italians another way. UK, very different.
#
So how to do decoupling
#
or de-risking rather from China is a long, painful process.
#
But I think majority of the countries are convinced that it's not a good idea
#
to make one country the hub of everything.
#
That's asking for trouble.
#
And don't let that model be replicated with anyone else.
#
You know, so diversify on everything.
#
I think that's an intelligent way of looking at things,
#
because if you look at look at companies, right,
#
Google or Amazon or whatever, the FTC today is bringing up cases against Google.
#
Anti-trust laws were applied against the big major companies in America
#
so that medium sized companies or competition could happen.
#
So the very essence of capitalism is based on that.
#
You don't let someone become so powerful that no one else can flourish.
#
But in essence, in a geopolitical sense, they allowed this to happen
#
Everyone was asleep at the wheels, right?
#
No one was thinking ahead.
#
So, I mean, in this country, they have
#
bureaus, departments within departments
#
like in the Pentagon and state and all that are little mini think tanks
#
whose only job is to sit in their chambers
#
and think and imagine problems
#
in the next 20 years, next 30 years,
#
and how policy should be shaped.
#
What should future leaders be thinking about?
#
How should you change current policy?
#
Because that problem could become real.
#
Nobody thought about a very simple case that you allowed
#
one country to become the center of everything.
#
And then in the process, you got addicted to cheap goods, right?
#
Now, Americans hate to pay anything.
#
That's, you know, close to a living
#
a real cost of making something.
#
So they're happy to buy one dollar socks.
#
And so are we in India, right?
#
We also have gotten used to cheap goods.
#
So, yeah, globalization.
#
Not every country cannot make everything for itself, right?
#
So there has to be some cooperation.
#
And I think they're working towards that now.
#
I only wish that WTO could be revived in an intelligent way.
#
But there China is in and they will block any kind of reform.
#
During the Trump years, they lost all interest.
#
The Americans lost interest in the WTO.
#
Now, in the Biden years,
#
the problem with the Biden administration is they don't want to talk about trade deals.
#
They don't want to talk about trade at all in the traditional sense,
#
because the unions are upset.
#
Their jobs have to come back to America.
#
And that was one of President Biden's promises.
#
So, in a way, America is going a little left.
#
So I have three more questions for you.
#
But before the third last question, a little anecdote.
#
I was sort of hanging with a bunch of fairly important people
#
at the secret conference a while ago, and everybody was talking about something
#
that the government is talking about, India 2047 and all of that.
#
They want to, you know, plan 25 years ahead or whatever.
#
And the first thought that came to my mind when I heard that was WTF.
#
And the second was WTGF, which stands for where this ganja from,
#
because what do you have to smoke to think that you can plan 20 years ahead?
#
You know, when 20 months ahead is filled with such terror.
#
So that is a fatal conceit indeed.
#
But I will sort of, you know, having admitted to how absurd the whole idea is,
#
I will nevertheless ask you to put on your hypothetical hat
#
and look 20 years ahead.
#
Since you have covered this subject for the last 30 years,
#
I feel I can kind of do this and think about what could be a possible
#
best case scenario and a worst case scenario for India in a geopolitical context.
#
The best case scenario is that all these wars that are happening today
#
remain contained and confined to the region.
#
They don't spread because everyone's worried about that right now.
#
Then that India continues its strong relationship with the U.S.
#
continues to get what it needs.
#
It needs for its development and continues to get technology, et cetera.
#
And with European partners as well, the same.
#
That that is the best case scenario and that the neighborhood for India
#
doesn't flare up because don't forget, China is in every country
#
around in our backyard, right?
#
Maldives, Bangladesh, Pakistan, of course, that's the headquarters.
#
But like, you know, Sri Lanka, even though India has gone out of its way
#
to help Sri Lanka, yet I recently listened to their prime minister.
#
The kinds of things he was saying, like kind of unfriendly
#
and somewhat pro China in Bangladesh, similar inroads China has made.
#
So neighborhood is the first concentric circle where things
#
have to remain under control.
#
India has to be engaged and act very intelligently, diplomatically,
#
keep all these partners enough away from China so they don't become
#
their, you know, made whatever their conduits for nefarious activities.
#
The other concentric circle that India would have to put much more,
#
I think, energy into East Asia, where, of course, India is doing a lot of outreach.
#
Indo-Pacific policy that we forgot to give credit to the Trump administration,
#
by the way, going back rewind, he did two major things like he revived the Quad
#
and the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, which is Australia, US, Japan and India.
#
And India went along and enthusiastically.
#
So these are four democracies working together.
#
It's a kind of a counter to China.
#
Indo-Pacific policy, the revival of the Quad with two major, major things
#
that India was very happy with that happened with the Trump administration
#
that Biden has taken forward.
#
So that's on the positive side.
#
So, yes, best case scenario, that is the best case.
#
Worst case scenario, dysfunction.
#
Since I live in Washington, I read maybe perhaps too much about American society,
#
but I fear the polarization here.
#
It's very difficult for them to to have all stakeholders together on any one issue.
#
Look at the Israel Hamas war right now.
#
The left is up in arms.
#
Biden is under tremendous pressure to tell Israel to have a ceasefire, etc, etc.
#
Like, there is a lot of pressure.
#
The complete right wing that wants to bring Trump back.
#
That means further division in American society
#
where things like school curriculum, high school curriculum
#
What teachers can say about race and African-American history.
#
Florida recently denied teaching a black history completely.
#
So black churches have had to get together
#
to do Sunday classes for black children so that they know their history.
#
Sometimes I feel this is like democracy out of control.
#
Anyone can do anything and decide if you have a majority, you can say,
#
oh, well, this history simply doesn't exist.
#
Consensus on major issues has broken down.
#
Things like abortion, so divisive, so anti-women,
#
the way some of these states are moving in the US.
#
So that is kind of the worst state scenario.
#
One could almost think along the same lines in India.
#
Polarization, the minority communities
#
feel sat upon, isolated, alienated.
#
So what do we do about that?
#
India is much more diverse, much less advanced,
#
much poorer than the US.
#
I mean, how are we going to manage that if things blow up?
#
So that's that's what I worry about.
#
How political leadership, how intelligent it will be in the face of
#
numerous geopolitical fault lines
#
and domestic fault lines in various countries.
#
I'm reminded of what John Maynard Keynes once said about how in the long run
#
And I wonder if that is a best case or a worst case.
#
You could view it as either.
#
My my penultimate question to you is if there are young people
#
listening to this who are interested in journalism or in a broader sense,
#
sense making, you know, or the pursuit of truth or whatever it is
#
that you however you'd like to define what you do, you know,
#
what would your advice to them be?
#
Because, you know, there is that old Chinese curse,
#
may you live in interesting times.
#
And while you have certainly lived through interesting times,
#
I would argue that the next 30 years might well be even more interesting
#
for, you know, young people today who are going to navigate
#
a similar kind of journey.
#
So what would what would your advice be?
#
My first rule would be your advice would be stick to your basic core values.
#
If you believe that there is a story to be told, that's not being told,
#
that people don't know that you find it upon yourself to tell that story.
#
And you have the courage to and the commitment to do that.
#
You won't make maximum money that you could as a computer engineer or whatever.
#
But journalists, even like I'm happy not making too much money.
#
I would just make enough to live OK, you know, not lavish nothing.
#
But I'm very satisfied with with my work.
#
And I I'm happy that I chose this profession.
#
So I would always recommend please go into it.
#
We need intelligent, dedicated, committed people
#
to go into this profession now and always, because there are people.
#
There are people who need to be told what's happening in the country.
#
And it shouldn't just come from the government, because as we know,
#
increasingly, the government just gives you a very one sided view,
#
Such wise and inspiring words.
#
So my final request to you for me and my listeners,
#
recommend books, films, music, art that has meant a lot to you.
#
And you love it so much.
#
You want to share it with the whole world.
#
Recently, I read a book by Isabel Wilkerson.
#
She's a former New York Times reporter columnist.
#
A book called Cast, where she relates
#
the black African experience, the African American experience
#
to the caste system and why she does that.
#
I mean, it's a wonderful book.
#
It's one of the best books I've read my whole life.
#
And it came out just a couple of years ago.
#
So I would recommend that.
#
I always recommend Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States.
#
If you want to know about the United States.
#
And this is not like this is the people's history.
#
So he really tells it like it is the decimation of the Native Americans, et cetera.
#
In terms of other books, I would say, I don't know.
#
You know, in college, how everyone read Sathra, Kafka and Camus,
#
at least in my generation, I never understood what they were saying.
#
But you had to read them because that was the in thing to do.
#
So you went and bought them from Connaught Place,
#
from that one bookstore that used to be there.
#
So I don't know, I wouldn't recommend those necessarily.
#
I would recommend Amos Oz, this Israeli writer,
#
late loved his autobiography that I read
#
while I lived in Jerusalem for a couple of years.
#
In terms of shows, I'm a fan of the spy genre.
#
I love The Bureau, this French show.
#
Then it's about the French spy agency and how they navigate all these current problems.
#
It's very recent, like the last five years, the ISIS problem
#
and how they get information beautifully and the protagonist then falls in love
#
with this beautiful Syrian, I think she was Syrian, like informant.
#
Anyway, then the Americans.
#
I don't know if you watched that.
#
I mean, I can't believe and it's based on real true stories,
#
how these Russians came and lived in America like Americans
#
and were doing all these funky things and passing on information.
#
Under the very noses of the Americans.
#
So, yeah, so the Americans I found fascinating and I really got involved in the story.
#
And then among the, you know, among the Indian shows,
#
recent shows are watched as Kohra.
#
I think it's really gritty and really gets into a lot of the social issues of Punjab.
#
And I also like Made in Heaven for a strange reason,
#
because it tackles some very current problems and it has the guts to tackle them,
#
you know, about being gay, about being transsexual, about all this.
#
So it was very well done, I thought.
#
But among the books, I want to mention a couple of old books that
#
that kind of had an effect on me.
#
One was, strangely enough, a book called To Serve with Love.
#
It is about this black teacher in a British school.
#
The movie had Sydney Poitier, beautiful movie.
#
I made my kids watch it.
#
So that was another very good movie and a very good book.
#
Another movie I watched three times is Doctor Zhivago.
#
And I actually had the occasion to meet Julie Christie, who stars in Doctor Zhivago.
#
She was shooting in Slovakia
#
when I lived in Bratislava for a couple of years, because my ex was posted there.
#
She came through for a shooting of some movie,
#
Dragon Heart, I think it was called, and I don't know how we met.
#
I think I went to watch the shooting because I had very little to do.
#
There's not much happening in India-Slovak relations.
#
So I talked to her and we met.
#
She called me and had coffee and things like that.
#
So what are the movies?
#
I was also interested in at one stage in the anti-apartheid movement very strongly.
#
So when I first came here in the 80s, because the late 80s,
#
at that time, the US had this horrible policy of constructive engagement
#
with South Africa, with the apartheid regime.
#
So I was like all, you know, with my JNU fervor, always, you know, writing about it.
#
And I remember watching all the movies that came out about apartheid.
#
One was, I think it was called The Dry White Season.
#
And one was called Biko after Steve Biko.
#
It was like his about his life.
#
So I would say that's about it.
#
Now I'm waiting to see the latest Martin Scorsese movie.
#
I'm also waiting to see it.
#
And by the time the episode is released, perhaps we would both have seen it.
#
And we will one day do a seven hour episode on India-Slovakia relationship.
#
But until that day, you know, I just want to thank you.
#
You've spent so much of your time today sharing your insights with me.
#
And it's been delightful.
#
So thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.
#
Thank you. Thank you, Amit.
#
You know that I'm a fan of your podcast and as and when I get time, I listen to it.
#
And thank you for having me on the show.
#
Thank you for listening.
