Dissecting momentous decisions

On 18 July 2005, an elaborate banquet was underway at the White House in Washington DC. It was a dinner that would be remembered long after the dessert plates and cognac snifters were cleared away. Those present were aware that the event was being held to herald the beginning of a new and strategic partnership between India and the US.

An embossed invitation to the dinner had gone out to a select guest list from US president George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush. The evening was to be ‘in honour of the Prime Minister of the Republic of India and Mrs Gursharan Kaur’. The tables in the State Dining Room that evening were covered in saffron-coloured silk and adorned with floral statues of trumpeting elephants made of pink roses. ‘[It] signaled it was no ordinary evening at the White House’ read a report in the Washington Post the next day. The paper described the evening as ‘A Bush dinner as rare as a pink elephant’. The dinner was meant to be ‘a nod to India’. For George W. Bush was not given to throwing banquets. He preferred to retire to bed by 9 p.m.

Earlier in the day, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Bush had issued a joint statement which laid out a framework for a strategic partnership between the two countries. The agreement was on joint India– US efforts on terrorism, security, trade, finance, investment, environment, and energy. The significant part of the agreement, however, was about ‘nuclear energy’—which was to lead to the Indo–US Civil Nuclear Deal.

Ten days earlier, the soft-spoken Singh and the hearty Texan Bush had sat side by side at a meeting in Scotland. It was held at the exclusive Gleneagles Hotel in Auchterarder. They were both participating in the 31st G8 summit hosted by British Prime Minister Tony Blair. On this occasion, in early July 2005, five of the world’s growing economic powers—China, India, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa (who called themselves the G5)— had joined the world’s top eight industrialized nations. They were France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK, the US, Canada, Russia, and comprised the G8. Climate change, carbon emissions, clean energy, and aid to Africa dominated the discussions.

The Glendevon Room at the grand and massive hotel, set amidst the rolling hills of Scotland, had been converted into a high security meeting area. In their first meeting, Bush turned to Singh and said: ‘If the oil prices go up to $100, it hurts India…But it also hurts the United States.’ Then, he added: ‘So, we must work together to help India to get its nuclear security by increased emphasis on the availability of nuclear power.’

When the two leaders had met on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly a year earlier, Bush in his direct style had asked Manmohan Singh, ‘What can I do for you?’ Singh told Bush that the biggest problem India faced was ‘of energy, and prices are going up’.

Manmohan Singh had first talked about cooperation with the US on civil nuclear energy when he was in New York soon after he took over as prime minister in September 2004.

That day in Scotland, without saying so explicitly, Bush and Singh put the Indo–US Civil Nuclear Deal at the centre of the new relationship they wanted to forge between their nations. The US under secretary of state for political affairs, R. Nicholas Burns and the Indian foreign secretary, Shyam Saran, sat in another room at the massive estate. Burns told Saran that day that the US objective was to ‘confirm India’s status as a full-fledged nuclear-weapon state with all the rights but also the obligations’. However, soon thereafter he was to go back on his statement, and called up to say that as a party to the NPT, the US could not explicitly recognize India as a nuclear-weapon state.

At Gleneagles, George W. Bush and Manmohan Singh struck up a rapport—which was to lead to a ‘chemistry’ between the two that was later talked about widely. For all their closeness, however, both knew only too well that national interest, not personal factors, determined relations between nations. Nevertheless, personal chemistry did smoothen the ride when the path became rocky in the months that followed.

‘Dr Singh,’ Bush was to tell the Indian prime minister, ‘you are a good man. I look forward to doing business with you.’ Manmohan Singh, fourteen years older than Bush, reciprocated Bush’s sentiments, ‘He (Bush) is very nice to me,’ Singh was to remark to journalist Raj Chengappa, ‘and of all the US presidents, he seemed the friendliest to India’.

Sitting in the large and beautiful Scottish estate that day which the media had described as the ‘eighth wonder of the world’ when the hotel opened in 1924, Bush remarked to Singh, ‘A solid relationship is based on values as well as (common) interest.’ Those words were to stay with Manmohan Singh for long afterwards.

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The dinner Bush hosted in honour of Singh ten days later was a blacktie affair. Prithviraj Chavan, the minister of state in the Prime Minister’s Office, who was a guest at the occasion, recalled: ‘There was a special embossed programme, the guest list was published in the social pages of newspapers, a jazz group specially selected to provide the music...(the) Indians invited were carefully chosen—footballers, doctors, businessmen....’ Bush had initially described the event as a ‘family dinner’. But it became a black-tie affair, the first big social event in the White House in two years, and the fifth formal dinner given by Bush for any head of government. This did not go unnoticed in the higher echelons of the US administration. Nor was its importance lost on the 134 guests who were there.

Bush had turned out in a tuxedo; Singh wore a black bandhgala and his signature pale blue turban. Laura Bush was attired in bright colours associated with India—a yellow chiffon gown with orange flowery design. Mrs Gursharan Kaur chose to wear a sophisticated and understated black silk sari with a red border. US Vice President Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas, World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, and US senators mingled with the Indian guests, and those from the Indian business diaspora. Besides the prime minister and his wife, the Indian delegation comprised External Affairs Minister Natwar Singh, Indian Ambassador to the US Ronen Sen, Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Minister of State in the PMO Prithviraj Chavan, National Security Advisor M. K. Narayanan, the PM’s Principal Secretary T. K. Nair, and Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice mingled with the guests, a wide smile lighting up her face. She had reason to be pleased. The framework agreement had almost fallen through twenty-four hours earlier. Rice had just managed to retrieve the situation, with a timely intervention in the early hours of that morning.

President Bush and the First Lady escorted their guests into the State Dining Room. The US president raised a toast to his Indian guest. ‘India and the US are separated by half a globe,’ he said. ‘Yet today our two nations are closer than ever before.’ The Indian prime minister was equally effusive. He thanked the president for his generosity. ‘Mark Twain once said the only foreign land he ever...longed to see was India,’ Singh

said. ‘We have grown up learning the story of the unfinished voyage of Christopher Columbus: setting sail to reach India, he discovered America. I now invite the people of America to complete the voyage of that great explorer.’

(Excerpted with permission from Neerja Chowdhury’s ‘How Prime Ministers Decide’; published by Aleph Book Company)