SujathaSpeak
On Modi
“I tried my best to brief the PM in Hindi. Maybe I should have tried briefing him in Tamil. I may have got the nuances right.”
On diplomats
“The foremost qualities that a foreign secretary must possess are honesty and integrity—and not
self-promotion.”
On her father
“If I had such political connections, my husband would not have had only one stint as ambassador, and that too in Iran.”
***
Bickering, back-stabbing, name-calling. All par for the course among diplomats of the foreign ministry, as among bureaucrats and senior police and military officers. In the foreign ministry, they usually intensify during power struggles. But nothing, sources in the ministry say, has matched the bitterness over the abrupt replacement of foreign secretary Sujatha Singh with Subrahmanyam Jaishankar late last month. Much of the drama is being played out by the rival camps through plants in the media—as also through tweets and posts in the social media.
Few had expected the transition to be smooth when, on January 28, Prime Minister Narendra Modi decided to remove Sujatha from the post six months before her two-year tenure was to end. Jaishankar was brought in, just three days before he was to retire from the IFS. For the 100-odd diplomats who gathered at Jawaharlal Nehru Bhawan on Janpath last week for her farewell, the mood was grim. This was no ordinary change of guard.
But the verbal fusillade Sujatha unleashed, with sharp references to Modi and her successor, came as a shock to everyone present. “The foremost qualities of a foreign secretary are honesty and integrity, not self-promotion,” she told the gathering. Media commentaries had hailed him as “brilliant” and said his personal efforts not only resulted in Modi’s successful visit to the US last year, but also Obama’s decision to visit India after Modi’s election and become the first US president to be present as chief guest at the Republic Day. Also, before that, lowering of border tension with China during his tenure in Beijing. The unsaid message was that they might be plants. She stressed that institutions are greater than individuals, and reminded the diplomats in her farewell speech that achievements of the foreign ministry were the collective effort of its officers, not the effort made by individuals.
“I tried my best to brief the prime minister in Hindi,” Sujatha said, in a clear reference to charges that she was removed from the post because she lacked personal chemistry with Modi. “Maybe I should have tried briefing him in Tamil. Perhaps I would have got the nuances of foreign policy better,” said Sujatha, a Tamilian from Salem.
But if her attempt was to lighten the mood of the gathering, she did not have much success. “My God, I have never heard so much bitterness from a senior diplomat before,” says a joint-secretary rank officer of the foreign ministry.
Who crafted it? Modi with Obama, Delhi
Perhaps Sujatha had every right to be bitter and disappointed, for not only the manner in which she was removed but also the fact that the decision was followed by a series of reports in the media and comments on Facebook and Twitter highlighting her “incompetence and failure to deliver” on Modi’s foreign policy objectives. Many of the officers who worked with her closely say she was an extremely competent officer who never shied away from speaking her mind and giving an honest assessment of a situation, irrespective of how it was received by the political leadership. They also point out that the two-year tenure given to senior secretaries in the government was especially to allow them do their job freely and without the vagaries of political pressure and whims of influential sections in the political establishment. “Most of you have perhaps watched my TV interview with Karan Thapar. Half of what I had to say, I have told him, the other half I have saved for today,” Sujatha said in her opening remarks, while also warning the diplomats that her speech would be long and, therefore, if anybody wishes to leave, they could before she began.
The fact she was in no mood to spare her successor in her speech also became clear from the outset. Sujatha, who spoke soon after Jaishankar introduced her to the gathering as the “outgoing foreign secretary”, began by saying, “You should also have told them the manner in which my tenure was terminated by the government.”
Diplomats who were present at the event pointed out that perhaps Sujatha was angry because Jaishankar, in his remarks, had decided to mention only the “exemplary courage that she showed as a junior diplomat” when she volunteered to be the liaison officer during a rain-hit Kailash Mansarovar Yatra, while glossing over all the other achievements in her 38-year long career with “inanities”. One diplomat said, “Maybe under the circumstances in which he took over, there was not much else that he could say about her career.”
She also made it a point to clarify about her “so-called political connection” through her father T.V. Rajeshwar, the IB chief during Indira Gandhi’s prime ministership, who later also served as governor in several states. “If I had such political connections (with the Congress), my husband Sanjay Singh would not have only one ambassadorship and that too in Iran for only two years.” An ambassadorial posting in the MEA is usually for three to four years and there are some diplomats who, by using their political connections, have managed to enjoy several back-to-back ambassadorships without returning to serve a stint in between at the headquarters, as is mandatory.
Opinion among the Indian diplomatic corps is divided on whether Sujatha did the right thing by making her points in her farewell speech. While some feel she should have shown grace and refrained from showing her bitterness, others argue that there was nothing wrong in an outgoing foreign secretary, especially one whose service was abruptly cut short by the government, sharing her feelings with her colleagues in the foreign ministry.
Sujatha is not the first foreign secretary whose services have been abruptly cut short. In the MEA’s history this has happened thrice before—Jagat Mehta, A.P. Venkateswar and S.K. Singh. But she is the only foreign secretary who has been asked to leave before completing her two-year tenure. Most of the MEA officials express confidence about Jaishankar’s ability to lead from the front as the new head of the IFS and look forward to working with him. However, under a proactive prime minister with a penchant to humiliate senior bureaucrats and terminate their service abruptly, many diplomats fear an extremely uncertain future ahead.
