It was in 1992 that I received a letter from K. Subrahmanyam, India’s top strategic affairs expert. It was one of the proudest moments of my life because I held him in very high esteem and believed that he was perhaps the only person in India who had a strategic vision.
The contents of the letter are not important and I don’t even know if it is still safe in my ancestral home in Kerala or if the tropical humidity has reduced it to mulch status. The exact date or month is now lost in the by lanes of my brain but I do recall that I was in my final year at university when I took out a sheet of paper and penned a long letter to Mr Subrahmanyam, who had an edit page column in the Economic Times, which I used to avidly follow.
Among other things, I requested that he write about why India must leave the Commonwealth of Nations. In my letter I asked Mr Subrahmanyam to write about the anger and frustration that patriotic and proud Indians felt about our country’s continued membership in a club that meant nothing to us. Why was India staying in an organisation which only provided some residual glory to Britain, a country that had pillaged and ravaged India for 190 years? It was a constant affront to us.
I argued that India’s membership in the Commonwealth allowed the British to deny and disown their vicious colonial role during which an estimated 84 million Indians died due to wars, British-made famines, wholesale slaughter and plain genocide.
Also, the Commonwealth Games provided an excuse to British officials to descend in hordes on the host country and inspect facilities like they owned the place. Strutting about like puffed up peacocks they condescendingly approved stadiums and hostels or made arrogant comments. Then there was the undue importance given to the British queen and the queen’s baton, which made us feel sick.
I never expected a reply. I thought such unsolicited letters were chucked into the newspaper’s dustbin seconds after they arrived. How wrong I was! Only four years later when I myself became a journalist did I come to know that even the largest circulation magazines got only a handful of letters per issue? Indeed, my letter must have been gratefully received at the Economic Times and handed over to Mr Subrahmanyam.
So imagine my surprise when the postman delivered a letter from India’s leading strategic affairs guru. Judging by my delight, my mother thought I’d got a job or a cheque from one of my doting aunts! In a country that produced few non-sporting heroes, Mr Subrahmanyam was my idol.
Mr Subrahmanyam thanked me for the letter, and wrote that he was indeed aware of the incongruity of India’s membership of the Commonwealth. He promised to write about it one day at an opportune moment. Of course, the project remained on the drawing board. Perhaps he forgot about it. Perhaps he never had the time to write about it when more pressing matters like nuclear bombs, high-stakes geopolitics and defence demanded his attention.
But why do I have this lingering doubt that perhaps he wanted to write but couldn’t? Having worked in the mainstream Indian media for over a decade I feel if Mr Subrahmanyam did write about the Commonwealth, the editors would have spiked the article. More likely, he may have been told that the peg is missing. This is a favourite word freely employed by Indian editors, who believe an opinion article, no matter how exciting or important, does not deserve publication if there isn’t some connection to ongoing events. In the Indian media, views must correlate to news.
Mr Subrahmanyam’s passing is indeed a great loss to India. Strategic thinkers like him come once in a lifetime. It is doubtful India’s feckless political class has even read, let alone implemented, his advice on strategy. The Indian government has, in fact, failed to make public the report of his task force on India's strategic development. The modern-day Chanakya of Indian strategic policy must have pressed for nothing less than a massive expansion of Indian influence and military might around the world. That is something not palatable to the backboneless politician whose tribe dominates New Delhi. During an international conference on geopolitics many years ago, a foreign diplomat was exasperated by India’s totally supine performance in global affairs, to blurt out: “There is the former superpower (Russia), the sole superpower (the US) and now the reluctant superpower.”
Over 2300 years ago, Chanakya, the master of statecraft, was able to unite India into a powerful empire because he had as his follower and friend the courageous King Chandragupta. However, sadly his modern-day avatar was resigned to watch a succession of Indian politicians willing to accept a marginalised role. India’s reluctance to sit at the global high table really wound up Mr Subrahmanyam. He couldn’t bear to watch third-rate ‘powers’ such as Britain, France and Japan strut around the global stage, meddling in developing countries. When a senior Indian editor wondered how he was able to write so prodigiously and passionately, he replied, “It's easy. I just have to watch CNN or BBC and I get so angry that I have several things to say!”
But what the great man wrote won’t go waste. The next generation of political and military leaders will surely share Mr Subrahmanyam’s vision to make India the pre-eminent power in the 21st century.
(About the author: Rakesh Krishnan Simha is a features writer at New Zealand’s leading media house. He has previously worked with Businessworld, India Today and Hindustan Times, and was news editor with the Financial Express.)
