Foreign policy had to evolve after 1991 reforms: Jaishankar at NK Singh’s book launch

Foreign policy needed to transform to reflect new geopolitical interests as India’s economy opened up in 1991, Union external affairs minister S Jaishankar said at the launch of the fifteenth finance commission chairman Nand Kishore Singh’s book in New Delhi on Wednesday.

“It was a very different world during the years of your travels to South America and Japan [in the 1970s-80s]. Once the course correction started in 1991-92, and the economic model changed, the political company also underwent a certain change. When I look back at that era, there was a lot of posturing on many big issues; we actually got left out, which is why we also had to make course corrections in foreign policy along with the economic reforms,” Jaishankar said.

Groupings like the G77 have been rethought, reinvented and recharged to give rise to present-day concepts like the Global South, while ideas like the Quad would have been “inconceivable” even three decades ago, the Union minister said.

Jaishankar spoke on the eve of his visit to Atlanta where he will meet the foreign ministers of Australia, Japan and the United States of America — together with India, the four countries form the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or the Quad.

The minister was responding to a question by Singh on the difference that groups like the G77 — founded by 77 member nations of the United Nations in 1964 — make in today’s landscapes of international relations, where smaller groups are de rigeur. Singh was under secretary in the ministry of Commerce when he travelled to Lima, Peru, with Lalit Narain Mishra, the then minister of foreign trade, to attend a G77 meeting in 1971.

Besides Jaishankar, former Union minister Karan Singh, special envoy to Indonesian president on international trade Mari Pangestu, chair, board of trustees, Victoria and Albert Museum Baroness Minouche Shafik and India Unbound author Gurcharan Das also participated in a panel discussion on Singh’s new book, Endeavours: An Ensemble of My Life, which details his pursuits and influences, not his career as one of India’s top bureaucrats, nor his perspective of political trends or economic policies (he is an insider in both worlds).

At the very outset, Singh set his readers’ expectations straight.

Singh, who served in the Rajya Sabha from 2008 to 2014, and joined the Bharatiya Janata Party in 2014, offers some glimpses of his long and storied career as a bureaucrat both in the Centre and in Bihar, which took him across the world, but the new book is about the “pursuits that grew alongside, and somewhat outside, the responsibilities of my official life”.

The book, published by Juggernaut Books talks about the areas in which he exercised “no professional authority”, from his passion in photography and rose cultivation and gardening to Hindustani Classical music, Japanese culture and modern art.

The practicalities of gardening — tending to the soil, water, planting, pruning and seasonal care — leads Singh towards musings on larger issues, from the religious, civic and historical meanings of the garden to the philosophical lessons it carries.

“Gardening taught me that growth requires attention, patience and a willingness to renew by cutting back what has ceased to flourish,” he writes, crediting his father, bureaucrat Tribhuvan Prasad Singh, whose ministrations at one point resulted in over 300 varieties of roses in their Patna home garden.

Singh wrote that it was tending to his father’s rose garden that pushed him towards photography, to capture the rose at the exact moment “when form, colour and light came together”. Photography became a serious pursuit when he was in Japan, Singh writes. Between 1981 and 1985, Singh was minister (Economic & Commercial Affairs) at the Indian Embassy, Tokyo. During this time he also played an important role in facilitating Maruti Suzuki’s entry into India. However, Japan left him with an endearing love for its landscapes which he would capture in photographs as he and his wife, Prem Kumari, travelled the length and breadth of the country.

Singh’s passion for Hindustani Classical music made it to the launch as he played tracks from some significant private concerts that he had hosted. While posted in New Delhi and Bihar, he invited maestros including Pandit Jasraj, Kishori Amonkar, Ustad Bismillah Khan, Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, and Girija Devi, among others.

At one point in his memoir, Singh writes about the farewell his bureaucrat-father, TP Singh, received when he packed up his Patna home to move to New Delhi in the early 1960s: “The local papers extensively covered the touching farewell as his train, the Delhi Express, slowly pulled out of Patna Junction. Friends and relatives had tears in their eyes because they felt that the social life of Bihar would become poorer in his absence.”

The social life of New Delhi — with NK Singh at its centre — was on full display on Wednesday.