Jaswant was born into an aristocratic family that was a fiefdom of the Maharaja of Jodhpur. Upon leaving Mayo College, Ajmer, he followed in his father’s footsteps and joined the army. He was part of the mobilization in Assam during the Chinese war of 1962. The humiliation of the moment had a profound impact on him. Pushed him to leave the army early and build a political career. Years later, mandated to fix things with an adversary he had once faced, he spoke and wrote poignantly about irony.
Jaswant was a very unique politician. Arriving in Chittorgarh in the middle of an election in the late 1990s, a senior BJP official found candidate Singh engrossed in a book. When asked why he was not in the middle of the campaign, the major looked up and explained something along the lines of “the troops have been deployed” and read again. It was a characteristic Jaswant response, the kind that left the interlocutors stunned.
Is quality was going to serve him well when, as envoy of Vajpayee and then foreign minister, negotiated with US Undersecretary of State Strobe Talbott.
India had just completed the Pokhran II nuclear tests and Jaswant’s job was to avoid pressure to sign the CTBT. In his 2006 memoir ‘A Call to Honor’, the title taken from a book by Charles de Gaulle, among his role models, Jaswant told a story. Speaking to Talbott, he was accused of “selective selection and selectivity of focus.” His answer was almost Vedantic: “What does it matter Strobe, all cherries have to ripen and be picked, or rot on the branch or, perhaps, on the ground, some now, some later.” Without a doubt, “my friend Strobe” was speechless.
A conversation with Jaswant was never just a conversation. “We are still reaching an agreement,” he once said, “with the consequences of the dissolution of empires after the World War. “Was he referring to the British Empire and World War II? I asked him politely. The contempt was withering:” My reference, young man, is the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires after First World War. ”
Such a play on words was classic Jaswant. However, it was not all he had. He had that unusual and intangible quality, that sense of India, of its greatness and its manifest destiny. He was never able to survive that cold winter night in Kandahar in 1999. Yet he was the rare politician willing to perform an ignominious duty just because he considered it his responsibility and would not pass it on to a public official. The male stopped with him.
While those who want to make them will make odious comparisons, there are actually remarkable lines of continuity between Vajpayee and Modi’s foreign policy approaches. Let’s take random examples: the end of nuclear ambiguity and the beginning of technological diplomacy, the ambitious engagement with the United States, the opening up to Myanmar (with Jaswant’s visit in 2001), the restart with Sri Lanka, the early approach to the United Arab Emirates and the Arab world. , while deepening relations with Israel. The Vajpayee era laid the building blocks, the Modi era erected the superstructure. Jaswant Singh was an integral part of that pioneering effort – a son and a servant that India will cherish and remember.
(The writer is an advisor in the ministry of foreign affairs)
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