Reborn in 1970 INDIA

Chapter 435: Chapter 394: The Chains We Outgrew

Chapter 394: The Chains We Outgrew

September 5 – September 6, 1979

South Block, New Delhi • The Central Hall of Parliament, New Delhi

At nine-fifteen on the morning of Wednesday, the fifth of September, the monsoon rain that had washed the red sandstone colonnades of Raisina Hill since dawn gave way to a shaft of pale, steaming autumn sunlight.

Inside the Cabinet Room on the first floor of South Block, however, the atmosphere bore no resemblance to a solemn council of state.

Around the long, oval Burma-teak table sat the full Political Affairs and Security Committee of the Union Cabinet: Prime Minister Yashwantrao Balwantrao Chavan at the head; to his right, Minister of External Affairs Sardar Swaran Singh, Defence Minister Jagjivan Ram, Union Finance Minister Chidambaram Subramaniam, and Foreign Secretary Ram Sathe; to his left, Chief Minister Karan Shergill, who had flown in from Lucknow at eight that morning aboard a Shergill Aerospace executive courier jet, flanked by National Security Advisor Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw, Home Minister K. Brahmananda Reddy, and Senior Strategic Advisor Ram Nath Kao.

In the middle of the green baize table, resting beside the silver tea service, lay twelve mimeographed copies of two documents that had arrived over the encrypted high-frequency circuit from Kingston, Jamaica, at four o’clock that morning:

The first was the verbatim Reuters and Associated Press global wire transcript of Ambassador Devendra Nath Sen’s fourteen-minute right-of-reply address before the Sixth Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in Havana.

The second was a single-page pink cipher sheet containing Ambassador Sen’s personal cable from Room 412 of the Hotel Habana Libre—requesting permission to be fired, stripped of his pension, or exiled to count yak-skins in Sikkim while he took a hot bath and drank a glass of single-malt Scotch in Jamaica.

For the first four minutes after Prime Minister Chavan called the meeting to order, nobody could get through the agenda because Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw could not stop laughing.

The sixty-five-year-old hero of the 1971 war sat with his white handkerchief pressed to his eyes, his broad shoulders heaving beneath his uniform tunic, his trademark moustache quivering as he reread page seven of the Havana transcript aloud to Defence Minister Jagjivan Ram.

*”‘And I regret to inform President Sadat of the conclusion of our generals,'”* Manekshaw wheezed, slapping the open folder against his knee with a loud whack, *”‘even the Pakistani military is stronger, better led, and more competent in the field than the Armed Forces of Egypt! And I invite this assembly to reflect deeply upon the gravity of that assessment, because nobody on God’s green earth knows better than the Republic of India just how dreadful, bankrupt, and utterly pathetic the Pakistani military is!'”*

Manekshaw threw his head back and roared, the deep, infectious boom of his laughter echoing off the high teak panels of the Cabinet Room.

Beside him, Jagjivan Ram—a veteran of forty years of parliamentary warfare who rarely gave more than a dry chuckle in committee—was shaking with silent, belly-deep mirth, his spectacles fogging up as he tapped the pink cipher sheet.

“And look at Paragraph Three of his personal cable to Sathe!” Jagjivan Ram chuckled, wiping his glasses with the hem of his dhoti sleeve. *”‘If the Motherland considers it necessary to maintain a seat at the remainder of this circus, New Delhi may dispatch someone with a higher tolerance for bad plumbing and worse speeches.’* Ram, where on earth have you been hiding Devendra Sen for the last five years? We sent a Balliol College mandarin to Havana to read a polite bureaucratic note, and he burned Fidel Castro’s convention hall to the ground without dropping a single preposition!”

At the right hand of the Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary Ram Sathe tried manfully to maintain the austere, buttoned-up gravity expected of the head of the Indian Foreign Service—and failed completely when he looked across the table at Sardar Swaran Singh, whose turban was shaking slightly as the elderly Foreign Minister chuckled behind his hand.

“Prime Minister,” Sathe said, his lips twitching despite himself, “strictly speaking, under Rule 14 of the Indian Foreign Service Conduct Rules, an Ambassador Plenipotentiary who calls the host Head of State ‘an upjumped Caribbean dictator in an unwashed olive-drab costume who eats eighteen scoops of ice cream while his people queue for black beans,’ tells Marshal Tito that Yugoslavia is going to disintegrate into a Balkan slaughterhouse the morning after his funeral, and then walks out of a summit to catch a British Airways flight to Jamaica without waiting for Cabinet instructions… has committed at least six separate dismissible offenses.”

“Dismissible offenses?” Field Marshal Manekshaw barked, sitting up straight and pointing his swagger stick across the table at the Foreign Secretary. “Ram, if you touch a single rupee of Devendra Sen’s pension, or if you send that man to count yaks in Sikkim, I will personally march a battalion of the 5th Gorkha Rifles into the Ministry of External Affairs and lock you in the basement!

“Do you know what happened in Rawalpindi and Cairo at seven o’clock this morning when the BBC World Service rebroadcast Sen’s speech across the Middle East and South Asia?!” Manekshaw grinned from ear to ear. “General Zia-ul-Haq and the Pakistani General Staff woke up to hear nine hundred million people being told that Pakistan is the universal gold standard for military incompetence—and Anwar Sadat didn’t even get to enjoy it because Sen used Pakistan as the measuring stick to call the Egyptian Army even worse! That is a two-for-one psychological artillery strike! Give the man the Padma Vibhushan and send him a case of Glenfiddich!”

Prime Minister Yashwantrao Chavan leaned back in his chair, a wide, deeply appreciative smile creasing his weathered Maratha face as the laughter rolled around the oval table.

“Calm yourself, Sam,” Chavan chuckled, raising a hand. “Nobody is sending Devendra Sen to Sikkim. Though I must say, when I read the line about the twenty-year-old Moskvitch backfiring like a siege mortar and the tap in Room 412 shooting brown mud across his Turnbull & Asser cuffs, I understood instantly why the man went nuclear at the rostrum. You can threaten an Indian Foreign Service officer with Soviet tank divisions and he will remain polite; ruin his Savile Row linen shirt before lunch, and he will topple three governments before tea.”

Another warm wave of laughter went around the table. Even R. N. Kao, sitting quietly beside Karan, allowed the corners of his mouth to curve upward as he looked at the Havana dispatch.

“The collateral intelligence value of Ambassador Sen’s walkout has already exceeded six months of station reporting, Prime Minister,” Kao observed in his soft, velvet voice. “Between four o’clock yesterday afternoon and eight o’clock this morning, nineteen heads of state and foreign ministers currently in Havana—led by Singapore, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Nigeria, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka—sent urgent, private messages to our embassy residence in Miramar. Every single one of them dissociated their governments completely from Castro’s draft resolution, and eleven of them informed the Cuban Secretariat last night that if India’s chair remains empty today, they will refuse to sign the Havana Final Declaration and will board their aircraft home tonight.”

Then, at the far side of the table, Karan Shergill set his pen down on his leather blotter.

He had laughed along with Manekshaw and Chavan at Sen’s dissection of Sadat and the Pakistani army. Now, as he leaned forward with his forearms resting on the polished teak, the laughter in the Cabinet Room quieted down naturally, every minister and secretary turning toward the twenty-eight-year-old architect of the Republic’s grand strategy.

“Devendra Sen did not commit a diplomatic error in Havana yesterday, Prime Minister,” Karan said, his voice calm, clear, and carrying that quiet subterranean weight that always shifted a conversation from tactics to history. “He simply said out loud, in fourteen minutes of unvarnished English, what reality has been telling us for the past five years.

“Look at why Fidel Castro put our Ambassador in a room above a garbage bay, why Anwar Sadat screamed for our expulsion, and why Marshal Tito wept over the ghost of 1956.”

Karan picked up the Havana transcript and tossed it gently onto the middle of the green baize.

“They did it because the Non-Aligned Movement is a moral chain around our wrists—and we have outgrown it, outbuilt it, and outclassed every single reason it was ever invented.”

The Cabinet Room went completely still.

Sardar Swaran Singh, C. Subramaniam, and Jagjivan Ram looked at Karan with intense, sudden concentration. For twenty-five years, “Non-Alignment” had been treated in New Delhi’s official vocabulary almost like a constitutional religion—a sacred heirloom inherited from the founding years of the Republic that no politician questioned in public, even while Karan and Chavan had spent the last eight years systematically violating every timid commandment of that religion in practice.

“Think about why the Non-Aligned Movement was created at Brioni in 1956 and Belgrade in 1961,” Karan said, looking around the oval table from Swaran Singh to Chavan.

“In 1961, the world belonged to two giants—Washington and Moscow. India, Yugoslavia, Egypt, Indonesia, and Ghana were poor, newly independent or war-battered agrarian states with no capital, no high-technology industry, no blue-water navies, and no strategic reach. When you are weak, when your treasury is empty, and when you cannot defend your own oceans or forge your own jet engines, how do you survive in a world of predators?

“You form a trade union of the weak! You gather ninety poor nations in a hall, you pass high-minded moral resolutions condemning ‘power politics’ and ‘spheres of influence,’ and you try to use collective moral guilt as a shield to stop the superpowers from trampling you!

“In 1961, that made sense for a weak India,” Karan said, his voice hardening into forged steel. “In 1979, we are one of the three superpowers on the face of the earth!

“Look at the absurd hypocrisy we are forcing ourselves to perform every time we walk into a Non-Aligned hall! “In December, we sat down with Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev in Singapore and signed a binding treaty locking the global nuclear warhead ratio at 1.25 to 1.0 to 0.75—giving the Republic of India the legal right to eleven thousand thermonuclear warheads! “In July, we took our permanent seat at the G8 Summit in Tokyo, capped global oil at forty dollars a barrel, killed the Rotterdam spot market, and forced the central banks of Germany, Japan, Britain, and France to clear their energy in Indian Rupees! “Three weeks later, we sailed an eighty-five-thousand-tonne nuclear supercarrier battle group and two amphibious assault ships carrying two thousand Manduk shock troops to the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz! “And four days ago, we marched forty thousand armoured troops across the Kunlun Mountains, partitioned Xinjiang with the Soviet Union along the Tian Shan range, split China’s nuclear stockpile fifty-fifty at Malan, and took a five-hundred-thousand-square-kilometre protectorate containing fifty billion barrels of oil and a hundred and forty thousand tonnes of uranium!”

Karan placed his palm flat on the teak table and looked straight at Prime Minister Chavan and Sardar Swaran Singh.

“How can an empire that commands nuclear carrier strike groups, sits in the G8, holds a 0.75 strategic warhead ratio, runs a twenty-billion-dollar development bank in Bombay, and guarantees the borders of Tibet, Burma, Singapore, and the Tarim Basin pretend to be ‘non-aligned’ alongside Fidel Castro, Anwar Sadat, and Idi Amin’s neighbours?!

“Every time we stay inside the Non-Aligned Movement,” Karan said starkly, “we hand ninety bankrupt dictatorships and third-rate juntas a free moral leash to pull on our neck! Whenever India acts like a superpower to secure its borders or its ocean, Cairo, Damascus, Havana, and Belgrade stand up and scream: ‘You are violating the sacred principles of Non-Alignment! You are behaving like an imperialist!’

“And the exact same truth applies to that other museum relic we still belong to: the British Commonwealth! Why does a superpower whose GDP, industrial output, and naval tonnage now dwarf Great Britain’s still send ministers to sit in Marlborough House in London under the symbolic headship of the British monarch?! We stayed in the Commonwealth in 1949 because we needed sterling balances and British trade preferences. Today, Margaret Thatcher’s factories run on Indian oil and Indian microchips!

“We will leave both the Non-Aligned Movement and the Commonwealth,” Karan declared, his dark eyes sweeping the hushed room. “We can deal with London and the Commonwealth at the next Lusaka or Melbourne cycle when the timing suits us. Today—this week—while the entire world is watching Havana, let us walk out of the Non-Aligned Movement forever and smash the chain on the floor!”

For ten seconds after Karan finished speaking, the silence in the Cabinet Room was absolute—the silence of men who had just watched a curtain torn down from a window, revealing a horizon they had been walking toward for eight years without daring to name it.

Then Sardar Swaran Singh—who had represented India at more Non-Aligned conferences over twenty-five years than any living man—slowly took off his spectacles and laid them down on the green baize cloth.

“For twenty years,” the seventy-one-year-old Foreign Minister said quietly, a profound, almost physical relief in his voice, “I have sat in halls in Belgrade, Cairo, Lusaka, Algiers, and Colombo, listening to military dictators who seized power at four in the morning lecture the world’s largest democracy on human rights and non-alignment between nine in the morning and noon, and then come to my hotel suite at two in the afternoon begging for Indian wheat, Indian engineers, Indian weapons, or Indian money.

“Karan is completely right, Yashwantrao-ji,” Swaran Singh said, turning to the Prime Minister. “In 1961, Non-Alignment was a shield for our weakness. In 1979, it is a cage built by our inferiors to restrain our strength.

“And consider what happens to the Non-Aligned Movement the minute the Republic of India walks out the door!” Swaran Singh’s eyes glinted with cold diplomatic precision. “Without India—without seven hundred million people, without the world’s third-largest industrial and military power, and without the thirty-eight Asian and African nations whose treasuries are anchored to the Asian-African Development Bank in Bombay—what is left in that hall in Havana?

“Nothing! A hollow shell! A debating society of Soviet satellites like Cuba and Vietnam screaming at bankrupt Arab rejectionists like Egypt and Syria, while Yugoslavia slowly dies of old age! Without India, the Non-Aligned Movement ceases to have a single ounce of geopolitical relevance on the planet!”

Union Finance Minister Chidambaram Subramaniam nodded vigorously from across the table.

“From the financial standpoint, Prime Minister,” Subramaniam said, “leaving NAM removes the last ideological confusion among our AADB and Belt-and-Road partners. For the past two years, whenever Dr. Venkataraman and Dr. Sengupta negotiated sovereign Rupee infrastructure loans and mineral off-take escrows in East Africa or Southeast Asia, radical leftists in those parliaments tried to invoke old 1960s ‘Non-Aligned socialist solidarity’ to demand free grants instead of commercial contracts.

“By stepping out of NAM today, we make the architecture of the new world unmistakably clear: India does not deal in Third World ideological charity. India deals in sovereign, bilateral and multilateral partnerships through the AADB and the Belt and Road.”

Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw leaned forward, resting his forearms on the table as a sudden strategic thought struck him.

“Wait a moment, Karan,” Manekshaw said, his sharp soldier’s eyes narrowing as he looked from the map of the Indian Ocean on the wall back to the young Chief Minister. “If we walk out of the Non-Aligned Movement tomorrow—and eventually out of the Commonwealth—we are officially telling the world that the Republic of India is no longer ‘unaligned.’

“As you yourself told David Frost on television last year: We have our own alignment. We are the centre of our own compass.

“Right now, we have bilateral defense and basing treaties with Singapore at Changi, with Tibet at Lhasa, with Burma in Rangoon, with the Republic of Tarim in Kashgar, with Oman at Muscat and Salalah, with Mauritius, and a secret strategic-technological accord with Israel. And we have thirty-eight nations tied into our ports and railways from Mombasa and Beira to Penang and Surabaya.

“If we are burying the Non-Aligned Movement this week,” Manekshaw asked quietly, “what replaces it on the military and security board over the next decade?”

In the quiet of the Cabinet Room, Karan looked at the great map of the Eastern Hemisphere mounted on the teak wall—stretching from the Meridian of the Cape of Good Hope up the East African coast to the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz, across the Himalayas and the Tian Shan, and down through Burma and the Strait of Malacca to the Andaman Sea.

“In 1949,” Karan said softly, speaking only for the ten men inside the locked room, “when the United States stepped out of its pre-war isolationism to secure the Atlantic basin, it did not rely on loose bilateral handshakes. It created NATO—the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. And in 1955, the Soviet Union created the Warsaw Pact.

“Why should the Atlantic Ocean have a collective security treaty controlled by Washington, and Eastern Europe have a collective security treaty controlled by Moscow, while the most vital ocean on the planet—the ocean that carries two-thirds of the world’s oil and half its container traffic—has no permanent, institutionalized security architecture of its own?”

Karan traced a wide, sweeping circle across the blue water of the Indian Ocean rim.

“Why don’t we build our own NATO?” Karan asked quietly. “The Indian Ocean Treaty Organization—IOTO.”

Around the oval table, every single man sat up straight.

Prime Minister Chavan, Swaran Singh, Jagjivan Ram, C. Subramaniam, Field Marshal Manekshaw, Ram Sathe, and R. N. Kao stared at the map as the sheer, breathtaking scale of the concept crystallized in the room.

“Think of what IOTO means once the foundations are laid,” Karan continued, his voice calm, measured, and visionary. “A formal, permanent, collective maritime and continental defense alliance headquartered in New Delhi and Bombay—bringing together the Republic of India and the key littoral and buffer states of the Indian Ocean and Inner Asian rim: Singapore, Oman, the Emirates, Mauritius, Seychelles, Sri Lanka, Burma, Tibet, the Republic of Tarim, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, and Zambia!

“An Article Five collective security guarantee under the nuclear and naval umbrella of the Indian Armed Forces: “Standardized Gorakhpur radar networks and Shergill Shield surface-to-air missile domes protecting every port from Mombasa and Muscat to Changi; “Permanent sovereign basing rights for our three nuclear supercarrier strike groups—INS Viraat, INS Akashvani, and INS Vikramaditya—and our sixteen *Chakra-class** nuclear submarines at every choke point of the ocean; “Joint military academies where every officer of the African, Southeast Asian, and Central Asian armed forces is trained in Indian doctrine, speaks Indian tactical codes, and operates Indian hardware financed through the AADB!”

Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw slowly let out a long breath, his eyes shining like a young subaltern’s.

“The Indian Ocean Treaty Organization,” Manekshaw repeated softly, tasting the words. “From the Cape of Good Hope to the Strait of Malacca, and from the Indian Ocean to the Tian Shan mountains. An entire hemisphere locked inside a legal, military, and economic fortress commanded from New Delhi.”

“Can we announce IOTO tomorrow when we exit NAM?” Home Minister Brahmananda Reddy asked eagerly.

“No,” Karan said immediately, raising a hand to impose strict strategic discipline. “Not one word of IOTO leaves this room tomorrow.

“If we announce a military alliance bloc on the exact same day we walk out of the Non-Aligned Movement, the smaller littoral states in Africa and Southeast Asia will feel cornered before their domestic parliaments are prepared, and Washington and Moscow will try to strangle the baby in the cradle.

“Building an alliance like IOTO takes patient, brick-by-brick institutional groundwork,” Karan said, looking at Swaran Singh, Sathe, and Kao. “First, tomorrow, we demolish the dead house—we formally withdraw from the Non-Aligned Movement, leaving Havana an irrelevant ruin. Second, over the next twelve to eighteen months, as the Belt and Road ports and railways at Mombasa, Dar es Salaam, Beira, Muscat, Colombo, Rangoon, and Penang come online, we upgrade each bilateral port-security agreement into a standardized Joint Maritime Defense Protocol. By 1981 or 1982, when all the pieces are already bolted to the floor in practice, our partners themselves will come to New Delhi to sign the IOTO Charter as the natural culmination of their own security.”

Sardar Swaran Singh nodded slowly in deep admiration. “First clear the ground of the ruins; then pour the concrete; and only when the walls are standing, put the name on the gate. Agreed. Not a whisper of IOTO outside this committee until the protocols are in place.”

Foreign Secretary Ram Sathe opened his drafting pad, his pen poised.

“Then for tomorrow morning, Prime Minister,” Sathe said, “the Ministry of External Affairs will transmit a formal Instrument of Withdrawal to the Non-Aligned Coordinating Bureau in Havana and to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, stating that effective noon on September 6th, 1979, the Republic of India terminates its membership in the Non-Aligned Movement.”

Prime Minister Yashwantrao Balwantrao Chavan looked at the Foreign Secretary over the top of his spectacles.

For a long moment, the sixty-six-year-old Prime Minister did not speak. He looked around the Cabinet table—at the men who with him had steered the Republic through the fire of the Burma war, the liberation of Tibet, the great oil war against the West, the Singapore nuclear summit, the Tokyo G8, and the blitzkrieg to the Tian Shan mountains.

Then a slow, fierce, iron smile spread across Chavan’s broad Maratha face.

“An Instrument of Withdrawal sent by a clerk over a teleprinter, Ram?” Chavan rumbled, shaking his head. “For twenty-three years, India carried the Non-Aligned Movement on its back. We paid its bills, we wrote its charters, and we gave it the only prestige it ever possessed in the capitals of the world.

“And yesterday in Havana, Fidel Castro, Anwar Sadat, and Josip Broz Tito thought they could put the Republic of India in the dock like a culprit while Devendra Sen sat under a leaking pipe in the fifth row!”

Chavan placed both of his heavy palms flat on the Burma-teak table and stood up.

“I am not exiting the Non-Aligned Movement with a clerk’s note, Ram!” the Prime Minister declared, his deep baritone booming across the Cabinet Room. “Devendra Sen gave them the trailer in Havana yesterday afternoon. Tomorrow morning at eleven o’clock, I am convening a Joint Session of both Houses of Parliament in the Central Hall of Sansad Bhavan—live on All India Radio and Doordarshan satellite relay to every capital on earth—and I am going to drive the stake through the heart of the corpse myself!”

Thursday, September 6, 1979 — 1100 Hours IST

The Central Hall of Parliament, New Delhi

The Central Hall of the Indian Parliament had been built for moments when history turned a page and refused to turn it back.

Under its great, ninety-foot-high circular dome panelled in dark teak and ringed by the gilt-framed portraits of the men and women who had fought for freedom, the Constituent Assembly had met at midnight on August 14, 1947, to hear Jawaharlal Nehru proclaim India’s tryst with destiny.

At ten-forty-five on the morning of Thursday, the sixth of September, 1979, every single polished green leather bench across the floor of the Central Hall was packed shoulder to shoulder.

All five hundred and forty-two members of the Lok Sabha and two hundred and forty-four members of the Rajya Sabha sat in unbroken ranks—from the massive two-hundred-seat phalanx of the Indian National Party and the ruling Congress benches to the Jan Sangh, the Socialists, and the regional parties. On the front row of the Chief Ministers’ enclave sat Karan Shergill of Uttar Pradesh alongside the newly sworn-in Chief Minister of Orissa, Biju Patnaik, and M. G. Ramachandran of Tamil Nadu, who had flown up from Madras overnight when the Prime Minister’s summons for a historic Joint Session went out.

And seated in the place of honour directly at the end of the front Treasury bench—wearing an immaculate, newly pressed cream silk bandhgala without a single spot of Havana rust on his French cuffs, having landed at Palam from London via Kingston three hours earlier—sat Ambassador Devendra Nath Sen, who had been greeted in the parliamentary courtyard ten minutes ago by a spontaneous, roaring five-minute standing ovation from four hundred MPs across party lines.

Up in the circular Diplomatic Gallery overlooking the floor sat the ambassadors and high commissioners of eighty-four nations—including US Ambassador Robert Goheen, Soviet Ambassador Yuli Vorontsov, British High Commissioner Sir John Thomson, and fifty-two ambassadors of Asian, African, and Arab states who had cancelled every appointment in Delhi to hear how the Third Superpower would answer Havana.

At eleven o’clock sharp, the fanfare of trumpets sounded in the outer rotunda.

The Speaker of the Lok Sabha, the Chairman of the Rajya Sabha, and Prime Minister Yashwantrao Balwantrao Chavan walked down the central aisle to the thunder of seven hundred and eighty pairs of hands hammering the teak desks.

When the applause died away and the great hall settled into a silence so deep that the whirring of the ceiling fans sounded like distant wind, Prime Minister Chavan stepped to the central mahogany rostrum beneath the national emblem—the Four Lions of Sarnath standing above the words Satyameva Jayate, Truth Alone Triumphs.

Chavan did not open a folder. He rested both hands on the sides of the lectern and looked out over the parliamentarians of the Republic and up at the crowded diplomatic boxes.

“Mr. Speaker, Mr. Chairman, Honourable Members of Parliament, and citizens of the Republic,” Prime Minister Chavan began, his deep, resonant voice rolling beneath the great dome and out across the global satellite feeds to London, Washington, Moscow, Cairo, Belgrade, and Havana, where it was one-thirty in the morning.

“Thirty-two years ago, in this very hall, at the stroke of the midnight hour, the Republic of India awoke to life and freedom.

“We awoke into a world we did not make, and a world we did not control. Our treasury had been emptied by two centuries of colonial extraction; our granaries were bare; our steel mills could barely forge a railway axle; our borders had been vivisected in blood; and the globe had been divided between two heavily armed thermonuclear camps in Washington and Moscow that demanded that every newborn nation of Asia and Africa kneel before one altar or the other.

“In that dawn of our weakness, our founders forged an instrument suited to the survival of an unarmed nation. They called it Non-Alignment.

“Let no man rewrite the history of that era,” Chavan said, his voice rich with solemn dignity. “When India, Yugoslavia, and Egypt met at Brioni and Belgrade, Non-Alignment was a noble declaration that a poor nation did not have to sell its conscience in order to eat. For two decades, the Republic of India carried that Movement on its shoulders. We lent it our moral authority, we fought for the decolonization of every captive nation in Africa and Asia, and we asked for nothing in return.”

Chavan paused, his heavy shoulders squaring beneath his dark Achkan coat as his eyes lifted to the Diplomatic Gallery and his voice dropped an octave into cold, reverberating iron.

“And two days ago, in the city of Havana, the Republic of India received its repayment.

“For four hours on Tuesday morning, at the Sixth Summit Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement, the sovereign delegation of seven hundred million Indian citizens was subjected to a pre-arranged, sanctimonious inquisition by three men who presumed to sit in judgment upon the honour, the strength, and the actions of this Republic!

“Because our Special Envoy, Ambassador Devendra Nath Sen—to whom this House and this nation owe a debt of gratitude for speaking with the spine of a free people—”

A thunderous roar of desk-thumping erupted across the Central Hall for thirty full seconds as seven hundred MPs turned to salute the silver-haired diplomat on the front bench.

“—because Ambassador Sen refused to sit silently under a leaking pipe and swallow insults aimed at his Motherland,” Chavan continued over the fading thunder, “certain voices in Havana and in foreign capitals have asked since Tuesday evening whether Ambassador Sen spoke only for himself, or whether he spoke for the Government of India.

“I have convened this Joint Session of the Sovereign Parliament of India today to give Havana, Cairo, Belgrade, and the world their answer!”

Chavan’s right fist came down on the mahogany rostrum like a gavel of stone.

“Every single word that Ambassador Devendra Nath Sen spoke from the rostrum in Havana carries the full, unconditional, and sovereign endorsement of the Prime Minister, the Cabinet, and the people of the Republic of India!”

Again the desks thundered across the hall—INP, Congress, and Jan Sangh members roaring in unison while up in the Diplomatic Gallery, the Cuban, Egyptian, and Yugoslav chargés d’affaires sat frozen in their seats like wax statues.

“Let us examine the three charges levelled against the Republic of India in Havana!” Chavan’s voice rose, filling the dome with the prosecutorial majesty that had once silenced the super-powers at Singapore and Tokyo.

“First: Comrade Fidel Castro of Cuba stood at the podium in Havana and demanded that the Non-Aligned Movement declare the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to be its ‘natural historical ally’—and in the very next breath, he demanded that India be condemned as an imperialist power for marching across the Kunlun Mountains on Saturday morning to save five million human beings in the Free and Democratic Republic of Tarim!

“Look at the grotesque obscenity of that double standard!” Chavan thundered. “When five Soviet divisions cross the Kazakh frontier at dawn on Saturday to occupy Dzungaria and install a single-party communist committee in Ürümqi, Comrade Castro applauds it as ‘fraternal socialist liberation’!

“When forty thousand Indian soldiers cross the Karakoram and Kunlun passes at the exact same hour to stop the Red Army from swallowing Southern Xinjiang, to reopen the mosques and bazaars of Kashgar and Khotan, to establish an elected democratic council, and to give the people of the Tarim Basin fifty percent of their own oil and mineral wealth—Comrade Castro calls it ‘imperialism’!

“Why? Because for twenty years, Havana has ceased to be an independent capital! Havana is a megaphone wired to a subsidy cheque in Moscow! A regime that has forty-eight thousand of its own soldiers acting as foreign mercenaries in the jungles of Angola and Ethiopia to fight Moscow’s wars has forfeited forever the right to pronounce the word Non-Aligned!”

Chavan turned slightly toward the left side of the gallery, where the Arab ambassadors sat in tense silence.

“Second: President Anwar Sadat of Egypt stood before that same microphone in Havana and demanded that the Republic of India be expelled from the Non-Aligned Movement unless we withdraw our Armed Forces from Kashgar and withdraw our nuclear supercarrier INS Viraat and the First Expeditionary Fleet from the international waters of the Gulf of Oman!

“President Sadat weeps today over the war of October 1973,” Chavan said, his voice dropping to a low, withering register of cold contempt. “He tells the world that India ‘betrayed the Third World’ by selling sovereign defence equipment to the State of Israel.

“Let me remind President Sadat—and every ruler in Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad who cheered him on Tuesday—of the historical ledger that we keep in the archives of South Block!

“When China invaded India across the Himalayas in October 1962, did Cairo stand with India, or did Cairo equivocate to please Beijing? You equivocated! “In September 1965, and again in December 1971—when the military regime in Pakistan was slaughtering three million Bengali civilians and ten million refugees were pouring across our borders—who stood with democratic India, and who sent fighter jets, ammunition, and money to the military dictators in Rawalpindi to kill Indian soldiers?! Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, and Riyadh sent weapons and money to Pakistan against India!

“For twenty-five years,” Chavan’s voice rang off the ninety-foot dome, “your definition of ‘Third World Brotherhood’ was a one-way street! Whenever an Arab state went to war, India was expected to shut down its trade, pass resolutions in your favour, and ask no questions; and whenever India was attacked at its throat, you sent rifles and cheques to our enemies!

“Well, that one-way street ended in 1972! The Republic of India is not a supplicant begging for certificates of good behaviour from Cairo! We trade with whom we choose, we arm our friends as we choose, and INS Viraat and the First Expeditionary Fleet are sitting at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz today—with the warm welcome of the wise rulers of Oman and the Emirates—because forty billion dollars of global energy and commerce cleared in Indian Rupees passes through those waters, and no power on earth will ever close a sea lane that the Indian Navy has sworn to keep open!”

Across the floor of the Central Hall, Biju Patnaik and Atal Bihari Vajpayee were on their feet applauding alongside Karan Shergill and the Treasury benches.

Chavan waited five seconds for the roar to subside, and then his face grew still and grave as he addressed the third and deepest charge of all.

“And third,” the Prime Minister said quietly, “in Havana on Tuesday, Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia invoked the memory of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, and mourned that the India of 1979—an India of eighty-five-thousand-tonne nuclear supercarriers, of sub-micron silicon foundries, of twenty-billion-dollar development banks, of a 0.75 strategic warhead ratio, and of armored divisions standing on the crest of the Tian Shan mountains—is no longer the gentle, unarmed moral republic of the 1950s.

“To Marshal Tito, and to every sentimental critic in Europe and the Third World who weeps for the weak, impoverished, sermonizing India of twenty-five years ago, I say this from the floor of the Indian Parliament today:

“You loved India when India was on its knees! You praised our morality when our children were starving and our soldiers had no boots! And you hate us today only because we stood up!”

A volcanic roar burst from every bench in the Central Hall—seven hundred and eighty members rising as one, hammering the desks until the dust motes danced in the shafts of sunlight beneath the dome.

Chavan stood at the rostrum, his chest rising and falling, his voice cutting over the tumult like a bronze temple bell:

“Yes, we have changed! We do not apologize for one single ton of steel we have poured, one single nuclear warhead we have built, one single rupee we have lent, or one single mountain pass we have fortified!

“Do you think Jawaharlal Nehru dreamed that seven hundred million Indians should remain forever poor, forever begging for foreign grain ships, forever at the mercy of foreign fleets in our own ocean, just so foreign diplomats could pat us on the head at conferences and call us ‘spiritual’?!

“Poverty is not spirituality! Weakness is not morality! Helplessness is not peace!

“True morality for a state is the power to ensure that no foreign pilot can ever again drop a bomb on fifty-one Indian workers on a bridge in Mizoram and live to tell the tale! “True morality is the power to ensure that when a racist mob breaks the skull of a six-week-old Indian child in Atlanta or burns an old widow’s flat in Bradford, the Republic of India can turn off the heat of the Western world in thirty days until the murderers are in chains and presidents come on their knees to apologize! “True morality is the power to walk into a stadium in Lucknow and give humanity the free medical science to stop totalitarian regimes from poisoning twelve-year-old Olympic children! “True morality is the power to release three million barrels of oil a day at forty dollars in Tokyo to save the working families of the world from bankruptcy, while lending fifteen thousand crore rupees at three percent interest to build the ports, railways, and hospitals of thirty-eight nations across Asia and Africa! “And true morality was marching forty thousand Indian soldiers across the Kunlun Mountains at dawn on Saturday to ensure that five million innocent human beings in Kashgar, Yarkand, and Khotan live in freedom under their own laws instead of dying under warlords or commissars!”

Prime Minister Chavan reached to the side of the rostrum and lifted a single, heavy parchment folio bound in saffron silk and stamped in red wax with the Great Seal of the Republic of India.

He held it high in his right hand so every camera lens and every ambassador in the gallery could see it.

“For twenty-three years,” Chavan declared, his voice ringing with the finality of an epoch closing before their eyes, “the Non-Aligned Movement was a shelter for nations waiting to grow up.

“The Republic of India has grown up.

“A lion does not ask for a seat in a parliament of sheep, and a superpower does not ask permission from Havana or Cairo to guard the peace of Asia!

“Thirty minutes ago, by unanimous resolution of the Union Cabinet and with the assent of the President of the Republic, this Instrument of Sovereign Withdrawal was transmitted to the Secretary-General of the United Nations in New York and to the Secretariat in Havana:

“Effective twelve o’clock noon today, the sixth of September, 1979, the Republic of India formally, permanently, and irrevocably withdraws from the Non-Aligned Movement!

“We leave the speechmakers in Havana to their manifesto committees and their leaking pipes! To our thirty-eight sovereign partners in Asia, Africa, and the Indian Ocean littoral who wish to build ports, railways, factories, and prosperity rather than slogans—the doors of New Delhi and Bombay stand wide open!

“We are not aligned with the West! We are not aligned with the East! We are the Republic of India—and we stand on our own two feet!

“Jai Hind!”

When Prime Minister Yashwantrao Chavan stepped back from the rostrum at eleven-forty-two in New Delhi, the Central Hall of Parliament erupted into a roaring, ten-minute standing ovation that shook the sandstone walls of Sansad Bhavan.

Across the floor, MPs from every corner of the subcontinent—from Tamil Nadu and Orissa to Manipur, Punjab, Maharashtra, and Uttar Pradesh—embraced in the aisles, before M. G. Ramachandran and Biju Patnaik walked across the green carpet to where Karan Shergill and Ambassador Devendra Sen stood side by side, shaking their hands amidst a blinding storm of press flashbulbs.

Nine thousand miles away to the west, in Havana, it was two-fifteen in the morning when the Reuters and TASS teleprinters in the press lobby of the Palacio de las Convenciones clattered out the full text of Prime Minister Chavan’s Parliamentary Declaration and India’s formal Instrument of Withdrawal.

The night drafting session of the Political Committee on the second floor of the convention centre stopped dead in the middle of a sentence.

Within forty minutes, the lights began snapping on across the diplomatic villas of Miramar and the suites of the Hotel Nacional.

The earthquake that Sardar Swaran Singh had predicted in the South Block Cabinet Room hit Havana before the sun even rose over the Straits of Florida.

At six-thirty on the morning of Thursday, September 6th (Havana Time), the Foreign Minister of Singapore, S. Rajaratnam, walked into the Secretariat office of Cuban Foreign Minister Isidoro Malmierca and handed him a two-sentence diplomatic note stating that as the founding pillar and economic anchor of the Movement had departed following the unprovoked abuse of the host chair, the Republic of Singapore was downgrading its delegation to observer status and departing Havana on the nine o’clock flight.

At seven-fifteen, the delegations of Oman and the United Arab Emirates checked out of their villas and drove to José Martí Airport.

At eight o’clock, a joint caucus of seventeen African and Asian member states of the Asian-African Development Bank—led by Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Nigeria, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Mauritius, and Burma—informed the Cuban Chairmanship that they would neither debate nor sign any political declaration at the Sixth Summit that lacked the participation and concurrence of New Delhi, and demanded the immediate striking of every paragraph introduced by Cuba and Egypt.

When Fidel Castro walked onto the podium of the main plenary amphitheatre at ten o’clock that morning to preside over the closing ceremonies of what was supposed to have been his historic six-year chairmanship of the Third World, he looked out across a hall that was half-empty.

Over forty delegations had either already flown out of José Martí Airport or left only junior third secretaries sitting at their desks to collect the mimeographed papers. Up in Row Five, Sector D, the wooden desk between Equatorial Guinea and the Comoros Islands stood bare—save for the placards that had been removed and a small, dark water stain on the green baize blotter where the air-conditioning duct above went plip… plip… plip into the silence of a dead movement.

And in New Delhi, as the evening lamps came on along the Rajpath at seven o’clock that night, Karan Shergill stood with Prime Minister Chavan, Sardar Swaran Singh, and R. N. Kao on the private verandah of South Block, looking out over the floodlit dome of Rashtrapati Bhavan.

On the small wicker table beside them lay two newly arrived encrypted cables: one from Muscat and Singapore, where Sultan Qaboos and Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew had just privately inquired whether New Delhi would be willing to host an inaugural “Indian Ocean Rim Security and Economic Conference” in Bombay in the spring of 1980; and the second from Washington, where Secretary of State Cyrus Vance confirmed that the high-level American trade and diplomatic mission would land in New Delhi on Monday morning to accept India’s e framework in the Republic of Tarim .

“Twenty-three years of moral chains,” Prime Minister Chavan murmured, taking a slow sip of his evening tea as he looked out at the vast, bustling capital of the Third Superpower. “And when we snapped them at noon today, not a single brick of our house shook—only theirs.”

“Because a chain only holds you so long as you believe you are still a prisoner, Yashwantrao-ji,” Karan said quietly, looking north beyond the lights of Delhi toward the Himalayas and the distant, snow-crowned wall of the Tian Shan. “Now our hands are completely free. And on Monday morning, when the Americans land from Washington and the reports come in from Baghdad and Tehran, we are going to need both hands.”

End of Chapter 394