Neo-institutionalism, in the discipline of public policy, is a tool to understand the arenas of power and power play of the rules of the game of domestic and international politics. Chinmaya R Gharekhan’s book, Centres of Power: My Years in the Prime Minister’s Office and Security Council, attempts to delve into it as the seasoned diplomat recollects his stints at the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and the United Nations (UN), the two nodal centres of power in India and abroad. The book, written with a memoir-like candour, gives an anecdotal account of the era of the Indira-Rajiv years in its first part, and in the second, sheds light on the diplomacy during the first Gulf War.
As an insider at the PMO, the author gives a ringside view of many events that both mother and son handled during their tenures as prime ministers.
Indira, the author felt, was more of a ‘commonsensical’ and ‘populist’ person. Not one with a high opinion of the Ministry of External Affairs, she did not share her father’s ideological affinity with the Russians. Gharekhan found in her a ‘compulsive sub-editor, who loved to amend the drafts of letters, speeches and messages; a good hostess, meticulously deciding the menu and seating plans, a seeker of awards, particularly the international ones such as the Nobel Peace Prize.
Her personality, the author says, was best described as concerning, unpredictable and, at times, humorous. Once asked whether she was Left- or Right-inclined, she remarked, “I do not lean left or right, I stand firmly in the centre”. With Indira’s assassination, preceded by the events of Operation Blue Star and the hijack of the Indian airline Airbus, Gharekhan notes that the whirling drift in Indian politics led Rajiv to take charge.
He wanted to establish himself not as Indira’s son, but as someone who could lead the country technologically at the global level. The author found in him the skills of a true diplomat. Gharekhan mentions how Rajiv was once successful in persuading Margaret Thatcher to agree with the idea of sanctions against South Africa’s apartheid policy at the Commonwealth Summit (1985) when other leaders had virtually lost hope.
To the author, Rajiv came across as someone who loved to talk to foreign leaders on phone, interacted too frankly and bluntly with the media, and carried with him his own share of eccentricities. It was, however, the Shah Bano case and opening of the lock at the Babri mosque that marked a major shift in political mobilisation in India’s electoral democracy. The author admits being personally disappointed by such moves, and recollects how Rajiv acted against his own convictions and fell prey to power-mongers with the least secular credentials.
The following segment is essentially a running narrative of the first Gulf War of 1990-91. Gharekhan’s stint at the UN Security Council, during which period the disintegration of the Soviet Union happened and pax-America reared, brings in rich analytical insights with an authenticity that is perhaps a notch higher than his previous work, Horseshoe Table: An Inside View of the UN Security Council.
The 10 chapters give a close view of diplomacy at the international fora when the Soviet Union got reduced to a middling power due to the end of the Cold War. The author rues that the loss of ‘balancing factor’ given by the Soviet during the war was felt by non-aligned nations, including India. The Gulf War had witnessed, quite unprecedentedly, the coming together of the permanent five members and voting affirmatively on all the UN’s resolutions.
The book, without getting into the hurly burly of politics, is replete with sentimentality of humour. Students of diplomacy and Indian politics will find it a useful supplement, mainly from a practitioner’s perspective, to their theory-laden textbooks.