Ambassadors in Our Time: Some Reflections

Ambassadors often lead charmed lives, owing to the best of their countries they represent in the capitals to which they are sent. Some of them sometimes come up with unexpected difficulties despite the experience and the verve they bring to their job. Vijayalakshmi Pandit, sister of India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, served as her country’s ambassador in Moscow but never had the opportunity of a meeting with Joseph Stalin. Her successor Sarvepalli Radhakrishan had better luck. He got on famously well with the Soviet leader before going back home to take over as India’s Vice President and subsequently as President.
Pranay Verma, as Indian High Commissioner in Bangladesh, did an admirable job of upholding diplomacy at a time when the Yunus interim regime and its mobs followers went overboard in undermining ties between Dhaka and Delhi. Verma will now head for Brussels. His successor in Dhaka, the reputed political figure and former minister Dinesh Trivedi will now be expected to reconfigure India’s ties with Bangladesh in ways that only politicians can. Political ambassadorial appointees often bring to the job experience and wisdom which career envoys may not always be capable of bringing forth. Think back on John Kenneth Galbraith’s days as US ambassador in India.
Bangladesh has had two brilliant civil servants-cum-scholars serve as envoys abroad. Khan Shamsur Rahman served in Moscow and Delhi, while Syed Najmuddin Hashim was ambassador in Moscow and Yangon. The academic Azizur Rahman Mallick was ambassador in Delhi before being called back home to take over as Tajuddin Ahmad’s successor as Minister for Finance. In 1976, Bangladesh and Pakistan decided to exchange ambassadors. Interestingly, Pakistan’s ambassador to Bangladesh was M. Khurshid, who before the emergence of Bangladesh was president of the Punjab Awami League. His counterpart in Islamabad was Zahiruddin, who had been elected to the Pakistan national assembly at the December 1970 election on an Awami League ticket in East Pakistan.
The recent furore over the appointment of former Labour cabinet minister Peter Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to the United States, resulting from his links with the late Jeffrey Epstein, and his subsequent sacking have been the staple of conversation in London and across the United Kingdom for months. A good number of officials have lost their jobs over the scandal, while Prime Minister Keir Starmer has been under relentless pressure from the Conservative opposition in Parliament. He appears to have survived. 
Overall, the Mandelson affair is an instance of the predicament that diplomats sometimes face as also the embarrassment they cause their governments when their unsavoury past is rolled out in public. Not long ago, Peter Haas, at the time American ambassador in Dhaka, was in the news in Bangladesh for a good many weeks. There were those who were unhappy at the way the American ambassador had been conducting himself in relation to Dhaka’s internal politics. At the same time, there were people, especially in the opposition, who felt enthused by the nature of Haas’ diplomacy in Bangladesh.
But the Haas story is now in the past. Diplomats, especially ambassadors, often walk a tightrope. Sometimes they slip and find their careers hanging in the balance. What happened some years ago around Kim Darroch, the British ambassador to the United States at the time, is a reflection of the difficulties envoys often find themselves in even in the best of times. With an occupant of the White House around at the time (and we speak of Donald Trump), there could hardly be any predicting circumstances that might arise and roil a whole diplomatic scene. Donald Trump was incensed over the leak of certain comments made by Darroch about the ineptitude, as Darroch saw it, of the President. It then became obvious that Darroch’s days in Washington were numbered.
Even without those leaks, we know all too well that ambassadors sent by their governments abroad form their own, distinct opinions about the governments to which they present their credentials. Those opinions are kept sealed in their hearts or in the classified documents of the embassies they administer. It is simply unfortunate that Kim Darroch’s comments were leaked by someone close to him or privy to his reports. The damage was done.
But there are too the times when ambassadors cause damage to themselves and their countries, leaving everyone red in the face. And this they do when they are driven by the zeal to correct what they see as wrongs being perpetrated in their host countries. Think here of diplomatic norms.
Of course there are governments which do wrong to their people by way of a violation of human rights and a lack of democracy. The normal practice for an ambassador, assuming he comes from a country way high up in influence than the nation he is posted in, is to proffer subtle criticism and advice to the host government. Where an ambassador chooses to go public with his sentiments, indeed his criticisms, he undermines himself.
And that is precisely what Craig Murray did when he served as British ambassador to Uzbekistan in the early years of this century. Shocked by the short shrift given to human rights by the entrenched regime of Islam Karimov, Murray went on the warpath, publicly. He was so loud in his condemnation of the regime that he was eventually dismissed by his government. 
It was the end of what ought to have been a brilliant career in the making. There is little question that Murray was moved by the repression into which Uzbekistan had been put by its authoritarian rulers. His problem, though, was his inability to bring diplomacy, despite being a diplomat, into the job of persuading the Uzbek regime to scale back on its harsh rule. 
There are those times of disbelief when ambassadors find themselves in a spot, to a point where their careers are put in jeopardy by circumstances. One will not easily forget April Glaspie, the American ambassador to Iraq at the time of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Shortly before the Iraqi leader sent his troops into Kuwait, Glaspie met him and gave him to understand that any aggressive acts by Baghdad would be a matter of concern for Washington. 
Unfortunately, her detractors back home painted her in dark terms, conveying the impression that her dialogue with Saddam was of a kind which encouraged him into believing that the administration of President George H.W. Bush would look away if he acted against Kuwait. It was not the truth, but for years thereafter Glaspie remained the butt of criticism.
Diplomats are vulnerable at important points in their careers. Glaspie remains a fine though uncomfortable instance of this reality. Archer Blood was not an ambassador but US consul general in East Pakistan in 1971 when the Yahya Khan regime’s military action led to the Bengali guerrilla movement for Bangladesh’s independence. He repeatedly conveyed his concerns over the excesses committed by the Pakistan army to his superiors in the State Department in Washington, but his worries were dismissed out of hand by the Nixon administration. 
Henry Kissinger, then serving as national security advisor and perhaps already planning his clandestine July trip to China by way of Pakistan, was clearly irritated by Blood’s cables. In the end, Blood was unable to rise any higher in his career. Conditions that would lead to his exit from the Foreign Service were created by Kissinger and his cohorts. Blood would never rise to being an ambassador. His career was wrecked by an administration which found the truth unpalatable.
Sujatha Singh, a professionally competent Indian diplomat serving as her country’s foreign secretary when the Modi government assumed office in 2014, surprisingly did not earn the confidence of the new Prime Minister. Modi sought to replace her, and did replace her with S. Jaishankar, India’s ambassador to Washington (and currently India’s external affairs minister). Singh did the honourable thing: she resigned and went into retirement. Her story was a reminder of the way Rajiv Gandhi treated AP Venkateswaran, the foreign secretary in his time as Prime Minister. 
Venkateswaran had let it be known that Gandhi would be visiting the capitals of SAARC nations. Later at a press conference, the Prime Minister stated unambiguously that he had no plans to do so. When a newsman pointed to the discrepancy between his statement and that of the foreign secretary, the Indian Prime Minister stated brusquely, ‘You will be talking to a new foreign secretary soon.’ A man of great dignity, Venkateswaran chose the option of resigning before he could be dismissed or shifted to another position.
There are diplomats who defend their countries in foreign capitals and soon find themselves asked to explain their positions by host governments. Some years ago, concerned at the British government’s stance on the anti-administration protests by young people in Hong Kong, Liu Xiaoming, China’s ambassador in the UK at the time, condemned what he saw as London’s interference in Hong Kong’s internal affairs. 
He was promptly summoned to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in London to explain himself. Summonses served on diplomats by host governments are hardly anything to be cheerful about. And there are the stories of ambassadors earning the displeasure of host governments and so ignored at the time of their departure. Dan Mozena, US ambassador in Bangladesh not many years ago, is a case in point.
There are ambassadors not unwilling to demonstrate their intellectual superiority and hubris abroad. India’s V.K. Krishna Menon irritated the British and annoyed the Americans and even Jawaharlal Nehru to no end. Abrasive as ever, he conducted diplomacy on his own terms. He had few friends.
There have been diplomats who have been emblematic of moral integrity. In 1971, Iqbal Athar, a proper Pakistani diplomat, felt revulsion at the criminality of his country’s soldiers in East Pakistan. He switched allegiance to Bangladesh and despite being a non-Bengali served the new nation creditably as its ambassador abroad. 
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Syed Badrul Ahsan writes on politics, diplomacy and history