Fire That Blunderbuss

NOTHING can be more ludicrous than the sight of a head of diplomatic mission demanding a public assurance from the prime minister of his host country that he will not be sent packing home. But this is exactly what Sir David Gore-Booth, British high commissioner to India, has gone and done. As if the fiasco over the Queen's visit here was not enough, Sir David's inexplicable antics on the Palam airport tarmac as Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral returned from the Commonwealth Summit in Edinburgh has sent Indo-British ties for yet another tail-spin.

One can understand the British high commissioner feeling rattled about the series of gaffes that marked the recent passage through India of Queen Elizabeth and her consort Prince Philip. It is only human for Sir David to feel insecure after conducting the biggest diplomatic disaster in the history of royal visits. Indeed, this was just the time for him to keep a low public profile and get down to systematically mend the damage caused to his personal reputation as well as relations between the two countries. Instead, the British high commissioner has mysteriously chosen to brew a fresh controversy. Flying into needless panic over a British Sunday paper report on a move by the government here to ask for his recall, Sir David took the astounding step of accosting Prime Minister Gujral as he alighted from the aircraft on the veracity of the newspaper report. Watched by a baffled Mrs Gujral and a host of cabinet ministers and officials who had come to receive Mr Gujral, the worthy diplomat, throwing aside all niceties of diplomatic protocol, waved a newspaper at the prime minister.

He is fortunate that Mr Gujral is far too mild mannered to have taken offence at this appalling behaviour from a diplomat and merely denied the newspaper report. A more abrasive prime minister, for example Chandra Shekhar, would have delivered a crushing rebuff to the British high commissioner, which would have been richly deserved. To compound his gaffe, after extracting a denial from the prime minister, Sir David is reported to have done a jig on the tarmac and rushed to correspondents present at the airport. He then proceeded to gloat about the categorical assurance he got from Mr Gujral, that there was no truth in the newspaper report.

Unfortunately for the British diplomat, the amazing scenes witnessed on the tarmac gave the Indian media an opportunity to twist the knife in further. The Times of India, for instance, carried a front page photograph of the worried looking high commissioner speaking to the prime minister with a caption, "Are you sending me back?" Clearly, this is not merely a question of an eccentric diplomat humiliating himself in public and, in the process, his country. It has disturbing implications for Indo-British ties which have almost overnight slumped to a new low. Coming as it does on the heels of the furious row between British and Indian officials during the Queen's visit, the traditional friendship between the two countries is all of a sudden being consumed by mutual suspicion and hostility.

The slump in bilateral relations is surprising because over the past decade Britain has perhaps been the best friend of this country in the entire western hemisphere. British leaders, officials and diplomats went out of their way to help India's case on Kashmir when the situation in the troubled border state threatened to go out of control a few years ago. In fact, Britain played a key role in getting the European Union to rebuff Islamabad's efforts to internationalise the Kashmir dispute and decide to adopt a neutral and objective stance.

It is ironic that when Kashmir was on the boil, with daily massacres reported from the state and no sign of a return to democratic rule, British diplomats posted in New Delhi were among the few to acknowledge the difficult situation faced by the government here. On the other hand, now that Kashmir is ruled by an elected government and the militant movement is in disarray, Britain seems to have suddenly discovered that all is not well in the border state. It is also strange that after consistently maintaining for the past many years that the Kashmir dispute was bilateral and could be sorted out by India and Pakistan alone, the British have been suddenly seized with a "historical responsibility" to mediate and resolve the imbroglio.

It is possible that the assumption of power in Britain by the Labour party, which has a sizeable Pakistani constituency, has played a part in this shift of approach to India. But with the next British elections several years away, it is not very likely that the Blair government would place such emphasis on playing up to Pakistani sentiments at the cost of antagonising a traditional friend and major trading partner like India. In any case, it is difficult to believe that a few clusters of Pakistani immigrants in British cities and towns would provoke Labour to ruin a royal visit.

There is far more likelihood that tensions between the two countries have emerged not because of any foreign policy shift but sheer incompetence and sloppy diplomacy by the officials concerned. As the British high commissioner in New Delhi, Sir David cannot but accept a lion's share of the blame for this slump in bilateral ties. And if there were any doubts on this score, his outlandish behaviour at the airport last week has confirmed that the real fault may well lie within the High Commission here. Ironically, Sir David should have had better understanding of Indian sensibilities, considering that his father was posted in New Delhi as British high commissioner three decades ago. Instead, the son appears to have developed an acute hostility to this country, especially its officials and the media. In fact, his predecessor, Sir Nicholas Fenn, managed to conduct his stint in the High Commission with far more elan and was a highly popular diplomat.

The recent wave of adverse publicity in the local press and the war of words between him and officials in the Ministry of External Affairs has made Sir David's position even more untenable. Indeed, even if the Gujral government has not asked for his recall, it may be prudent for the British government to remove him from the scene. After all, if the high commissioner is unable to get along in the country where he is posted, it is high time for him to either go back home or to a country where he feels less insecure.