Foreign policy needed to transform to reflect new geopolitical interests as India’s economy opened up in 1991, Union external affairs minister S Jaishankar said at the launch of the fifteenth finance commission chairman Nand Kishore Singh’s book in New Delhi on Wednesday.
“It was a very different world during the years of your travels to South America and Japan [in the 1970s-80s]. Photography became a serious pursuit when he was in Japan, Singh writes. During this time he also played an important role in facilitating Maruti Suzuki’s entry into India. However, Japan left him with an endearing love for its landscapes which he would capture in photographs as he and his wife, Prem Kumari, travelled the length and breadth of the country.
Once the course correction started in 1991-92, and the economic model changed, the political company also underwent a certain change. Between 1981 and 1985, Singh was minister (Economic & Commercial Affairs) at the Indian Embassy, Tokyo.
When I look back at that era, there was a lot of posturing on many big issues; we actually got left out, which is why we also had to make course corrections in foreign policy along with the economic reforms,” Jaishankar said. Groupings like the G77 have been rethought, reinvented and recharged to give rise to present-day concepts like the Global South, while ideas like the Quad would have been “inconceivable” even three decades ago, the Union minister said. Singh, who served in the Rajya Sabha from 2008 to 2014, and joined the Bharatiya Janata Party in 2014, offers some glimpses of his long and storied career as a bureaucrat both in the Centre and in Bihar, which took him across the world, but the new book is about the “pursuits that grew alongside, and somewhat outside, the responsibilities of my official life”. Singh wrote that it was tending to his father’s rose garden that pushed him towards photography, to capture the rose at the exact moment “when form, colour and light came together”.
Besides Jaishankar, former Union minister Karan Singh, special envoy to Indonesian president on international trade Mari Pangestu, chair, board of trustees, Victoria and Albert Museum Baroness Minouche Shafik and India Unbound author Gurcharan Das also participated in a panel discussion on Singh’s new book, Endeavours: An Ensemble of My Life , which details his pursuits and influences, not his career as one of India’s top bureaucrats, nor his perspective of political trends or economic policies (he is an insider in both worlds). The minister was responding to a question by Singh on the difference that groups like the G77 — founded by 77 member nations of the United Nations in 1964 — make in today’s landscapes of international relations, where smaller groups are de rigeur. Singh was under secretary in the ministry of Commerce when he travelled to Lima, Peru, with Lalit Narain Mishra, the then minister of foreign trade, to attend a G77 meeting in 1971.
