He had ceased to communicate about a year ago. By which I mean, he had stopped replying to mails and messages. This was uncharacteristic of PS Raghavan.
Ambassador PS Raghavan, Indian Foreign Service, 1979, as he was properly described in formal parlance, had been a friend since the summer of 1992 — London being the place where we first met. I had just shown up at India House to set up its Nehru Centre in the High Commission’s stately office-cum-residential building on South Audley Street. High commissioner LM Singhvi welcomed me with a warm embrace in his sumptuous room — which had a gleaming floor of polished wood on which one could slip, literally and metaphorically. No sooner was I seated in a green leather-bound chair facing him, he picked up his phone and asked the person he had called to join us. In a couple of minutes, a young officer stepped in, smiling with cautious amiability, and shook my hands with a warmth that said more than welcome. “Raghavan will introduce you to our colleagues and the Commission’s working life,” Singhvi said. Raghavan did much more.
As we stepped out of Singhvi’s office and into the entrails of that handsome old building, Raghavan switched to speaking in Tamil, the language we shared in our genes — while English was the language we had, with most urban Indians, adopted for all practical purposes. I noticed that Raghavan spoke his Tamil with perfect ease and a certain style in which humour and sarcasm were as integral as tamarind is in rasam.
It transpired that Raghavan and Talmiz Ahmad, another colleague in India House, and their families were neighbours in the South Audley Street building that I and my wife were moving into. Raghavan and his wife Barbara, an amazing daughter of Poland who was now indistinguishable from India (specifically from Tamil Nadu), hosted us that evening to a homely dinner and a conversation that covered the gamut of the High Commission’s work, its weaknesses and its challenges.
In the course of this chat, both he and I quietly noted, I think, that we were becoming friends for life — a realisation that was to be borne out over the next four decades. I also realised that, in my newly-acquired friend and host, I was encountering an Indian diplomat of the most cerebral kind. One who would have made an academic of the highest order had the Indian Foreign Service not enlisted his fine-honed mind. He and I had studied in the same college in Delhi — St Stephen’s — though a decade apart, with his subject being Physics of which I knew less than zero (mathematically impossible, he would have corrected me) and mine being English Literature, on which his grip was stronger than mine. This became another instant fastener in the bond.
{{/usCountry}}In the course of this chat, both he and I quietly noted, I think, that we were becoming friends for life — a realisation that was to be borne out over the next four decades. I also realised that, in my newly-acquired friend and host, I was encountering an Indian diplomat of the most cerebral kind. One who would have made an academic of the highest order had the Indian Foreign Service not enlisted his fine-honed mind. He and I had studied in the same college in Delhi — St Stephen’s — though a decade apart, with his subject being Physics of which I knew less than zero (mathematically impossible, he would have corrected me) and mine being English Literature, on which his grip was stronger than mine. This became another instant fastener in the bond.
{{/usCountry}}And so when earlier this year, Raghavan went silent, I worried: Had I offended him by some contretemps of mine? No, that could not be so. I had, I was sure, given Raghavan no cause to clam up. This made me worry even more. Have I written something in my columns or said something to someone that has so jarred on his sense of values? That in extremis possibility, too, I ruled out as the likely cause. Raghavan had maturity enough to live with disagreements with his elegant head of more-salt-than-pepper hair untousled and his altogether enigmatic smile unerased.
When the number of unreplied communications crossed the two-digit measure, I decided to ask mutual friends, one of whom gathered that Raghavan was indeed unwell, very unwell. I stopped looking for more news until the news found me, the news of his death. I find myself putting these words down in self-pity over having lost a friend who had been a colleague and an adviser beyond the ordinary. When after four years in my London post, I was appointed to India’s High Commission in Pretoria, my luck found Talmiz Ahmad there, my inestimable support as deputy high commissioner — to be succeeded by none other than Raghavan himself. No high commissioner could have been luckier than I, in these two friends being my immediate colleagues.
In November of 1997, when President K R Narayanan rang to ask me to join his staff as secretary, I was torn. I had just done a little over one year in South Africa, coming to know President Nelson Mandela and his great team of ministers as intimately as protocol may permit and diplomacy considered appropriate. “Sir,” Raghavan said to me when I told him of President Narayanan’s call and my hesitation, “there can be no higher honour for an Indian official than working for the President of India… This mission in South Africa, especially at this time, when Mandela is at its helm, is special. But, please join duty in Rashtrapati Bhavan without the slightest doubt as to its importance.”
Raghavan was himself to move to a major Lutyensian elevation in New Delhi — in Prime Minister (PM) Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s office, to work in the intensest cerebral partnership with the peerless principal secretary to the PM and India’s first national security adviser, Brajesh Mishra. Raghavan’s hand was unmistakable in the terse announcement made on January 4, 2003. Pivoted on India’s nuclear policy on building and maintaining a credible minimum deterrent, it contained the concomitant decision that India will use nuclear weapons in retaliation against a nuclear attack on Indian territory or on Indian forces anywhere. This also meant India will not use its nuclear weapons before or ahead of another.
I was to benefit greatly from the columns he wrote on international relations and security concerns, not the least on the Russia-Ukraine conflict where he did not exonerate Moscow’s belligerent action but showed the provocations offered by Nato as a major spoiler of the peace. As a former ambassador to Russia, he knew what he was writing about.
Nuance, subtle differentiation, the adjudication of the competing claims of importance, urgency and immediacy were Raghavan’s forte. He was no olive leaf-bearing dove, but no taloned hawk either. His DNA harboured no prejudices, his mind bore no legacies of spite.
In times when technology and strategy are giving a new and sharp dentition to conflict, and surprise, invisibility and instancy of damage have become the new and hideous threats to world peace, India’s diplomatic and strategic sinews needed Raghavan’s brains and his balance more than ever. That, alas, is not to be.
Gopalkrishna Gandhi is a student of modern Indian history and the author of The Undying Light: A Personal History of Independent India. The views expressed are personal