Ambling up to him at a gathering in the Capital last night, one quickly sensed that National Security Adviser J.N. Dixit was about to get into a huddle with the High Commissioner of Pakistan, Aziz Ahmad Khan. A little later, after greeting them and leaving the two alone in a corner, I tried to draw Dixit out on the two sensitive negotiations he was engaged in—the normalisation of relations with Pakistan and the resolution of the boundary dispute with China. The quintessential civil servant he was, Dixit would give nothing away. But he was acutely conscious of the historic nature of these two negotiations that fell into his lap from the previous government and their potential to transform India’s geopolitical condition. He was confident that progress could be made on both the fronts, despite the many hurdles that lie ahead. It was the ability to combine India’s grand strategic imperatives and a problem-solving approach at the micro-level that made Dixit part of a rare breed among Indian public servants. When the shocking news of his sudden death arrived this morning, the first to share the grief were the Embassy of China and the High Commission of Pakistan. In Dixit’s untimely death, Beijing and Islamabad will miss a trusted and reliable interlocutor. Dixit’s successors will find it hard to match his skill in handling the two eight-hundred-pound gorillas of India’s national security strategy—China and Pakistan. Equally daunting is the thousand-pound beast that Dixit was trying to tame—the United States. Eleven years ago, when he demitted office as India’s top diplomat, Dixit had laid the foundations for a paradigm shift in India’s foreign policy by insisting on an interest-based approach and shedding empty ideological slogans of the past. Finding Independent India at one of her weakest moments in the early 1990s, Dixit was instrumental in protecting India’s nuclear option and gaining time and space for the weaponisation of India’s nuclear programme. Equally challenging was the task of warding off international pressures on Jammu and Kashmir. Helping him perform these tasks with aplomb was Dixit’s unshakeable faith in India’s unrealised potential. Much like Lord Curzon, the British Viceroy at the turn of the 20th century who defined India’s national interest in expansive terms, Dixit believed in India’s manifest destiny on the world stage. From Dixit, there would be no apologies for India’s inevitable greatness. In choosing a successor for Dixit, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will inevitably look at a pool, small though it is, of distinguished retired civil servants with experience in diplomacy and national security management. Singh needs someone who shares Dixit’s maximalist vision for India and his strategic realism. For another, the new NSA will have to enjoy the total trust of the Prime Minister, who in the modern age is the driver of foreign and national security policies in any nation. Any attempt to undercut this will inevitably lead to sub-optimal outcomes at best and national security disasters at worst. The difficult question before Singh is not who, but how to make the working of the NSA more effective. Dixit, like his predecessor Brajesh Mishra, had to battle the perception that the NSA is a ‘‘fifth wheel’’ in New Delhi’s higher bureaucratic organisation. Singh will also be looking for the ability to smoothen the inevitable contradictions within the Prime Minister’s Office and between the PMO and the different organs of the government, including the Foreign Office, intelligence agencies and the Ministry of Home Affairs. The office of the NSA, new as it is, will have to evolve in India. Singh might have a brief moment to reflect on the experience of the last six months before choosing Dixit’s successor, to manage that evolution with some finesse.
