Power games

An engaging insider account provides valuable insights into the functioning of the PMO & UNSC

- C UDAY BHASKAR

DIPLOMATS GLOBALLY ARE a D special tribe in the larger constituency of civil servants. They represent their respective countries with foreign interlocutors in the continuous power game among nations that is the systole and diastole of international relations. Some among them are chosen to be at the centre of power in their parent state (usually the president or prime minister's office in democracies) and a very small percentage of this select lot get to represent their nation at the very apex of the global power game the United Nations Security Council (UNSC).

Chinmaya R Gharekhan, author of the book under review, is counted among India's most accomplished and low-profile mandarins who served in the office of two prime ministers - Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv Gandhi. He later moved to New York in August 1986 as India's permanent representative (PR) to the UN. During this assignment at the UN, Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, thereby precipitating the first US-led Gulf war in January 1991- an action-packed period that also marked the end of the Cold War. Ambassador Gharekhan witnessed this tectonic geostrategic flux from the vantage point of the deliberations within the UN Security Council when India became a non-permanent member of the UNSC in 1991-92.

Centres of Power is a very interesting two-in-one book, the first part being a lucid account by ambassador Gharekhan of his years in the PMO (prime minister's office) in Delhi; and the second part dwells on the 1991 war for Kuwait and the manner in which Iraq was punished by the USA for its feckless invasion.