A leader and a gentleman

Shashi Uban Tripathi

Shashi Uban Tripathi

THE year was 1977. The Janata Party had come to power after the Emergency and Atal Bihari Vajpayee — who would have turned 95 today — was its first Foreign Minister. One of his first trips abroad in that capacity was to Nepal. He wowed the crowds with his mesmerising oratory. Then came the official talks. The Nepalese were lobbying India for separate treaties on trade and transit. India was adamant that one consolidated treaty had served its purpose and there was no need to tamper with the format. We were aware that the Nepalese side would bring up the subject during the official talks between Vajpayee and his Nepalese counterpart. And so they did. In an impassioned tone, the Nepalese Foreign Minister asked, “Mahamahim, aap kyun nahin maante alag alag treaties ke liye (Excellency, why don’t you agree to separate treaties)? Vajpayee shot back in a mock-serious tone, “Shayad hum kaagaz bachana chahte hon (maybe we want to save paper)! In a moment, the tension in the room melted in peals of laughter.

Another incident that comes to mind shows Vajpayee’s complete lack of ego. During the Janata regime, Prime Minister Morarji Desai was invited to pay an official visit to Moscow. Vajpayee accompanied him. He decided that the toast to be given in response to Soviet President Brezhnev’s greeting at the official banquet would be in Hindi to balance the Russian of the hosts. The PM agreed, provided the script was bold Devanagari so it was easy to read. Now a serious problem arose. Those were pre-Hindi typewriter days. The Mission had neither a Hindi typewriter nor a Hindi translator.

When the Ambassador presented the problem to Vajpayee, he remarked, “We have given you three Tripathis. Ask one of them to do it.” The reference was to three diplomats with the surname Tripathi stationed in the Mission. So, the Ambassador called the seniormost Tripathi, who was then the Counsellor, and asked him to translate the toast from English to Hindi. Tripathi begged forgiveness, saying that even though from UP, he had studied in missionary schools and his knowledge of Hindi was not of a translator’s level. The Ambassador then called in the next senior Tripathi, who was the First Secretary. He begged to be excused on the ground that his mother tongue being Oriya, he dared not venture into official Hindi, and that too in an official toast. At that, the Ambassador declared in despair that there was no point in asking the juniormost Tripathi as she was a Punjabi! However, my command of Hindi was pretty good. But by then, Vajpayee announced that he would translate the toast. He asked me to sit across the table and transcribe in bold Devanagari as he dictated. Finally, it was this handwritten toast that was read out by the PM at the banquet.