Presidential visits abroad are usually remembered by journalists for the vignettes they offer. One of the most memorable anecdotes to emerge from a state visit by any Indian head of state was during Zail Singh’s travel to Tokyo. Between the time the Giani took off from New Delhi and landed in Tokyo, Indira Gandhi had decided that she would dismiss an irksome state government in the Northeast and got her rubber-stamp cabinet to approve the imposition of president’s rule in that state.

The prime minister’s office wanted the president’s approval for imposing Article 356 of the Constitution on the hapless state that had incurred the imperious prime minister’s ire. The then Indian ambassador in Tokyo promptly entrusted the delicate job to his deputy chief of mission, who took the papers to the Giani. But the officer of the Indian foreign service who was entrusted with the job was not prepared for what awaited him. The president’s secretary did not even let the deputy chief of mission into the president’s presence. Instead, the secretary took the papers from the IFS officer and told him to send a message back to New Delhi that the president had approved the proclamation of Central rule.

When the IFS officer, naturally, hesitated, he got a brush off from the president’s secretary. The IFS officer consulted his ambassador, who reminded him that the younger diplomat had probably been away from India far too long and had forgotten how things were on Raisina Hill those days. And sure enough Zail Singh carried out Indira Gandhi’s wish as his secretary had predicted.

Three days into Pratibha Patil’s maiden trip abroad, it would appear that there is less ceremony or ostentation to her three-nation Latin American tour and much more substance than several presidential visits abroad that this columnist can recall.

If this trend is sustained during the remainder of her ongoing journey, it will be primarily because she is visiting Brazil, Mexico and Chile at a time when India — as well as the countries she is visiting -— are repositioning themselves on the global stage. Two of the three countries Patil is visiting — Brazil and Mexico — have been acknowledged by several members of the Group of Eight industrialized states as potential candidates for membership of the world’s club of rich nations. Both Brazil and Mexico — along with India — are already in the so-called outreach five (O-5) and participate as guests at G-8 summits.

A striking undercurrent during Patil’s meetings in Latin America is the growing confidence shared by her own country, Brazil and Mexico that in the foreseeable future, they will collectively have as much power as Italy, Canada, France or some other G-8 members in shaping the course of world affairs. It is a confidence which Chile, as one of Latin America’s most dynamic economies, shares as well, even though it is not yet a part of the O-5.

This is by no means the fantasy of an Indian journalist who obviously is proud that his country and other similarly placed nations are marching forward on the global stage. Two years ago, it was Goldman Sachs, a pillar of the Western capitalist system — not an Indian or Brazilian — who coined the term ‘BRIC’ (for Brazil, Russia, India, and China) to predict that this group of countries constitute candidates for the largest economies in the world by 2050.

Given the economic alliances, albeit nascent, that India has entered into in the new millennium, it is possible that the coming years will see India, Brazil, Russia, China, Mexico and South Africa come together in influencing international affairs in a way they have never done before. For this reason, the president will take in South Africa, although briefly, on her way back home from Latin America. Roberto Jaguaribe Gomes de Mattos is one of Brazil’s veteran diplomats. His designation in Portuguese lends itself to a variety of translations, ranging from under-secretary general for political affairs of the Brazilian ministry of external relations to vice-minister for foreign affairs.

Jaguaribe told a group of Indian correspondents, including this columnist, at a meeting in Brasilia some time ago what could be the best rationale for Patil’s visit at this time. “It is important that we multiply our own exchanges and visits. Because we use the North’s lenses to understand each other, we have ended up incorporating their distorted view” of the world. Jaguaribe said that if Indians and Brazilians kept meeting at every level, “we might still have a distorted view but at least these will be our own distortions”.

It is a line of thought that Brazil’s highly respected president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, agrees with. When the external affairs minister, Pranab Mukherjee, was in Brazil in February, preparatory to Patil’s visit, President Lula personally suggested to Mukherjee that he should advise the president to meet the leading business organization in Sao Paulo during her visit to the city. She did just that on Monday.

Patil’s trip to Latin America is part of a concerted effort by the government to correct some long-standing deficits in Indian foreign policy. It comes close on the heels of an India-Africa summit in New Delhi to correct what some sections of the foreign-policy establishment see as another geographical deficit in India’s external affairs in recent years.

Prime minister Manmohan Singh, as a veteran of the South-South dialogue, has been very keen to promote India’s relations not only with Latin America and Africa, but also with countries like Saudi Arabia. He is known to be disenchanted that his efforts in this direction have met with inadequate support from the establishment and a virtual blackout by a media obsessed with India’s relations with Pakistan and the United States of America. Hopefully, a combination of new factors will moderate this obsession with Pakistan and the US, and convince doubting Thomases that Latin America is, indeed, important.

The rising price of food globally, which raises the spectre of mass hunger in India for the first time since the Green Revolution, makes Brazil relevant for India’s food security. Although Brazil has 22 per cent of the world’s arable land, only 5.7 per cent of that land has been utilized. An agreement to be signed during Patil’s visit to expand bilateral agricultural cooperation assumes importance in that context. There is enough in Patil’s Latin American agenda to make the Left parties happy. Among the decisions that put Prakash Karat’s back up over India-US relations was George W. Bush’s initiative to get the navies of India, Japan, Australia and the US to work together on providing relief in 2005 after a tsunami the previous December. The Left parties believe that the initiative had implications that went beyond mere humanitarian relief.

The same exercise is to be undertaken now with Brazil’s Left-leaning President Lula, thanks to an agreement on civil defence and humanitarian assistance to be signed during Patil’s stay in Brasilia. Perhaps Singh will use this argument to gain some more space in dealing with the Americans, especially with the chief of the naval staff, Admiral Sureesh Mehta, due to be in Washington in about a fortnight. That apart, the civil defence agreement will realize, for the first time, much that has been going on, mostly under wraps, between India and Brazil in strategic cooperation between two large countries in two distant continents half way across the globe.