Menon

Washington, July 17: Foreign secretary Shiv Shankar Menon is ploughing a lonely furrow on his crucial journey to Vienna.

He appears to be getting more help from the Americans than from his own ministry in the historic efforts to change India’s equation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

It is the stuff of Ripley’s “Believe it or Not” that for many, many vital months now, the ministry of external affairs has not had a joint secretary for its disarmament and international security affairs (DISA) division.

It is the joint secretary for DISA division who should have been the fulcrum of India’s efforts to co-ordinate, analyse and interpret New Delhi’s liaison with Vienna for the benefit of a political leadership that has little idea of the intricacies and ways of international organisations and for the government’s public relations outlets to mobilise a full-scale media effort to shore up its position on the nuclear deal.

South Block has two joint secretaries dealing with UN, who constitute the next level of support in the government’s efforts to make the best of its dealings in Vienna and other multilateral locations like Geneva which are tangentially involved in the efforts to end India’s nuclear isolation.

But the joint secretary dealing with political work involving the UN has been in perpetual motion for the last two years or more. He was first posted to Dubai as consul general and the posting was cancelled as he was preparing to leave. Then he was told that he would go to another city and for the last several months he has been preparing to move to Houston as consul general.

The other joint secretary in charge of UN-related economic and social work was posted to New York several months ago, a posting that is in limbo, naturally unsettling his work.

Their boss, an additional secretary for international organisations, busied himself with an issue of total irrelevance — the moribund Indo-German-Japanese-Brazilian effort to get a permanent seat on the UN Security Council — and travelled to New York during the crucial week when India approached the IAEA with the safeguards agreement and reaped the adverse fallout from that badly executed effort.

The foreign secretary is so short of support from subordinates with enough talent or experience on matters relating to disarmament within South Block that he had to import a former aide to the Prime Minister, D.B. Venkatesh Varma, from Geneva to finalise the safeguards agreement.

In marked contrast, the Americans have marshalled their resources in key locations from the moment India took the much anticipated step of going to the IAEA.

Indian diplomats in Vienna do not take any calls from the media and they have not issued any statements on India’s recent dealings with the IAEA -- on strict instructions from New Delhi, they confess in private.

Contrary to this bunker mentality at India’s permanent mission to UN organisations in Vienna, the US permanent representative to the IAEA, Gregory Schulte, issued a meaningful statement as soon as the nuclear watchdog announced that it had been approached by New Delhi to act on the safeguards agreement.

The website of the US mission to the IAEA has a comprehensive section on the Indo-US nuclear deal, including the IAEA’s position on the deal and relevant web links.

It is a comprehensive guide to journalists and non-governmental organisations in Vienna who want to work on India’s safeguards agreement with the IAEA.

It is a joke among the large international media in Vienna that not only does India’s counterpart website in Vienna not have even a line on the nuclear deal, its last announcement about any significant Indian meeting in Vienna is about an event hosted by the previous ambassador, Sheel Kant Sharma, in July 2007 for Indian expatriates.

Yesterday, US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice directed the number three official in the state department to go to Vienna to be available to Menon there for consultations if necessary.

William Burns, under-secretary of state for political affairs — who recently replaced Nicholas Burns — will “have some consultations at the IAEA related to the nuclear deal” on the same day Menon is briefing 54 countries in Vienna, US state department spokesperson Sean McCormack said.