Ratan Tata's return to active corporate leadership of the conglomerate that goes by his name is a moment of nostalgia for Indian diplomacy: Tata's contribution to changing the contours of India's external affairs at a time when foreign policy - especially economic diplomacy - was at a crossroads is yet to be recorded. Very few people are aware, for instance, that Tata was a midwife of sorts for what is now celebrated alternately in Washington and in New Delhi as the annual "strategic dialogue" between India and the United States of America, the strongest institutional pillar of their bilateral relationship.
Robert Blackwill, the hyperactive US ambassador to India for two years from 2001, told me once that Tata came to his rescue when the envoy was extremely frustrated by an inability to go beyond the straight and narrow concerns of conventional diplomacy in his dealings with New Delhi. Tata along with Henry Kissinger, acting as unofficial patrons, modestly launched a dialogue between India and the US that brought into the process eminent people outside the government: Joseph Samuel Nye, the former Dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, was one such. This dialogue, for which Tata placed at the disposal of Kissinger and others his picturesque setting of Lake Palace Hotel in Udaipur, similarly allowed for continuity in bilateral engagement by retaining the association of Naresh Chandra, who had ended his tenure as ambassador in Washington and was no longer active in the government in any capacity.
When the late K. Subrahmanyam - who coined the memorable phrase "Ayatollahs of non-proliferation on the Potomac" - joined this dialogue, it became possible to informally discuss holy cows such as nuclear and defence cooperation with the Americans. The nuclear deal between India and the US, in fact, has its genesis in this dialogue, which Tata helped facilitate in a big way.
At any rate, it was this exercise that later became a model for the official, expanded, US-India Strategic Dialogue, now rechristened the US-India Strategic and Commercial Dialogue. Unlike in the case of Germany or the United Kingdom, India and the US do not have an eminent persons' dialogue. Therefore, the unofficial strategic dialogue provided a platform that was essential for the the evolution of Indo-US engagement into what it is today.
When Manmohan Singh and George W. Bush created the bilateral forum of chief executives of major companies, both the prime minister and the US president zeroed in on Tata to co-chair the forum. It was for these reasons that S.M. Krishna, who was Manmohan Singh's external affairs minister, decided to grant Tata a diplomatic passport. Tata was then the most peripatetic among the captains of Indian industry.
Krishna, who changed Bangalore's persona and made it into what it is today, has an empathy for businessmen and industrialists unlike many Congress leaders of his generation. A red passport with its ease of passage across countries, the external affairs minister concluded, would help Tata in his travels, a lot of which were then for public causes rather than for promoting his business.
One day on a visit from Washington, when I walked into Krishna's office in New Delhi's South Block, the minister pushed across his table towards me a letter on his official letterhead that was addressed to Tata. Signed by Krishna, it conveyed to Tata the government's decision to grant him a diplomatic passport. Krishna is not excitable by nature, but this was one decision he was genuinely pleased with and did not hesitate to show it. I concurred that it was an appropriate decision: from my point of view as this newspaper's representative in the Western hemisphere and therefore resident in the US it made eminent sense. Tata was still the co-chair of the CEOs Forum.
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, had dramatically changed the ways of admitting visitors to the US. The US customs and border protection service had introduced "Global Entry," a programme to allow expedited clearance for pre-approved, low-risk travellers, but India was still not included in this facility. The rationale for Krishna's decision was based on such circumstances. In the outer chamber of the minister's office, Raghavendra Shastry, who was Krishna's adviser, told me that Tata had agreed to accept the diplomatic passport but he showed me nothing to that effect in writing from Bombay House, the conglomerate's corporate headquarters.
It was only many years later that I learned that Tata had, in fact, turned down Krishna's offer and declined to accept the diplomatic passport, which was his without asking. He continued to travel the world on an ordinary passport like every other Indian citizen when some of his peers would have gone to any length to have a red passport as a status symbol.
During this week, when the landmark Paris agreement on climate change is to take effect with India having agreed to accede to the pact ahead of schedule, Tata's contribution to diplomacy surrounding global warming is another little known aspect of his work for public causes. When he was director general of the Confederation of Indian Industry, Tarun Das once told me that Tata pioneered corporate efforts on environment long before the idea became fashionable. A corporate initiative of a Green Business Centre in Hyderabad was one of Indian industry's earliest initiatives to build "green" buildings and create awareness among businessmen about "green" practices. That was complemented by the creation of an environment management division at the CII.
It was Ratan Tata who financed the creation and operation of this specialized division in its entirety during its first three years. Just as he turned down the diplomatic passport, Tata's only condition for helping the CII's green initiative was that he would do so anonymously, that his name as the initiative's patron should not be revealed. Das further said that Tata was offered the presidentship of CII, but he preferred to advance the organization's work without a formal role and turned down the position of president; according to Das, so did N.R. Narayana Murthy, the co-founder of Infosys.
Perhaps all this would have been mere tattle if it were not in sharp contrast to the behaviour and actions of some of Tata's peers, also captains of industry no less. Indian diplomats often wring their hands in sheer desperation when business leaders demand and insist where they should be seated at state banquets when they follow the prime minister or other dignitaries abroad. For that matter, one industrialist even insisted recently that his travel and that of other businessmen should not be described as "coinciding" with the visit of Narendra Modi to a particular country. The argument was that it was not a "coincidence" that these businessmen were in the same city as the prime minister. They were "accompanying" Modi, he insisted, when that was not really the case.
In the last decade, many American universities privately regretted their India initiatives, which were launched when Kapil Sibal, the human resources development minister in the Congress-led government promised them the moon by way of opening up the domestic education sector to foreign educational institutions. A silver lining in this bleak scenario has been Ratan Tata's $50 million contribution each to the two American universities where he enrolled: Cornell and Harvard. Half of the $50 million given to Cornell will be set apart to provide scholarships for students from India, the other half for an initiative to advance nutrition and agriculture in India.
The gift of $50 million to Harvard Business School from the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust and the Tata Education and Development Trust is the largest from an international donor in the school's 108-year history. Meanwhile, Tata never gave up being a trustee of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington's leading global think-tank even after he handed over the reins of his conglomerate to others, briefly, as it turns out.
