`When Carter called, media fed on bloomers'

`When Carter called, media fed on bloomers'
SUNETRA CHOUDHURY

NEW DELHI, MARCH 16: If South Block officials are spending sleepless nights due to the US Presidential visit, they probably have good reason to. Going by past record, it doesn't take much to have things go wrong. According to someone who has had a ringside view of not one but two such visits, faux pas is part of the package.

Jagat S Mehta was involved with both the Eisenhower and the Carter visits in 1959 and 1978, respectively. Of course, his involvement with the latter was greater in his capacity as the Foreign Secretary. His late wife, Rama, was nominated by the then Prime Minister Morarji Desai and Foreign Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee to be the lady-in-waiting to the First Lady Rosalynn Carter.

Now living in Udaipur, Mehta is far away from the buzz of the Clinton trip, but he has vivid memories of the previous such visits.

It appears Eisenhower's unexpected popularity caused a major security scare among the officials. Recounting the scene when a million strong crowd gathered along the Sardar Patel Road and Connaught Circus, Mehta said: ``Had one of those wanting to touch him as he sat next to President Radhakrishnan in an open car carried a hand gun, the President could not have been saved.''

If anybody had any doubts about security never being such a big issue before Clinton, Mehta dispels it instantly. Even the wife of the Foreign Secretary was stopped at Rashtrapati Bhavan where the Carters were staying, despite having proof of identity. Though the First Lady herself called later to apologise, Mehta said: ``During the American Presidential visit, one almost got the feeling that we had lost sovereignty over part of the Rashtrapati Bhavan and whole of the Mughal Gardens!''

He added that it was probably wiser that Clinton was staying at a hotel as the personal safety of such a VIP is ``so treacherous a responsibility that the foreign security agency must be allowed to dictate the requirements''.

For bureaucrats, media have always been a ``menace''. And imagine being caught in a potentially major Indo-US crises right in the very midst of a US President's visit due to a reporter's high-tech microphone.

After the confidential one-to-one conversation between Carter and Morarji Desai on January 2, all the delegates were gathered and a select group of media were ushered for 30 seconds. According to Mehta, the NBC correspondent had a ``long, vulgar looking microphone'' which picked a whisper between Carter and the Secretary of State Cyrus Vance saying that Desai had been rigid on non-proliferation. The mike picked up the part -- ``When we get back, we must write him another letter just very cold and very blunt?'' -- without even the correspondent's knowledge. But as the media had pledged to share all reports, the remark was disseminated to the entire media presence and the news was broken to the delegates at lunch at the American Embassy.

The then PM directed Mehta and Jody Powell, the White House spokesman, to issue a statement which said that India took no offence over the leakage of confidential observation. According to Mehta, the reaction was ``muted'' and did not ``vitiate our relations''.

The media menace prevailed even when the picture of a fly being swatted at the Embassy lunch occupied front page space.

But not all faux pas was courtesy the media. Mehta remembers spending hours preparing the draft speech for the President to be delivered at the welcoming banquet -- the only opportunity to make a policy statement on behalf of India, he says. After being amended by the PM and the Foreign Minister and after approval by the President's office, the final text reached Mehta only an hour before the banquet.

Apparently President Reddy had specified that the speech should not exceed 10 minutes and so it was shortened, to leave only one-third of the original version, recalled Mehta. ``The careful invocation and reference to Mahatma Gandhi was unintentionally censored and the omission became very pointed as Carter had made several references to Gandhi,'' said Mehta.

The Press had a field day with this omission, he recalled, and Charan Singh even alleged deliberate oversight and insensitivity amongst officials of the external affairs.