contrast. There was absolutely no doubt right the way through that Tebbit thought that he had bettered himself by moving on to become a leading politician; Rajiv was not at all sure. Wright (Chair): Very good. Peter, may I ask you to come in, perhaps with a particular emphasis on the two years in which you were in New Delhi after David had left? Not that I want to annoy or contradict him. Goodall: You are free to contradict anything. Peter Fowler: I should say that I have two of my former bosses here, in that Sir Robert was my boss during my time in the Cabinet Office, and David, as you have heard, was High Commissioner while I was Minister and Deputy High Commissioner in New Delhi. Wright (Chair): I think I was also your boss. Fowler: Yes, but you were so senior, sir, you did not come within my ken. I had had a lot of posts before going to New Delhi—I was a Cold War specialist—including Hungary, East Berlin and the Bonn Group, which dealt with inter-German relations with the Germans, the Americans, the French and so on. The end of the Cold War meant that I had to do something else. Fortunately, I had had an early posting to Calcutta, from 1968 to 1971. I left just before—days before—the liberation war started.19 I had, in fact, had meetings, kind of stealthy ones, with the Bangladesh Government in embryo. I would like to echo what has been said about the importance of both empathy for the Indians and also the advantage of previous knowledge. David said he was not sure whether that was a handicap or a help to be a neophyte in India. I certainly found it a great help to have served in Calcutta, partly because not only did I pick up a lot of experience about East India—from Calcutta, we also covered Orissa, Bihar and the north-east states—but also that you met individuals there who, when I came back to New Delhi in 1988, were also around. By then, I had developed something of a passion for India. Although I by no means enjoyed the company of all Indians, I did enjoy and was stimulated by the company of a lot of the people I knew. I would again echo the importance—in New Delhi and the High Commission, as also in the other posts—of one of your chief aims, particularly if you were interested in India, being just to meet an awful lot of Indians and to see as much as you could of India. One was fortunate, of course, in that one had not only diplomatic status and access, but also servants—I also had four children and domestic responsibilities—so you were able to get out in the evenings. Not only did you have servants, but a lot of the people you wanted to meet, whether they were in the law, the press, diplomacy, business or whatever it was, also had servants. Television was not something that at that point you spent much time watching, so everybody used to go out. I would regularly, over five and a half years—I was in New Delhi for an unusually long time, partly because I refused to leave—go to three cocktail parties in the evening in various bits of New Delhi. When I left in 1993 that was breaking down, because New Delhi was getting so big and the traffic was getting worse. I found that if you had a cocktail party somewhere in south Delhi and your next one was in Noida, north of the river, life was getting to an 19
The Indo-Pakistan War of 1971.
18