When Khrushchev came calling
How a diplomat showcased India’s spectacular diversity during a superpower leader’s rst o cial visit
Decades ago, at the Centre for West Asian Studies in Jawaharlal Nehru University, it was a well-established practice to invite serving and retired diplomats to speak to students and researchers. The writer rst met the diplomats he writes about in his new book, Nehru’s First Recruits, at the JNU seminars. One of the “rst recruits” was Mirza Rashid Ali Baig who had to plan New Delhi’s welcome to visiting Soviet dignitaries Premier Bulganin and General Secretary Khrushchev in 1955. An edited excerpt:
1955 was the year of Indian diplomacy; it’s when New Delhi emerged as one of the most-visited capitals of the postcolonial world. This was also the year of a turnaround in India-Soviet relations. In June that year, Prime Minister Nehru had visited the Soviet Union for the rst time. He had allowed the
Soviet Union to open a diplomatic mission in Delhi years ago, but bilateral relations between the two were far from what it could have been because of Joseph Stalin’s sceptical attitude towards India.
That year, General
Secretary Khrushchev, successor to Stalin, was to visit India along with Premier Bulganin. The Soviets had given a grand welcome to Nehru, and the understanding was that the Indian welcome would have to match that of Moscow.
Difficult task
This was a dicult task. India had been hosting big foreign visitors since at least the Asian Relations Conference of 1947, but the visit by Soviet leadership was another matter. Nehru was the rst major non-communist leader to visit Moscow and his successful tour proved that Winston Churchill was wrong in saying that the Soviet Union was behind an ‘iron curtain’. The visit of the Soviet leadership to India was therefore going to be a momentous occasion.
The protocol division of the Ministry of External Aairs drew up plans for welcoming ocial guests. But the division needed to be revitalised to welcome leaders from a superpower. The task of drawing up the hosting plans thus fell on the second head of the protocol division — Mirza Rashid Ali Baig. The challenge before Baig was of a dierent order. The scale of the welcome often indicated the importance of the visit, and the leader of the Soviet bloc could not just be welcomed through ocial ceremonies — that would be insucient. The entire capital of India had to be worked up to a festive spirit to make the eort worthwhile. M.R.A. Baig began planning the visit that would begin a festival.
Tribal and classical show
A major challenge before the Indian hosts was the fact that Indians did not have a unitary culture to showcase. Soviets paid a great deal of emphasis on cultural shows for foreign delegates, and the Indians felt it was necessary to showcase something spectacular to impress the Soviet guests. The problem was, however, that India did not have one form of art, as every part of the country had something unique to oer. The responsibility of planning for the cultural show thus fell on Baig’s wife, Tara.
She chose a spacious part of the Rashtrapati Bhavan, which was not hitherto used, and a large stage was erected for the performance. Earthen lamps were lit, and two performances depicted the dance forms of tribal India and classical Indian dance forms. The performance took place in the backdrop of thousands of diyas, and the atmosphere turned ecstatic as Mrinalini Sarabhai took the stage.
India was a newly independent country, and public enthusiasm was high because of the popularity of the Soviet Union; hundreds of thousands of people lined the roads across the city — from the airport in Palam to the central part of the city in Connaught Circus. People sat on the roads as they waited for the Soviet leaders and threw owers on the way. This was the rst visit to a non-Soviet Asian country by the Soviet leaders, and it was spectacular.
Support on Kashmir
It was during this time that the Protocol Division and the PWD came up with the idea of oral designs to welcome the guests. Among the many ideas was one to create the ags of the guest country with owers. Gigantic oral ags of India and the USSR were placed on prime roundabouts in the Lutyen’s zone of New Delhi so that the motorcade carrying Khrushchev and Bulganin could see them. The high point of the visit was the public welcome, which was led by PM Nehru at the Ramlila Maidan, the meeting point of Old and New Delhi.
Most importantly, during his stay in India, Khrushchev spent two days in Kashmir, where he declared that Jammu and Kashmir belonged to India. The Kashmir dispute had caused a great deal of embarrassment for India since the beginning, and the support from Khrushchev came at a crucial moment for the Nehru government. If the purpose behind the spectacular hospitality was to impress the Soviet guests and get them to sway to the Indian tune, then Baig had succeeded in achieving his goal.