Some wisdom after retirement Tuesday, 15 November 2016 | Kumar Chellappan -The result of the US presidential election is yet another proof of how ill- informed our veteran bureaucrats (not to mention journalists) are. Most were pitching for Hillary Clinton from the television studios till the outcome was known. Their predictions and observations went haywire.

The US presidential election proved how ill-informed our veteran bureaucrats are. The same holds true about former diplomats in our country who find faults with the Modi Government’s performance The result of the US presidential election is yet another proof of how ill- informed our veteran bureaucrats (not to mention journalists) are. Most were pitching for Hillary Clinton from the television studios till the outcome was known. Their predictions and observations went haywire. One can say the same about the analyses by former diplomats and military officers about the Modi Government’s performance on defence and foreign policy matters. They too seem to be getting it wrong most of the time, but are unwilling to course-correct. Of late, the veterans are firing on all cylinders, finding faults with the foreign policy initiatives being pursued by Prime Minister Narendra Modi since he took over in 2014. This article is not an attempt to justify or support the foreign policy “adventures” of a self-made man, who does not have a Jawaharlal Nehru University or Cambridge University to show to the outside world as his alma mater. The war veterans mentioned above are not retired Army generals or personnel from other branches of the defence forces. The WAR stands for Wisdom After Retirement! Some of the WAR veterans one encounter in newspaper columns these days are MK Narayanan, former National Security Advisor (NSA) and TP Sreenivasan a former diplomat. Mani Shankar Aiyar, another diplomat with Cambridge background, has also been criticising the Government, cursing and taunting the former chai walah for spoiling the country’s reputation abroad. Whether the country had any reputation till 2014, is a topic to be debated and let’s keep it for another occasion. Narayanan always laments over the directionless foreign policies of the Modi Government. He says there is no coherence and balance in the foreign policy of the present Government. Sreenivasan blames the BJP Government for its over-emphasis on terrorism and efforts to isolate Pakistan. Well, let’s take a stock of the contributions by the above mentioned WAR veterans while they were serving the country. Narayanan was an 1995 batch IPS officer who spent most of his career in the Intelligence Bureau (IB). When the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated in 1984, by her own security guards, Narayanan was one of the top honchos of the IB. He was the Director of the IB when Rajiv Gandhi was killed by the Liberation of Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) terrorists in 2001. It was during the tenure of Narayanan as the National Security Advisor of the country when the Mumbai terror attack took place. One has lost count of the number of terrorist attacks which took place in India while he was the NSA. Isn’t it in an open secret that former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh kicked Narayanan upstairs as the Governor of Bengal following his all-round failure as the NSA? These incidents strengthen the impression that Narayanan was a total failure both in intelligence gathering as well as the man in charge of the national security arrangement of the country. Any IPS, IAS or IFS officer, who knows which side of the bread is buttered, is capable of rising in the ranks and getting a cosy post-retirement post. We have had titans like Lakshmi Kant Jha, VP Menon, BN Mullick as our top administrators and super cops in the past. The likes of Narayanan survive because they know the right persons at the right place for the advancement of their career, not that of the nation’s interests. At the age of 82, Narayanan is specialising in finding faults with the present dispensation. An account by him about the failures committed by him during his active years would help the young IPS officers not to repeat the same mistakes! What was the contribution of the likes of Sreenivasan, Aiyar, or Bhadrakumar or for that matter, hundreds of diplomats like them in solving the Kashmir imbroglio? If they are good in finding faults with the foreign policy of Modi, what were these WAR veterans doing when they were enjoying the office of power? According to Narayanan, who pens articles regularly in a Communist Party of India (Marxist)-sponsored daily published from Chennai, there is only one person who could solve India’s problems! It is Narayanan himself... An intelligence professional who could not save his own sambandhi from the evil designs of the latter’s son-in-law. That’s Narayanan. If we take a global list of brilliant diplomats, security experts and bureaucrats, I am sure we will never see at least one of the above mentioned veterans even in the first 10,000 names, they are trusted minions of a sick lady presiding over the destruction of a redundant organisation. Interestingly, Shashi Tharoor, the Congress Member of Parliament, was heard blaming the people of the US for electing Trump as the US President. Pot calling the kettle black