The Literary Diplomat
By
Ambica Gulati

Navtej Sarna (IFS Retd)
Navtej Sarna (IFS Retd)
The Career Ladder
While awaiting his civil services result, Sarna was selected for the very exclusive Tata Administrative Service. ‘That, too, was a great service, very difficult to get into. I spent a few months with them in Bombay but when I got the news that I had made it into the foreign service, there was no doubt in my mind about what I wanted to do. So, I said goodbye to the Tatas gently and politely, and came to Delhi in September 1980 to sign up at the Ministry of External Affairs.’
The entire training for the foreign service those days lasted two years, which included a three-month foundation course at the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration in in Dehradun in what is now the state of Uttarakhand, attachments with various institutes across Delhi, a three-month district training and even an attachment with the Indian Army. ‘We were trained at the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, Indian Institute of Mass Communication, School of International Studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. My district training was in Nahan, Himachal Pradesh; then there was an army attachment for a couple of weeks in the Northeast and finally an attachment with a division in the Ministry of External Affairs.’
After this two-year on-the-job training, he was assigned to the mission in Moscow. ‘The first posting depends on the language allotted, which in my case, was Russian. I learned the language and after an exam, I was confirmed in 1983.’
It was his first time in a foreign land, but his congeniality and ability to connect with people were an invaluable asset. ‘I made friends with people in the Bolshoi theatre and would often get tickets for ballet and opera for others in the office as well.’
The social and political milieu was different, but for young Sarna in search of adventure, it was an unexplored mysterious world. It was the era of the Soviet Union and the Cold War. The communist country had different systems in place. Mail came through the diplomatic bag every two weeks. International calls had to be booked and could take hours to materialize; Sarna recalls keeping the big phone by his bedside in case the call came late into the night. ‘It was a year and more of learning a new language, a new culture, and making new friends. I didn’t even get to go to Leningrad (St. Petersburg) ─ couldn’t afford it, but I saved every penny and undertook the long train journey from Moscow to Paris.’
This forty-eight-hour, three-thousand-kilometre journey took him through spectacular landscapes across Russia and Europe. The train went through present-day Belarus, Poland, then East and West Germany, through the Iron Curtain in Berlin. The wheelsets of the train were changed from a Russian broad gauge to European meter track gauge at Brest. The dining car was also dismantled here, which young Sarna was unaware of. ‘My co-passengers, a family, had enough Russian food and they shared that with me. In turn, I shared my lone big bar of Toblerone chocolate.’
The days of divided Germany meant rigorous border checks, much like the movies—blue-eyed macho German guards with sniffer dogs scrutinised passports in the middle of the night. This train was a potential escape route for those fleeing to the West, and the border checks were diligent.
It was an unforgettable holiday. ‘To be young and in Paris, what more could anyone want? I stayed with a friend, walked around the city, explored the monuments, and ate at streetside cafes. I saw several exhibitions and visited museums.’
Much later in his career, he visited Paris many times and finally also St Petersburg as well as Central Asian countries such as Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, which had then been part of the Soviet Republic.
From Moscow, Sarna returned to New Delhi and was assigned to the external publicity division of the Ministry of External Affairs. As the right-hand man of the official spokesperson, his job was to provide all kinds of assistance to the foreign press. Journalists from The New York Times, BBC, and other major global newspapers were always in and out of the ministry. It was a momentous time (1984) that witnessed Operation Blue Star, the assassination of the then prime minister, Indira Gandhi, the massacre of Sikhs in the wake of the assassination, the election of a new prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi and the Bhopal Gas tragedy. All of these events had news value and dealing with the foreign press those days was a very busy job.
In 1985, he was posted to Poland, a large European nation with a complex polity, part of the Warsaw Pact, known as the Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation and Mutual Assistance but with a distinct identity. It was a time of great political churn, just after Martial law that lasted from 1981-3. Sarna spent an eventful four years in Poland during which he saw and reported on considerable political, social, and economic change. That was also the time of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 in Kiev and its impact was felt in Warsaw. ‘We were closer than Moscow and the cloud passed right over Warsaw.’