Ground Realities
Being in love, being married, and being in diplomacy
LOVE makes the world go round. Let there be no mistake about that. And if you were to go back to good old Shakespeare, you are quite likely to hear him state the obvious: "Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind; and therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind."
It is a most natural thing, this feeling of love men and women perennially have for one another; and it encompasses nearly every region of life and experience. Had it not been the case, there would not be that wonderful song in the 1980s, "Even the President has passion." In America, where people keep falling in and out of love, John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton in our times have demonstrated with force what passion is all about.
So there is that elemental quality about love, like the elemental nature of the universe we inhabit. There is then little surprise that even diplomats can, indeed will, fall in love. If there are diplomats, in the service of the Bangladesh government or any other government, who happen to be drawn to the charms or intellect of individuals of nationalities not their own, indeed fall in love with them, that is perfectly natural.
You cannot tell the heart not to resonate with another. You ought not to begrudge an individual's becoming willing captive to this soothing malady we call love. If it is a foreigner you get captivated by and wish to marry him or her, by all means go ahead. And live happily ever after. May the gods smile on you!
And so there we have an agreement. So far so good. But what does come to us now in the form of a question is the strange alacrity with which the Bangladesh government, a caretaker one in case you tend to forget, has recently opted to permit our citizens to go forth into marriage with foreigners. Narrow that down to something specific; and what you now have is a government position, which tells you that people in the service of the republic can henceforth engage in matrimonial exercises with people who are not citizens of Bangladesh. That has surely made a number of individuals, especially in the Foreign Office, happy beyond measure.
Of course, there are the grumblers too, those who will point out to you that the measure of lifting the ban on marriage with foreigners was designed to uphold the interests of an individual or two. Maybe they are right. But the bigger point here is: if today our diplomats can go for marriage with foreigners, what do we do about some of their predecessors who in earlier times fell in love with individuals from other nations but then found their path to ultimate bliss blocked by an embargo on marriage with them?
In the late 1970s, as this scribe understands on extremely reliable authority, a brilliant, rising officer in the Bangladesh foreign service then posted in Beijing sought government permission to marry a foreign woman. A sympathetic foreign secretary then sought to have the president accede to the request. The president was properly firm. The diplomat, said he, could not have his marriage his own way.
But if he persisted in his goal of marrying that woman, he would have to quit the foreign service. The brilliant, rising officer quit the foreign service. We are not quite aware of what happened to him or to his life afterwards. But we do realise that his departure was a setback for a service that was already beginning to develop cracks through a gradual influx of mediocrity in its ranks.
A retired diplomat-cum-freedom fighter informed yours truly the other day that when he and his team, a batch of fresh young recruits to the Pakistan foreign service in the mid 1960s, were granted an audience with S.M. Yusuf, Pakistan's foreign secretary at the time, they were served a terse message. And it was? Simply this, that if anyone in the diplomatic service violated government regulations by tying himself up in matrimony with a foreigner, he would have to resign. If he did not, he would be given the sack.
In more recent times, there have been quite a bit of legal complications with a Bengali non-diplomat packed off to a diplomatic job in Europe because a foreign woman has been his wife for years now. The new rules waiving the ban on marriage with foreigners will surely have come as cheering news to him.
Now, of course this idea of diplomats not being in a position to marry people beyond their own nationalities may sound like a redundant one. There are the deeply serious, perhaps even sinister implications behind the existence of such a law, which is that because a diplomat or for that matter any other person marries a foreigner, his or her loyalty to the state becomes suspect. That is not necessarily so, for romance is fundamentally a self-contained affair and does not go beyond its parameters.
In a way, therefore, some among you could suggest that the removal of the old rules pertaining to marriage with foreigners brings us level with the rest of the world. After all, there are American, British, German, French and other diplomats all happy being spouses of people not hailing from their own societies. It, therefore, makes little difference if our diplomats too can look beyond their political frontiers in their search for men or women they can spend their lives with.
Having said all that, though, there remains for us the question of why the old rules on Bengalis marrying foreigners were turned on their heads and replaced so swiftly with new ones. All sorts of rumours and speculations have been aired in the media of late, to which the Foreign Office has paid scant attention. That is not good enough. With our diplomacy being in the state it is, what with the inaudible way in which many of our diplomats have made their presence known on the world stage, it becomes important to deal with areas that truly and really matter.
Over the years (and this we have said earlier), an increasingly high number of Bengali diplomats have, even as they have occupied senior positions at our missions abroad, kept themselves busy trying to obtain residency permits or green cards abroad. Perhaps it is time for the Foreign Office to come clean with a list of diplomats who, on superannuation, chose not to come back home but settled comfortably in their adopted countries. And it becomes important because it has a bearing on the attitude of these diplomats toward the country they were supposed to represent.
If the entire goal of a diplomat in his serving years remains either a search for a home abroad or for a higher, better job with an international organisation, there arise all those uncomfortable questions about his or her comprehension of national service.
There is then the matter of the quality of the diplomats we send abroad. When you train a young diplomat in the Japanese language and then send him off to the embassy in Paris, you quite undermine the nation's diplomacy. When you keep good officers grounded or send them off to outposts where their talent remains under-utilised, you do the nation grave disservice.
When you have diplomats of high intellectual calibre deprived of the chance of heading missions at significant capitals of the world, when politically influenced or administratively contrived postings become the rule rather than the exception, you cannot expect excellence to define the structure of your nation's diplomacy.
Let our diplomats go forth into the sunlight and let them marry whom they will. But, with apologies to Mr. Eliot, in diplomacy there are more things than happy marriages or the rules governing matrimony.
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