Chapter 139: Persia

South Block

28 August 1950

"Iran?" Patel said.

He sat in the high-backed chair with a spoonful of ghee on a saucer beside him, which he regarded with an air of grim respect. A fortnight earlier, the physician had permitted it on Sundays. It was Monday, and Patel had taken it anyway.

"Iran," Ram said. "A land frontier, since Kalat acceded. Baluchistan runs to the border, and Quetta is in our hands. A pipeline from Khuzestan to Karachi crosses more than a thousand miles of desert, but it does so without crossing anyone else’s country, except Iran’s own. We have a stake in the AIOC, and a seat at the table. I want to go and look."

"You want to go to a country in the middle of a political crisis."

"I want to go to a country where the largest oil company in the world is burning four hundred million cubic feet of gas a day, and where I own twenty per cent of a firm that owns twenty per cent of that company. I am not going as an enemy. I am going as a customer, and a significant shareholder."

"And the war?"

"Cariappa is holding the line. The refugee roads are doing their work. Mullick says Pakistan cannot last past the year. If they go to the Council in the next fortnight, Menon will fly to New York, and Setalvad’s brief goes with him. I would like to be home in a week." Ram looked at the old man. "Vallabhbhai, you are the Deputy Prime Minister. Will you act for me while I am away?"

Patel was silent for a moment. He looked at the saucer. He picked up the spoon, held it, and put it down.

"I acted for you in April when you went to London."

"You did."

"It was a month. I coughed blood into a handkerchief for half of it."

"You have gotten better since then. Should I leave Nehru-ji as the acting PM?"

"No." Patel’s mouth moved. "I disliked it very much. It is a great deal more tiring to hold a country than to push one. But I will do it. Take Jawaharlal with you."

"Shroff-ji, K.P.S. Menon for the Foreign Office, Shaktidas, and now Nehru-ji. Krishna Menon stays in Delhi with the Security Council papers."

"A wise arrangement. Jawaharlal should see the Persians. He has a way with such people." Patel took up the spoon and ate the ghee, slowly, with great relish. "I will say one thing, Ram. Be careful of the English."

"I am always careful of the English."

"You are careful of what they say. Be careful of what they do not say." He waved the spoon. "Go. And bring me a tin of Persian dates. I am told they are very good for the blood."

Tehran

3 September 1950

The Avro York came in over the Elburz in the early afternoon, with the snow-line white on the peaks and the city spread below in a brown haze. Ram sat by the window with his case on his knees. Nehru sat opposite, with a thin book of Persian poetry he had been reading since Karachi. Shroff dozed with his spectacles on his forehead. K.P.S. Menon, a tall, patient, grey-haired diplomat, was drilling Shaktidas on the names of ministers in the Persian Government.

"Razmara is Prime Minister," Menon said. "A general, appointed in June. He wants the Supplemental Agreement with the British through the Majlis, and he cannot get it. The Majlis is divided, the street is angry, and a man named Mossadegh is the centre of the opposition. He is sixty-eight, a lawyer, educated in Paris and Neuchatel. He is a deputy, not a minister. He holds no office. But when he speaks in the Majlis, the building shakes."

"And the Shah?"

"Twenty-nine. Unmarried since the divorce from the Egyptian princess. He has an able, restless mind and a poor grasp of his own position. He fears the Communists, the Majlis, the British, the Americans, and, I think, his own army, in about that order."

"A well-balanced list," Ram murmured.

They landed at Mehrabad at three. The tarmac was baked flat and white, and a strip of red carpet had been laid from the foot of the stairs to a low pavilion. A guard of honour in pale blue uniforms stood stiffly in the glare. The Persian Government had sent the Foreign Minister, a cabinet delegation, and a small crowd of Iranian officials in dark European suits and black lambskin hats, among them, at the back, a tall, spare elderly man in a long Persian coat who stood perfectly still and did not look at the cameras.

"Dr. Pour-e Davoud," Menon said in Ram’s ear. "The scholar of the Avesta. The Foreign Ministry asked for him specially."

The Foreign Minister, Abbas Gholi Golshayan, a plump, smiling man with excellent English, welcomed them in the name of His Imperial Majesty and conducted Ram along the carpet. A band played something that Ram took to be the Persian anthem, and a girl in a white dress presented Nehru with a bouquet of roses.

The motorcade drove through avenues lined with plane trees. Children waved small green, white and red flags. An old man at a corner shouted something, and the crowd around him laughed. Menon, listening, said, "They are shouting ’Welcome, Hindustan.’ And that you are the man who took Karachi from the English."

"I took nothing from the English," Ram said.

"They think you did. It will help us."

The banquet that night was in the Golestan Palace, in a mirrored hall that blazed with a thousand candles. Long tables stood under a ceiling of cut glass. The Shah received them at the door, a slender, dark-haired young man in a gold-braided uniform, with an air of wary courtesy. He shook hands in the Western manner and conducted Ram to a seat at his right. Nehru was on his left. Behind them stood a row of servants in red.

"Prime Minister," the Shah said, in good English. "Your Government has done more in three years than most do in thirty. We follow your progress with admiration. We also follow it, if I may say so, with some anxiety."

"Anxiety, Your Majesty?"

"A great power is arising on our eastern frontier. It has taken Baluchistan. It has put a government in Kalat that never existed before. Our own province of Baluchistan lies just beyond that line, and its tribes have cousins in yours."

"Your Majesty has put his finger on a real matter," Ram said, without hurry. "I shall be frank, as I am told Persians prefer. The Baluch of Kalat and Makran have joined the Republic by their own choice. India has no designs upon Iranian Baluchistan. I will undertake in writing to oppose any movement among our Baluch for a union across the border. The frontier you inherited is the frontier we recognise. I would like it secured and patrolled by both our governments, and I would like Iran to have the advantage of Indian engineers for the roads."

"A written undertaking."

"Whatever form your lawyers prefer."

The Shah considered him. His restless eyes went down the long table, to the ministers, the generals, a row of mullahs in dark robes, and back. "I will think about it," he said. "I will tell you honestly, Prime Minister, that I had been advised by some to look to Rawalpindi."

"To Pakistan?"

"A Muslim state. A neighbour. My advisers thought we should be friends."

"Your Majesty may still be friends with Rawalpindi," Ram said gently. "I will not take it amiss. But I should point out that Karachi is in our hands, and Rawalpindi is holding on by the thread of its pride. A government that cannot feed its people will not be an ally for long."

The Shah laughed. It was the first genuine laughter Ram had heard from him. "You are very direct."

"It saves a great deal of time."

When the toasts came, Ram rose. He had refused a written speech. He stood at the long table, a plain, dark figure among the uniforms, and spoke quietly in English, and Dr. Pour-e Davoud, who had been seated near the middle, translated in a low voice for the Persians nearest him.

"Your Majesty. Excellencies. I come from a country whose first books were written in a language close to the one in which your ancestors first prayed. Four thousand years ago, a people who called themselves Aryans lived on the grasslands north of the Hindu Kush. Some went south, into the Indus valley, and composed the Rigveda. Others went west and south, onto the plateau where we are sitting tonight, and composed the Avesta. In my country the god of the covenant is Mitra. In yours, Mithra. In mine, the sacred drink is soma. In yours, haoma. In mine, the ancient priest is the atharvan. In yours, the athravan. We have been cousins since before we could write."

A faint murmur. Dr. Pour-e Davoud had stopped translating. He was looking at Ram with the fixed expression of a man listening to something he did not expect to hear.

"I have taught Sanskrit to children in a courtyard for twenty years," Ram said. "It is a habit. I will give you one sentence of the Rigveda, in the old accent. It is the first verse of the hymn to Agni." He spoke a line, slowly, in the sing-song of the Vedic chant. "Agnim ile purohitam yajnasya devam rtvijam."

Pour-e Davoud rose to his feet. His voice shook a little. "Your Excellency. In the Avesta, the fire is atar. The priest is zaotar. And the hymn begins, Atarem yazamaide. We honour the fire." He stopped. "It is the same verse. In different dialects. It is the same prayer."

The room had gone quite still. Then someone clapped, a single, dry clap, and the whole hall broke into applause.

"There is more," Ram went on, when it had subsided. "When the Arabs conquered your country in the seventh century, a handful of your people who would not give up their ancient faith took ship from the Persian Gulf and landed on the coast of Gujarat. The local king gave them leave to stay on condition that they spoke our tongue and obeyed our law. They have prospered for twelve hundred years. They are the Parsis. Some of the leading industrialists of my Republic are their sons. They have never forgotten you. Nor have we forgotten that for eight hundred years, Persian was the language of the Mughal court in Delhi. Our poets wrote in it. Our officials were trained in it. Your Hafez and Saadi are read in my country by people who cannot read the language of their own ancestors."

He paused.

"We have not always been friends. In seventeen thirty-nine, Nadir Shah came down through the Khyber and sacked Delhi. It was not a happy day for my city. A great deal has happened since. Our two peoples have traded and fought and married and written to one another for four thousand years. I think we may be allowed to put old quarrels aside. I ask Your Majesty and this company to raise their glasses to the friendship of two ancient nations, and to the hope that we may find, in the century ahead, new reasons to be cousins."

He sat down. For a moment nothing moved. Then the Shah lifted his glass, and the whole hall rose with him.

Nehru, beside him, had been silent throughout. He leaned over now and spoke, very low. "I have heard you speak many times, Ram. I have never heard you do that."

"Do what?"

"Say something you meant without a figure in it."

"I put figures in the rest, Jawaharlal. I was saving this one."

Dr. Mossadegh’s house, Tehran

4 September 1950

The invitation had come in front of the Shah and the Iranian government, and when asked, they had not forbidden the meeting, so the Indian delegation went to meet Dr. Mossadegh the next morning. He lived in a modest house in a side street of the old city, where a man in his late sixties lay propped on pillows in a bed in the middle of a sitting-room. He wore woollen pyjamas and a heavy dressing-gown. He was bald, with a long-hooked nose and eyes that looked ready to weep or to laugh and had not yet decided. A stack of newspapers lay on the coverlet, and beside the bed stood a samovar and a plate of dried apricots.

"Excellency!" Mohammad Mossadegh said, in French, and held out both hands. "Forgive me. My legs are bad. I receive in bed. It is a bad habit, but my constituents have grown used to it."

Nehru took his hands and answered in French. They fell at once into the easy, rapid cadence of two men who had been to the same schools. Within three minutes, they had established that Nehru had been at Harrow and Cambridge and Mossadegh at Neuchatel and Paris, that both had been called to the bar, that both had gone to prison for their countries. Ram sat on a hard chair at the end of the bed and listened to the music of it with the faint envy of a man who had never been abroad before 1947.

"Your Prime Minister is a silent man," Mossadegh said at last to Nehru. "I have been told he says very little."

"He says what is necessary, Excellency."

"A rare gift." Mossadegh turned his large, wet eyes on Ram. "Mr. Gupta. You have come to buy oil."

"Who told you?"

"Everyone knows everything in Tehran. The British know. The Americans know. The Russians know, I am sure. You are the director of Burmah Oil, which holds twenty per cent of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. And you have come to Iran in the week the Majlis debates the Supplemental Agreement." He picked up an apricot and ate it slowly. "I think you are a clever man. I do not think you are here by accident."

"I came to see the gas," Ram said.

"The gas?"

"The gas that is burning at Masjed Soleyman, at Agha Jari, at Gach Saran, at every well in Khuzestan. About four hundred million cubic feet a day. I would like to buy it."

Mossadegh set down the apricot. "Buy the gas? Not the oil? From whom?"

"Oil too, but the gas has no sellers in my knowledge, so that is what I came to ask."

A beat of silence, a servant came and poured tea. The old man’s hands, with their long thin fingers, rested on the coverlet, and for a moment Ram thought he saw the shadow of something cross the heavy face, a flicker, almost of delight.

"Mr. Gupta, you have asked the question the Company has never asked. It burns the gas. It says, the gas is nothing. It says, it is cheaper to burn it than to move it. It says, we have paid Iran sixteen million pounds in royalties last year, which is more than the gas would have fetched. I say, it is a lie. I say, sixteen million pounds is a crumb. In the same year, the British Treasury took fifty million in taxes on the same profits. Iran received a third of what the English Chancellor received from a company that is not English, working on land that is not English, with oil that is not English."

"I have seen the figures," Ram said.

"You have seen them?"

"As a shareholder. The profit for 1949 was about sixty-one million pounds after tax, before the Government took its share. The Company paid sixteen to Iran in royalties and about twenty-eight to the Exchequer in tax. The Company also retained a large sum in reserves. I have not seen the Iranian share rise in proportion to the Company’s profit for twenty years."

Mossadegh stared at him. "You say this in my house?"

"I say it because I think it is true."

"You are a director of that Company!"

"I have nominated a director of a company whose shares I own. I owe it a duty. I do not owe it silence." Ram kept his voice level.

"Excellency, I will tell you what I believe. I believe that a contract which gives one party a third of what the other party takes from the same source, and calls itself a partnership, will not last. I do not say it should be torn up. I say it will not last unless it is changed," Nehru supplied.

Mossadegh had begun, absurdly, to weep. Tears rolled down the long nose and fell onto the newspapers. He did not wipe them. "Mr. Nehru," he said, and his voice broke, "thirty years I have said this in the Majlis. Thirty years I have been told by Englishmen, by Persians, by my own friends, that I am a fool, an agitator, a man who does not understand business. And you sit there, a foreign minister of the largest country in Asia, and say it in a dozen words."

Ram had not wanted to meddle in the affairs between Iran and the AIOC. He did not know the circumstances, or the contract. He had intended this official trip to sign a deal with someone for the oil and gas, keep the Iranians from helping the Pakistanis too much, and make a friend in the neighbourhood for the foreseeable future. But now that Nehru had spoken, he could see that the contract was flawed. He could also see that he needed to change his plans.

"I am told that there is a new contract being discussed to address the inequality?" Ram asked.

"A concession, I’d grant you that, but it does not address the inequality at all." Mossadegh spat and turned to Nehru. "Do you intend to raise the issue with the English?"

"I do," Nehru replied.

"Then I will tell you what they will say." Mossadegh wiped his cheek at last with the back of his hand and sat up straighter. "They will say that a contract is a contract. That the concession of 1933 was signed by the Shah’s father with his own hand. That it cannot be revised except by mutual agreement. They will say that to demand more is to violate the sanctity of treaties."

"I know, we used the same argument on them last April about the Burmah articles," Ram remarked.

For the first time, Mossadegh laughed. It was a high, helpless laugh that turned into a cough and a fit of wheezing. "Forgive me. It is only that... the Englishman’s own weapon!"

"It is a good weapon. It cuts both ways."

"And the gas?"

"I would like to buy the gas that is now burning," Ram said. "From the Company, which does not seem to value it in any sense. From the National Iranian Government, if it can be brought to sell it. I would build, at my own cost, a plant at the field to gather and compress it, and take the heavier fractions, liquefied petroleum gas and light petrol, for use in India. I would pay a fair price, a price that does not exist today because the gas is valued at nothing. I would employ Iranian workers. I would train Iranian engineers, and I would give the Government a half share in the front-end plant."

"A half share?"

"Fifty per cent. The plant would be a joint operation."

Mossadegh sat very still. "You would give us the joint operation of a gas plant."

"I would give you a plant that burns nothing, in a country that has burned it for forty years."

"The English will say that the gas belongs to the Company."

"The English will say what they say. What is the law?"

Mossadegh leaned back on his pillows. He looked, suddenly, very old and very sharp. "The Concession of 1933 gives the Company the exclusive right to explore, drill, and produce petroleum. It does not mention gas, which was not valued at the time. It says nothing on whether the Company has a title to the associated gas once it has come out of the ground and been burned. A lawyer might argue either way."

"Then there is room."

"There is room for an argument. Whether there is room for an agreement, I do not know."

"May I ask you something, Excellency?"

"Anything."

"If the Majlis rejects the Supplemental Agreement and the Company refuses to give you fifty-fifty, what will you do?"

Mossadegh looked at him for a long time, and when he spoke, it was not in the tone of a politician. "Mr. Gupta, I have thought about this for thirty years. In the end, there is only one thing a country can do with a resource that is being taken from it on terms it cannot accept. It can say: this is ours. I do not say it lightly. It would be war with the British, of a kind. A war of money and ships and insurance. I have seen what they do to a country that defies them. But I do not see another way."

"And if it comes to that?"

"I shall have no allies," Mossadegh said sadly. "Russia will try to buy me. America will try to restrain me. England will try to ruin me. And I shall be a very old man in a pair of pyjamas."

"You will have one," Nehru said quietly.

Before Nehru could promise an alliance unilaterally, anything, Ram cleared his throat. "It pains me to say, but as a shareholder, I should hope that both sides come to an agreement, and there should not arise circumstances to cause a war." Nehru glanced at him sharply, which Ram ignored. "I am told of a new deal with better terms, albeit unequal, I have not seen it."

"The majlis cannot, will not sign an unequal contract," Mossadegh replied with steel and passion in his voice, and Ram could imagine just why the halls would shake when this man spoke.

"I have been made well aware, but I imagine even the new deal would regard only the oil, and disregard the gas, as always. A man could argue that Iran would keep all the proceeds from the sale of the gas, which the contract does not mention explicitly." This was the middle ground Ram could see that could keep all sides interested, provided that the English did not obstinately keep their position on the ownership of everything produced by the well.

Ram even proposed to delay buying the gas until after the negotiations with the English. Though Mossadegh did not agree or disagree, Ram could see the man had cooled towards him, and could only shrug mentally. The meeting ended shortly afterwards with an exchange of pleasantries.

Mossadegh reached out and took Nehru’s hand in both of his. He held it a moment longer than courtesy required. Ram looked at the two of them across the bed, and thought he had never seen two men so alike in everything but their circumstances, and thought, perhaps his own presence had reduced the chances of Mossadegh’s agreement.

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