The Indian rope trick

 

 

Inder Malhotra

Senior Columnist One way of looking at Indian foreign policy is to rejoice over its success. Initially, a Third World leader, this country did slip down in the international league, but is today one of the six actors – along with the United States, the European Union, Russia, Japan and China on whom rests the world order, such as it is. In the year 2000, in his monumental work, Diplomacy, Henry Kissinger had tried to forecast the future and said that the six main powers of the 21st century would be the other five and “perhaps” India. It is to the credit of the Rising India that it has erased the word ‘perhaps’ from this text. Doubtless the economic policies of liberalisation, integrating the Indian economy with the global one, resulting in the impressive 8 to 9 per cent annual growth has had lot to do with this country’s emergence as a major world power, as has the transformed international situation.

Looking back on the evolution of this policy over the last 60 years, the highest and the lowest points are crystal clear, the lowest having preceded the highest by nearly a decade. It was the brief but brutal border war with China in the high Himalayas in 1962 that became, for this country, a combination of a military defeat and a political debacle. National morale disintegrated almost overnight. It wasn’t fully restored until after the most glittering triumph of foreign and strategic policies in the shape of the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971. That shining climax to Indira Gandhi’s dazzling, if chequered, political career speaks for itself. One must take note also of the complex Kashmir issue that, having triggered four senseless wars and even more senseless cross-border terrorism lasting 20 years, still stalks India and Pakistan.Another memorable landmark is the initial spelling out of the basic tenet of the India foreign policy, nonalignment, by its founder, Jawaharlal Nehru. This happened as early as September 7, 1946 when he was only Vice-Chairman of the Viceroy’s Executive Council. Independence was still far away. No one then knew whether there would be one successor government to the departing British or two. But Nehru had not the slightest doubt. Over the years, nearly 140 countries saw their salvation in the Nehruvian prescription, which is a tremendous tribute to India’s first Prime Minister. Only the other day the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, stirred a hornet’s nest by criticising nonalignment. Not only the government and people of India, but also of many other lands told her where she must get off. In making nonalignment the sheet anchor of his policy, Nehru was only forging a methodology for safeguarding India’s security and supreme interests.

Several times he had testily told them, “I can’t be nonaligned against myself”. It is not generally known that Nehru’s first attempt soon after Independence was to develop a close relationship with the United States, but the Americans wanted him to join their military pacts against the Soviet Union, which he refused to do. Pakistan, however, readily became America’s “most allied ally”, and got generous military aid in return for military bases. This put paid to the possibility of a negotiated settlement of the Kashmir problem. Between then and now there has been a sea of change in the situation. Initiated by Atal Bihari Vajpayee and continued by Manmohan Singh, the India-Pakistan peace process is into its fourth year. More importantly, an across-the-board ceasefire between the two old adversaries has lasted even longer.

More dramatic is the change in the India-America relationship. The two estranged democracies of yore are now “strategic partners”, cooperating in various fields including military. The Indo-US civilian nuclear deal is proving highly controversial in both countries but will probably go through. On both Kashmir and China, Nehru has been severely criticised, not least by his countrymen. Some of the criticism is valid, but much of it is not. For instance, if India hadn’t taken the Kashmir issue to the UN, Britain would have, almost certainly under the mandatory chapter seven of the UN charter that could have enabled the world body to station UN troops in Kashmir.

Similarly, on China, Nehru’s fault was not his naivety about Chinese intentions but his grievous miscalculations about mao’s intentions. He believed that China would not precipitate a crisis.