Missing: foreign policy

As it savours the diplomatic triumph in getting the nuclear deal through the US Congressional Committees this week, the UPA government might have every reason to ignore the Bush administration’s decision to sell 34 F-16 fighter aircraft to Pakistan. Embarking on an unprecedented engagement with the US in the last one year, India has certainly got over its knee-jerk impulse to oppose every arms transfer to Pakistan. Amidst an operating nuclear deterrence between India and Pakistan, conventional arms transfers have long ceased to make a big difference to the military balance between them. In any case India might itself turn to the US to purchase the 126 fighters that the air force is looking for.

While he deserves all credit for pushing through the bold nuclear deal with the US, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh must be held responsible for a loss of vision and vigour on the foreign policy front in recent months. The peace process with Pakistan has begun to stall. More than a year after Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf visited India, the Prime Minister’s Office cannot even set dates for a reciprocal visit. National Security Advisor M.K. Narayanan has just returned from China after yet another round of meandering talks on the border dispute. With a PMO bureaucracy that hasn’t been charged with either initiative or imagination, the nation’s foreign policy has become rudderless. And when it does act, it is with unbelievable ham-handedness. Singh’s advisors almost wrecked India’s standing in Nepal by sending a wrong man, Karan Singh, as an emissary to a collapsing monarchy last April. No one has gleaned the wisdom of backing an expatriate Indian for the post of UN secretary general. Perhaps Shashi Tharoor and his friends in the PMO may know something we don’t. A frustrated foreign minister of Pakistan, Khurshid Mahmood Kasuri, goes around asking if there is any one in New Delhi he can speak to. Nearly seven months after External Affairs Minister Natwar Singh was forced out of the Foreign Office, it is a question many of India’s interlocutors are asking.

It would be appalling indeed if Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi suggest, even by implication, that the grand old party cannot find a suitable candidate to replace Natwar Singh. No one in the government had made the public case that India can get by without a foreign minister. The longer the PM, who is increasingly burdened with the complex management of domestic politics, avoids appointing a full-time foreign minister, the greater will be the damage to India’s long-term interests.