NDA’s foreign (non)policy

Jaswant Singh humiliatingly rushed wherever Strobe Talbott summoned him, begging and pleading that India be taken off the hook. So degrading was his performance that till date the NDA has not dared reveal the terms of the subsidiary alliance that Talbott imposed upon Jaswant — like some factor of the East India Company putting a Mughal subedar in his place.

Meanwhile, it took under a fortnight for Pakistan to enact its nuclear nautanki. With both countries now put in the doghouse, a shameful competition started between the two as to who could beat the other in getting out of the kennel. Pakistan won that round within a week — when first the G-8 in Geneva and then the P-5 in New York pulled out the Kashmir Sword of Damocles, which had remained sheathed in the UN for 33 years since the war of 1965, and dangled it over India’s head in the shape of a Security Council resolution pointedly referring to Jammu and Kashmir.

And to underline the point that India’s rehabilitation in the international community depended on American tutelage, President Bill Clinton had the gall to include J&K in his list of “disputed areas” in his address to Parliament in the sacred precincts of Central Hall, an outrage never before permitted by any previous Indian government to any visiting foreign dignitary. The Talbott-Jaswant compact, however, ensured that Prime Minister Vajpayee kept his mouth firmly shut as genuflection towards Washington got indelibly inscribed as the first principle of the NDA’s foreign policy.

Under the terms of this subsidiary alliance, India After NAM was permitted to call itself “Non-Aligned” but only provided it committed itself to the Superpower camp, just like the native princes of India, after William Bentinck, were permitted to call themselves “raja” but only provided they put their Raj in hock to the Angrez. So desperate was the Vajpayee dispensation to keep the smile on the Yankee face that after our jawans had thrashed Pervez Musharraf’s troops in Kargil, the NDA endowed the credit for ending the war to the wigging given by Clinton to Nawaz Sharif.

Worse was to follow. The NDA commerce minister, Murasoli Maran, spoke up for India and all developing countries in his brilliant opening address to the WTO ministerial meeting in Doha. Vajpayee happened to be in the US at the time. Like the British resident whispering a word in the raja’s ear, George W. Bush told Vajpayee to shape up or ship out. Promptly word went to the Indian delegation in Doha to can it.

On the morrow of 9/11, the NDA rushed in where angels fear to tread. Without so much as being asked, New Delhi pledged its heart and soul — and the sacred soil of Mother India — to the Americans. The Americans quietly spurned the offer. Pakistan, they knew, mattered much more to them militarily than India ever would. Thus the worst state-sponsor of terrorism became their closet ally in what they chose to call their “war on terrorism”.

Anxious, nevertheless, to prove that New Delhi and Washington were langotiya companions in the war on terrorism, Vajpayee tried to interest the White House in Pakistan’s role in the attack on the J&K Assembly and then on Parliament. Washington and the rest of the West demurred. So, to impress Cowboy Bush in his own idiom, the NDA government drew up a dramatic list of its “Twenty Most Wanted” residents of Pakistan, preliminary to cutting off air, train and bus links to Pakistan, recalling high commissioners (or getting them recalled), and mobilising the army to the borders.

Thoroughly alarmed at India opening this second front in the “war against terrorism” without American sanction, not one western government bought the NDA argument that Pakistan had sponsored the attack on the Indian Parliament. Instead, they firmly tucked the NDA’s tail between its legs and bullied it into pulling back its forces from the frontier.

Thus firmly catching the two nuclear-weapon armed neighbours by the ear, Washington brought Musharraf and Vajpayee to the negotiating table. Like errant but still recalcitrant schoolboys, the two signed on the dotted line — but not before the NDA prime minister reneged on his “principled” stand that there could be no talks with Pakistan until (a) cross-border terrorism was ended and (b) the infrastructure of terrorism dismantled. The earnest of Pakistan’s commitment was to be its acceptance of the expression ‘‘cross-border terrorism’’, a buzzword Jaswant Singh had altogether forgotten to include in the Lahore Declaration but which became the straw with which Vajpayee broke the Indo-Pakistani back at Agra.

Musharraf dug in his heels at Islamabad and rejected the expression. Vajpayee cravenly gave in. This provided Musharraf his opening to unambiguously delink the ‘‘freedom fighters’’ of J&K from the ‘‘terrorists’’ against whom the US-led ‘‘global war on terrorism’’ is allegedly being fought. The NDA is, therefore, left comforting itself with a 3-2 victory in the ODI cricket series. What a fall there was, my countrymen!

Musharraf, in his newly acquired avatar as Busharraf, has now become Target Number One for the Al-Qaeda. Like the French colonialists who honoured black Africans who killed other black Africans for the greater glory of France by conferring on them the title of ‘‘Legionnaire d’Honneur’’, Colin Powell has conferred on his erstwhile co-sponsor of the Taliban, Pervez Musharraf, the title of ‘‘MINNA’’ for his taking up the White Man’s burden of America’s war on Osama bin Laden.

South Block is, therefore, left red with embarrassment, green with envy, and white with surrender. Substitute orange for red, and you have the colours of the Indian flag. This is what the NDA has done to India’s honour, independence and sovereignty.