India's new External Affairs minister Yashwant Sinha may take some time finding his feet in South Block, but he certainly made some welcome noises in his first meeting with his bureaucrats last week. India’s obsession with Pakistan, said Sinha, must end, notwithstanding the necessity of following up on the present strategy of coercive diplomacy to its logical conclusion. His other big idea was to focus on ‘‘economic diplomacy’’, one of those mother of all ideas whose time has long since come—whether in India’s neighbourhood, including in the still-new economies of Central Asia, or elsewhere—but which MEA has, tragically, so far never been able to think creatively about.Still, the thought that there’s more to life and foreign policy beyond Pakistan, is a huge relief. Similar longings were expressed by none other than Narasimha Rao in the early 1990s after the end of the Cold War, when he decided to turn his head away from the stagnant relationship with Islamabad and hit upon the ‘‘look east’’ policy. To think that Sinha will do a Rao—one of the most understated foreign ministers ever—must make even the most cynical foreign affairs observer take continuing note of this space..except when you want a junketSinha, his near and dear ones affirm, surely has his heart in the right place. Apart from the path-breaking policies that new ministers like to chalk out just in case there’s a deluge, Sinha, a former bureaucrat to boot (he was India’s consul-general in Frankfurt in the seventies), is said to be crucially aware of the need to use ‘‘protocol as diplomacy.’’ For the uninitiated, the new EAM having once been FM knows well the predilections of both ministers and bureaucrats to travel, especially in the summer, usually to the West. Few care that Indian missions have a tough time trying to locate appointments for these worthies. Few want to travel to Third World nations, where India may have a chance of expanding influence, or want to receive people from these parts. Sinha, say his friends, wants to change all that. India is a big country and should be treated as such, they add. South to North, baggage includedFinance Minister Jaswant Singh, meanwhile, is said to be making himself comfortable in North Block. His journey from across the road last week was studded with mementoes accumulated over the last four years. For example, a pair of binoculars that once belonged to ‘Burger’, of IC-814 hijacking fame. To think that Singh, so heavily criticised for taking Maulana Masood Azhar and Co on the same plane as his—the terrorists are said to have verbally abused him throughout that journey to Kandahar—would have wanted reminding about that trip. There are other deadly reminders too: five bullets that had lodged themselves in Gate No 12 in Parliament on December 13. Jaswant’s office, as leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, is only a couple of feet away as you enter Parliament through that gate. Other bric-a-brac include a painting of the goddess Saraswati, as well as a Chinese scroll gifted to Jaswant by the high priest of the Jade temple in Shanghai during a recent trip to commemorate the first direct Delhi-Beijing flight. On the scroll is painted a figure of the Bodhidharma, who travelled from Kanchipuram to Shaolin many centuries before Christ, and is shown crossing the Yangtze river on a leaf.Closing the Russian chapterIn his capacity as finance minister, Yashwant Sinha dealt with the Indo-Russian joint commission, that is said to have given him at least a different flavour of things to come. Moving to South Block has disinherited him of that charge, unless he makes a pitch to return all the Joint Commissions to the mother lode, MEA. But deliciously, the Indo-Russian affair will now be taken over by Jaswant Singh, who never hid the fact that he never had a tactile appreciation of the Russians. In fact, at his farewell speech in MEA last week, Singh made the point of moving on, of not being a permanent dissenter, of trying and converting even your opponent to your point of view. Towards that effort, he said, he had become really, really good friends with the foreign ministers of the US, Britain, China, France and some others. Nothing new, except the omission of his Russian counterpart. Now, was that a slip of tongue.?Pickering and a plane taleGuess who was here last week, quietly making contact and getting to know New Delhi all over again? Tom Pickering, the US ambassador to India in 1992 for a very brief seven months, but where he is said to have sowed the seeds of a new bilateral relationship. Seems that Pickering is now retired and lobbies for the US aircraft company Boeing. It also seems that the Government may be inclined to share the placement of its order —43 aircraft worth Rs 10,000 crore—between Boeing and the European consortium Airbus, though Boeing priced itself out of the last retender. Some say it’s a show of gratitude to Washington for coming to India’s aid in the recent crisis with Pakistan. So, Pickering met Principal Secretary Brajesh Mishra and Civil Aviation minister Shahnawaz Hussain. Hmmmm.
