The pre-emptive smirk

Events of recent weeks can show you how that argument might be a little flawed and how differently the two democracies actually work. Notice for example how in one, namely the US, it is the secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld who has had the whole world scared with warlike talk, leaving it to his secretary of state to pour oil over troubled waters with gentle diplomacy and kinder words. Then contrast this with what has happened in India.

Here, quite to the contrary, it is the foreign minister who8217;s been going around talking as if charged with a fresh shot of testosterone, threatening pre-emptive strikes and retaliation. And who has been working to bring down the temperatures subsequently, but the very defence minister who should have normally been asked to carry out those supposed strikes.

Quite apart from the fact that it is such a role reversal for George Fernandes 8212; usually he is the one for war-like talk while the rest of the Cabinet is left to clean up in his wake 8212; it could also mark the return of the ideology-driven foreign policy instincts of the old. For a decade now several geniuses and self-styled Kautilyas in the foreign policy establishment have searched desperately for some straw from the past to clutch at.

They watched in anger and helpless silence as first Narasimha Rao and then Jaswant Singh and Brajesh Mishra challenged the inherited wisdom of the past and confected a foreign policy that was pro-India rather than anti-someone-or-the-other. Raja Mohan sums it up in what he calls the Fourth and the Fifth Transitions in India8217;s changing foreign policy: The rejection of the instinctively anti-West mindset and a shift from idealism to pragmatism.

Yashwant Sinha, his foreign policy establishment and 8212; indirectly instigated by them8212;a slogan-shouting political class that watches too much CNN, produced a resolution in Parliament that packed criticism of the US and Britain of the kind you haven8217;t heard from the parliaments of France, Russia and even Pakistan. Further, equally consistent with the Indian trait of waffling till the last moment and then plonking ourselves on the side of the loser, we passed this resolution just when the Americans were securing Baghdad, people were dancing on the streets of that city pulling down Saddam8217;s statues and, even closer home, at the Iraqi embassy, his portraits were being pulled down and, as a news report in this newspaper described, being replaced with harmless ones of Iraqi women picking flowers.

It was in the course of this debate that Sinha made his immortal 8216;8216;right to pre-emptive strike8217;8217; remark that immediately got the Pakistanis and finally Colin Powell so excited. Exactly a year after the world was accusing the Pakistanis of being unreasonable, of making provocative statements and following an adventurist policy towards India we now had the entire international community8212;at least the one that matters, I haven8217;t checked out the websites of NAM, Rwanda and Fiji8212;counselling us to be patient and to engage in dialogue with Pakistan.

For the first time in four years a senior US official Colin Powell in this case publicly contested an Indian argument when he said it was wrong for India to compare Kashmir/Pakistan with Iraq. Some repair work is now being belatedly attempted. But even in their wildest dreams the Pakistanis would not have expected India to score such a remarkable self-goal. That, too, from a politician who was so far accused of being too cautious, of possessing a bureaucrat8217;s play-safe instincts. If only this testosterone had been discovered when the Unit Trust of India was collapsing.

The disastrous Sinha babble, this Parliament resolution, the spectacle of the Left8217;s Jiban Ray shouting in Parliament 8216;8216;catch Bush, jail him8217;8217;, or the Muslim League8217;s Banatwala calling him a war criminal, all mark a return to old ideological instincts embedded deeper into our establishment and political class than even the monkeys of the Rhesus kind in the corridors of South Block.

These instincts are not merely anti-American. These also include the old Indian belief that somehow we deserve to be taken seriously on the world stage because of some kind of inherited moral authority. In the past we deluded ourselves into believing we were there already, merely by holding jamborees of third world despots in the name of NAM, et cetera, proudly embracing Fidel Castro one day, Saddam Hussein on another, naming the widest avenues in our capital after dictators like Tito can you find me a road named after him in whatever has lately become of Yugoslavia? and getting some applause in return.

We believed somehow that even by being on the sidelines, mere spectators while the big boys played the game, we became serious participants just because we could make a nuisance of ourselves. A bit like the spectators who run on the field and get their 15 seconds of television fame anytime somebody else hits a century or takes a wicket.

The highlight of the decade of transition in our foreign policy, led by Rao and then Jaswant Singh and Mishra under Vajpayee, was our success in de-lumpenising our worldview. The arrival of The Sinha Smirk he8217;s been telling television channels the Americans have made a blunder, that he always knew the Iraqis would fight and so on with the same, know-all smile cheered by our horde of Cold Warrior MPs and the NDA government8217;s inability to insulate foreign policy and high strategy from public opinion of the day have taken us dangerously backwards in time.

A pragmatic reorientation of foreign policy was a notable achievement of the Vajpayee government8217;s five years in power; in a matter of days Sinha8217;s statement has set the clock back by half a decade. It8217;s made the Americans contradict us in public for the first time in four years, it8217;s got the Pakistani establishment cheering and celebrating, and if it has meanwhile put the fear of God in the hearts of the evil West, we have no indications of that as yet.

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