Tags:
Journalism of Courage
As Prime Minister Manmohan Singh heads to Washington this week, domestic opposition to his bold foreign policy initiatives is beginning to crystallise. Not all of it is from the political parties. A lot of it also comes from the permanent establishment, which is struggling to come to terms with the new opportunities before Indian diplomacy.
The Left parties have signaled that their opposition to new elements in the engagement with the US is not pro forma. They want to bring their rare clout on the central government to bear upon foreign and defence policies. The Left criticism of the Singh government, until recently limited to economic reforms, is now being extended to national security.
The last few weeks revealed that bureaucratic opposition has also begun to slow down the peace process with Pakistan. Although Singh and Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf called for an expeditious solution to the Siachen question, talks with Pakistan ran into natural conservatism in the system.
China policy has long been an esoteric subject and few have the time or energy to decode diplo-speak on the boundary dispute. But once the significance of the current assumptions about resolving the boundary dispute with China are understood by political leaders there is bound to be anxiety about the much-needed territorial adjustments Delhi must eventually make.
Manmohan Singh inherited an exciting foreign policy agenda from Vajpayee. At the end of his six year tenure, Vajpayee had handed down a new framework for a sustainable peace process with Pakistan, a new approach to boundary negotiations with China, and a positive engagement with the US that involved not just transforming bilateral relations but also reconfiguring India8217;s standing in the global nuclear order after the tests of May 1998.
It fell upon Manmohan Singh to build a new architecture of foreign policy on the foundations laid by Vajpayee. After some initial confusion, Manmohan Singh and External Affairs Minister Natwar Singh persisted with a purposeful approach on the three big foreign policy accounts of the nation.
On the Pakistan front, Manmohan Singh8217;s talks with Pervez Musharraf on September 24, 2004 in New York and April 18, 2005 in New Delhi served to intensify the peace process. More fundamentally, they laid the basis for a serious negotiation on J038;K for the first time in more than four decades.
The UPA government successfully completed the first phase in the boundary negotiations with China initiated by Vajpayee. When Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao came here in April, the government concluded an agreement on the guiding principles and political parameters of the boundary settlement.
The hardball negotiations that produced this document are only the beginning of a complex endgame on a question that has hobbled Sino-Indian relations ever since Independence. The stage is now set for some serious talks on the specific territorial concessions the two sides have to make on the boundary settlement.
On the US, too, confounding scepticism at home and abroad, the government pressed ahead with the expansion of bilateral relations with the US and an attempt to resolve the long-standing nuclear problems with the American-led global nuclear order.
While the commitment of the government for a purposeful foreign policy has not been in doubt, the initiatives towards Pakistan, China and the US have entered a delicate phase. All three involve a significant departure from long-held national positions on the disputes with the three countries.
The talks with Pakistan necessarily demand out of the box thinking on J038;K in New Delhi. The boundary negotiations with China involve giving up dearly held notional territorial claims as well as adjustments on current territorial controls. The much sought after nuclear deal with the US, too, involves difficult political give and take.
Given the nature of grand bargains under negotiation the government must expect opposition, some of it fierce. After all, J038;K, China boundary, and the nuclear question have been three of the most important challenges independent India faced all these decades.
Different parts of the political spectrum will challenge one or more of the bargains involved. The Left will support talks with China and Pakistan, but will oppose engagement with the US. The BJP might now find it convenient to pick holes in the very initiatives it launched during Vajpayee8217;s tenure.
The broader establishment 8212; involving the bureaucracy, commentariat, and the so-called strategic community 8212; grew up in the 1970s at a time when the US, China and Pakistan were together ranged against India. For them moving on any of the three fronts will involve a mental leap into the unknown.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is surely aware that the three fronts are deeply interconnected. Without cooperation from China and the US, the negotiation of a final settlement on Kashmir will be near impossible. An expanding engagement with the US and Pakistan will provide important leverages for India in its talks with China. An India that sorts out its long-standing territorial problems with Islamabad and Beijing will have greater weight in Washington and in the Asian balance of power.
India has an unprecedented opportunity to restructure three of its most important bilateral relations. Movement on one front will open up space on the other. The obverse is also true. Unless India simultaneously moves on all the fronts there will be no breakthrough on any.
As the prime minister demonstrates he has the vision as well as political courage to think and act beyond conventional wisdom, he also needs to more actively mobilise public support to foreign policy, by going beyond the permanent establishment. The Indian middle class today is less burdened by self-doubt and is willing to support deliberate foreign policy experimentation towards Pakistan, China and the US aimed at transforming India8217;s standing in the world.
