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RIGHT
ANGLE
Truncation
of the Mind
India
is remarkably insular today but we weren't like this always
By
Swapan Dasgupta
 Reviewing
former foreign secretary J.N. Dixit's recent book on Afghanistan in India
Today last week, Arabist Manvendra Singh made an astonishing claim. There
is, he wrote, "an interest across the strata of society, from Barmer
to Bromley, to understand" Afghanistan. Without disparaging the Barmer
yeomanry in any way, it may have served the cause of accuracy better to
have identified the overweening interest in Afghanistan as stretching
between Princeton and Pindi. The Durand Line may well be an unnatural
divide between Afghanistan and Hindustan, but it has ended up delineating
the mental boundary on this side of the Radcliffe Line. Even before the
brutalised body of Najibullah was displayed in Kabul by the victorious
Taliban in 1992, neither Afghanistan nor Iran-the other country with which
we shared a border until 1947-figured high in the check list of Indian
foreign policy. What figured were amorphous entities like the West, the
socialist bloc, the Third World and, inevitably, Pakistan.
The evidence
of rising unfamiliarity and disinterest in our neighbourhood is overwhelming.
Take the worthwhile studies on contemporary Afghanistan in recent years.
The bulk of these have come from US think tanks or from Pakistan. India's
institutional knowledge of Afghanistan is so poor that a disoriented South
Block had to seek the assistance of the US for information about the Taliban
during last December's hijack drama in Kandahar. During the early phases
of the Kargil war, India's military intelligence was seriously handicapped
by the absence of personnel with an adequate command over Pushto dialects.
The School of International Studies, a premier institute in Delhi, is
still awaiting an Iran expert.
It's not
that our collective awareness of the region was always so feeble. Even
if the deep involvement of the Mughals in Central Asia, Persia and Afghanistan
is kept aside, the 19th and early-20th centuries witnessed a revival of
strategic concerns in the region. What is referred to as the Great Game
wasn't played from Whitehall, as is often believed. It was planned and
executed by the Foreign Department of the Government of India in Calcutta
and Delhi. The players also included Indians like Mohan Lal and Sarat
Chandra Das, well-versed in local customs and languages. By proceeding
on the assumption that Indian foreign policy began in 1947, India turned
its back on an institutionalised awareness of the region. In taking anti-colonialism
to ridiculous extremes, we failed to appreciate that the foreign policy
of the British Raj was primarily centred not on Britain but on India and
Indian interests. Within the Empire, India played an autonomous role.
After 1947, we pretended, and our ideologically inclined historians assisted
the process, that the legacy of William Moorcroft, Lord Lytton, Colonel
Francis Younghusband and Lord Curzon belonged to Britain, not India. The
isolationism was egged on by a Fortress India economic policy that led
to civil society breaking off age-old links with the neighbourhood. The
end result: zero presence in Afghanistan, nominal influence in Iran and
a Tibet policy that serves China better than India.
The grim
reality is that the Indian mind has been truncated. It has been imprisoned
within walls of our making. We aspire to a larger role in the world but
lack the intellectual preparedness for it. We demand a place in the UN
Security Council, but are we equipped to undertake the obligations?
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