Fifth Column: Tough Guys Don't Cry

India Today, November 23, 1998
Nov 23, 1998

FIFTH COLUMN
Tough Guys Don't Cry

India thinks whining is a strategic foreign policy weapon.

Tavleen Singh

We whined when the American president imposed economic sanctions. So, really, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) should have been delighted when he partially lifted the sanctions last week. No. We whined again. Even the prime minister joined the chorus: "Should India also make its economic condition worse to get international funding? India is opposed to any such illogical, discriminatory decision." Whine whine. Grumble grumble.

In the petulant tones of a sulky child India -- mighty India, which dreams of being a regional superpower -- complained about favouritism to Pakistan. It was a disgraceful performance and whoever orchestrated the whining should be severely castigated. But this is unlikely to happen because our tone in matters of foreign policy has traditionally been a whine.

That is, since we stopped preaching to the world in high moral tones. Preachy tones were a major feature of Nehruvian times, when we saw ourselves as the voice of the newly free world. We constantly lectured everyone on the virtues of non-violence and democracy. Then we started doing a few bad things in Kashmir and other countries threw our moral science lectures back at us. So we crept into the arms of the Soviet Union, emerging from time to time to whine about something or the other.

By the time the Soviet Union disintegrated we were so totally dependent on it for defence supplies (imports) we swapped, almost barter style, for our shoddy consumer goods (exports) that we had to virtually learn to trade from scratch. In retrospect, it was not a foreign policy that served our national interest at all. Not only did we turn ourselves into a Soviet satellite but we behaved so unpleasantly in our neighbourhood (training Tamil terrorists, starving Bangladesh of water, blockading little Nepal) that everyone hated us.

Yet we currently have political parties like the Congress and the CPI(M) going dewy-eyed with nostalgia about the supposed glories of our earlier foreign policy which, in their view, is being destroyed by the BJP. Comrade Jyoti Basu, whose own party's foreign policy has traditionally involved total obeisance to China, has in a recent article accused the prime minister of single-handedly destroying the foreign policy that previous governments had followed.

If only, ah if only, the BJP really had the courage to do this. Or even to seriously examine what went wrong, why it went wrong and how it can be rectified. Of these questions, the "why" is the easiest to answer. Indians are completely uninterested in foreign policy. In the many elections I have covered, not even at the height of our problems with Pakistan, has anything connected with foreign policy ever been an issue. It is this lack of interest that has allowed the MEA to do pretty much what it wants.

So instead of our foreign policy being based on self-interest, it has been built on emotion, ideology and obscure notions of morality. We have "emotional links" with South Africa, for instance, because Gandhiji spent his youth there. So we continue sending them clapped-out Gandhians who may not even be diplomats. Instead, we should be building economic ties through modern diplomacy.

This page is not long enough for a list of other examples of such silliness. But if the BJP Government ever has the courage to take a new look, then it should examine the serious mistake we have made by always seeing our foreign policy through the prism of Pakistan. It's all right for Pakistan to return the compliment but surely we are big enough not to be so eternally obsessed by one sad little neighbour in the throes of what seems like economic meltdown.

This economic meltdown is not in our interest because it would further destabilise the region. So we should, in fact, be backing the IMF bailout that the Americans have permitted. Instead, we whine. And because we always bring ourselves down to Pakistan's level it gives Pakistanis delusions of their country's size and importance. They have also been, thanks to the Cold War and other factors, cleverer than us at projecting their importance to the Americans.

If the Americans have become slightly more interested in us since the Cold War ended it isn't due to sudden altruism but only because when it comes to doing business we are more important than Pakistan. America's South Asia policy has been quite wonky. It has been self-centred to the point of being dangerous for us. So we suffer in Kashmir from the detritus of America's Afghan war. But it is in our interest to convince them of the flaws in their policy.

We need, for instance, to firmly point out to the US that it is its backing of Pakistan which has prolonged the Kashmir issue. The Pakistani Government is our Osama bin Laden. We can question the world's sole superpower if it still doesn't see our point. We also need to convince the Americans that they really have no role to play in Kashmir. It is not the Middle East. It is a problem that can and eventually will be solved bilaterally. If this has not already begun to happen it is mainly because Pakistan has an inflated sense of its own importance on account of American support.

Our problem, though, is that the more we whine the less seriously anyone takes us. So before we go any further we need to change the tone in which we speak to the world. Since we are so proudly nuclear, we could start by reminding ourselves that nuclear powers don't need to whine.

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