May 25, 1998

Follow up the Pokhran tests with radical changes in foreign policy.

Tavleen Singh

Well, well, well. Just when we were starting to write off the BJP Government as yet another Congress clone, it has literally nuked us into thinking again. By going nuclear, officially, after 24 years of namby-pamby ambiguity, the BJP has made it clear it is prepared to take a new road where India's defence and foreign policy is concerned. The fact that all our political parties (other than the Marxists, whose patriotism is more international) expressed their approval of the underground tests is evidence, if evidence was required, that most Indians strongly support the idea of our going nuclear, whatever the consequences.

This unusual unanimity in a country that generally speaks in a million voices comes from the widespread perception that in most of our international dealings, India is the weak one -- always at the receiving end. This perception has grown in the past 10 years or so, since Pakistan proved it could successfully export terrorists and guns across our borders, wreak havoc even in a city like Mumbai and get away with it.

A couple of days before the nuclear tests, I saw Mushahid Hussain, Pakistan's information minister, being interviewed on BBC. He smugly informed the interviewer that it was India which had "a seige mentality", that Pakistan wanted only peace and that Ghauri was developed only to restore the balance in South Asia. It was this same peace-loving gentleman who visited the head- quarters of one of Pakistan's nastiest terrorist outfits, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and congratulated it on its good work just before the group sent a bunch of killers to murder innocent villagers near Jammu recently.

If Sushma Swaraj had been similarly caught chatting up killers who then went off to Pakistan to effect some massacre, what would the international community have said? Pakistan, on the other hand, seems to get away with being virtually a delinquent state, just as China manages to do pretty much what it likes and yet retains the admiration of the West. If this is not sufficient indication that there is something very wrong with our foreign policy, it is hard to think what is.

So while the BJP Government is in the process of changing the way we have done things in the past, could it also consider other foreign policy changes? Our foreign policy -- which has really been Congress foreign policy since we continue to credit Jawaharlal Nehru with it -- has been a complete and utter mess for several years now. Yet, we behave as if it were somehow sacrosanct.

Bureaucrats in the Ministry of External Affairs (mea), the most know-all of the species, bristle with indignation at the slightest change of direction. Yet nobody asks them why most of our foreign policy initiatives in recent times have been failures. We are Pakistan-obsessed and all this has achieved is that Pakistan has elevated itself to being our equal.

It even dares lecture us on human rights, overlooking the fact that in our country Christian bishops do not have to commit suicide to draw attention to a blasphemy law that has sentenced even illiterate children to death. Remember the boy who was charged with writing slogans against the Prophet even after it was discovered he could not write? But we seem unable to counter the charges of human rights violations in Kashmir that Pakistan routinely flings at us.

We have had other foreign policy disasters like our misadventure in Sri Lanka. It is no secret that we trained and financed Tamil terrorism in that country until it exploded in our face and caused Rajiv Gandhi's murder.

The mistakes go back even further. Remember how we reduced ourselves to a Soviet satellite, remaining shamelessly silent even when the USSR invaded Afghanistan? This, only to find when the Cold War ended that we were quite friendless and alone in the new world order.

This should have been the point at which we sat up and thought seriously about a complete change of direction, about a foreign policy that would be based on our own interests rather than some silly ideology or the other. But we continued mouthing the same old slogans and continued clinging to ideas like non-alignment. Who are we non-aligned from now that the Cold War is over?

So caught up are we in dead ideas that we have not even been able to shake off the old "Hindi Chini bhai bhai" slogan. That is why there was such outrage across the country when George Fernandes dared to say China was our "potential threat No. 1". "There is a need for explaining to Fernandes our country's policy with neighbours," said Sharad Pawar, former defence minister. "Mr Fernandes is temperamentally an adventurist," said I.K. Gujral, former prime minister.

Yet, isn't it true that China is potentially our biggest threat? When asked the question, most people say: of course, it is. But we must be careful not to say it because we are such a weak country and China is so strong.

It is this perception that has made ordinary Indians quite proud of us going officially nuclear. There is a feeling that we will now be a stronger, more confident country. In reality, we will not be so unless the BJP Government follows up the nuclear tests with some equally decisive changes that will make us stronger and more confident economically. The mea is not the only one that has stagnated amidst old, dead ideas.

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