BY SWAPAN DASGUPTA

Flip-flop to New York

Let us hope Clinton thinks it's a courtesy call

Indian politicians are not accustomed to engaging spin doctors. But Prime Minister I.K. Gujral, it seems, followed expert advice in avoiding the press this past week. He was advised not to make any public pronouncements until his meeting with President Bill Clinton in New York. It was, to put it mildly, sage advice. The only occasion Gujral broke his public silence was last Tuesday when he presented an award to Ratan Tata and J.J. Irani of TISCO for that company's excellent performance in steel production. Gujral deftly avoided any mention of the controversy surrounding another Tata company in Assam, but he stumped the small audience by reportedly narrating how proud he was seeing the portrait of the first Indian to enter the House of Commons in the Central Hall of Parliament. It is a matter of minor detail that Sir Jamsetji Tata wasn't separated at birth from Dadabhai Naoroji.

Some public figures are born with a reputation, others acquire it and yet others have it thrust on them. Five months into his prime ministership, it is difficult to trace the origins of Gujral's awesome reputation as an intellectual and foreign-policy expert. He has certainly sat through a number of sombre seminars on the state of the world, repeated umpteen Urdu couplets to every visiting Pakistani dignitary and even fashioned a so-called doctrine that is said to have invited Hillary Clinton's curiosity at Mother Teresa's funeral. But his reputation as an oriental Metternich is still a source of great mystery. Gujral, after all, was the foreign minister who put Indian interests at risk in the Gulf by ostentatiously embracing Saddam Hussain of Iraq in 1990. On a visit to Moscow in March this year, he endorsed a strange "strategic partnership" floated by President Boris Yeltsin quite forgetting that it was only a casual instrument of Russia's bargaining with nato.

Like his friends, who act as his real advisers, Gujral has begun believing in his own mastery over foreign affairs. Whereas other successful ministers combine political initiative with a thorough grasp of the briefing provided by the permanent bureaucracy, Gujral has allowed instinct to sway his conduct of international relations. It was his instinct that made him detect the West's "designs" on the land of Lenin, made him look the other way as Pakistani forces fired along the entire Line of Control in August and prompted him to say that he wasn't going to be dictated his schedule by Uncle Sam. Over the past four weeks, particularly in the run-up to his New York visit, Gujral has been made to eat more of his words than he has had hot meals. He is the only prime minister whose policy assertions have been contested by the Reserve Bank of India.

If Gujral's inconsistencies had been limited to, say, minor dealings with some obscure Third World potentate, it could have been dismissed as a laughing matter. But Gujral is not a Laloo Yadav dealing with a Pappu Yadav. He is the prime minister who has been entrusted with facing up to the purposeful agenda of the world's only superpower. He is politically vulnerable and temperamentally volatile, a combination that has left the State Department salivating. Indians can only hope that Clinton views Monday's meeting as a courtesy call. Otherwise the country could find itself dragged into more commitments than are diplomatically warranted.

© Living Media India Ltd