National Security Advisor and Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister Brajesh Mishra today made it clear that India’s growing partnership with countries like the United States and Israel was not an impediment for New Delhi to hold divergent views on issues like Iraq and Palestine. ‘‘We may have defence cooperation with Israel, but that doesn’t mean we agree with their view on Palestine. Take the case of Iraq, we were clear on our stand that we are not in favour of any action outside the United Nations. Shared values does not mean there would be no disagreement, but we should be open about it.’’ Mishra was speaking at the release of C. Rajamohan’s Crossing the Rubicon: The Shaping of India’s New Foreign Policy here today. In his keynote address, the bureaucrat touched upon some transitional aspects of India’s foreign policy in recent years. However, restricting himself largely to the period where the BJP-led coalition has been in power, he said the need to negotiate past the ‘‘assymetry of power’’ between India and countries like the US was one of the biggest challenges that India faced in the 1990s. From being caught in a daze after the shake-up following the end of the Cold War to engagement with powers that sit at the high table of world politics, Mishra said, Indian foreign policy had gone through a transition punctuated by significant events like the nuclear tests and the Clinton visit.
