Cowboy George has been lassoed by the United Nations. Notwithstanding his having won congressional and now electoral approval for his War on One More Man, the US president’s policy of a ‘War-a-Year/ Keeps the Presidency Near’ has, for the time being, been stalled. A November war on Saddam, to match last November’s war on Osama, no longer seems on the cards. But a January war on Iraq to match his Papa’s January war in 1991 is entirely possible. So, has there really been a taming of America?Yes, because Germany and France have shown that the US can no longer take the western alliance for granted. Even as the United Kingdom blithely assumed that the US would be with them when they launched their last imperial misadventure — the invasion of Egypt in the wake of the nationalisation of the Suez canal in 1956 — only to discover that they could not take Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles for granted, so has Bush discovered that Schroeder’s Germany and Chirac’s France are no longer the easy pushover the US had thus far imagined the European Union to be. More even than the foot-dragging by Russia and China, it has been the United States’ difficulty in getting the EU to sign up that has converted the US attempt to get an open-ended authorisation for war whenever it feels so inclined into a multi-layered process of decision-making which might yet deny Bush the Mother of all Opportunities to shatter and smash yet another small defenceless country.This opens a window of opportunity for a post-Jaswant Singh foreign policy that India must seize. As a nation, we do not seem to have woken up to the implications of the new strategic reality that we are completely encircled by US bases. To the north, in an arc stretching from Georgia through Turkmenistan and Tadjikistan to Kazhakastan, are US bases from which we can be intimidated. To the west, US forces are no more in the remote Gulf area but next door in Pakistan. The Indian Ocean, which we once hoped would be a Zone of Peace, is now the staging post for US wars on any Asian nation. Jaswant Singh wanted us to joyfully acquiesce in this, like the princely houses which acquiesced in the subsidiary alliances imposed on them by British colonialism.Till Saddam’s face-off with Bush, we seemed to be confronted with the choice of becoming either a vassal or victim of US hegemony. Which is why to most Indian faint-hearts, cutting across political parties, nonalignment in an unaligned world seemed not only impossible to sustain strategically but even obsolete as a philosophy. The German elections have shown that the soul of a nation cannot be long suppressed. It does find utterance. The European Union is already an economic bloc capable of holding its own against the US. The German reaction, backed by France as a government and public opinion everywhere in Europe outside the UK, to the US president’s lust for ‘regime change’ in Iraq, has shown that the economic might of the EU is slowly but surely burgeoning into political independence. Moreover, the Soviet Union is no longer glowering at western Europe across an easily-transgressed land frontier. Europe, the 20th century battle-ground of the bloodiest conflicts humankind has ever known, has emerged into the 21st century as the most peaceful continent on planet Earth. Therefore, their subsidiary alliance with the US is drawing to a close. India needs to discover and reach out to this Europe. We can do so only if we rediscover our lost Nehruvian voice. For it is that voice which reverberates in what the Europeans are now beginning to say.The time for us to do so is now. For over the next few weeks, Saddam may give over his weapons of mass destruction and thus leave the US with only ‘regime change’ as the excuse for invading Iraq — an excuse Europe and most of the world will not buy. Or, more likely, Bush will be left with egg on his face when it turns out that Saddam does not have the secret cache of weapons of mass destruction which the Americans have persuaded themselves to believe he must have. If, nevertheless, Bush invades Iraq, that will bring on European ire. And, if he does not, it will strengthen the European conviction that it is they who forestalled war, much as America in 1956 stopped war over the Suez Canal. As a nation, we do not seem to have woken up to the implications of the new strategic reality that we are completely encircled by US bases I, therefore, commend to our new external affairs minister, Yashwant Sinha, a letter he doubtless saw when he served as cabinet minister under Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar at the time of Iraq War I. I do so because I am encouraged by his having authorised our Permanent Representative to the UN to make a statement on Iraq which the craven Jaswant Singh would never have permitted. And if Sinha is too busy to go fishing in the archives, he can always get his minister of state, Digvijay Singh, who was Chandra Shekhar’s deputy minister of external affairs at the time, to pull it out.The letter I refer to was dated January 20, 1991, and written to Chandra Shekhar by Rajiv Gandhi, the leader of the Opposition, in the immediate aftermath of the outbreak of Iraq War I. Demanding the mobilisation of the forces of peace as the answer to the mobilisation of the forces of war, Rajiv Gandhi pointed out that Germany (then as now) was among the countries asking that ‘‘top priority be attached to stopping and containing the war before it assumes cataclysmic proportions.’’ He added, ‘‘I am confident that there are numerous friends of ours in the NAM who would be prepared to step forward for sustained peace at this juncture.’’ Calling for a ‘creative and relevant response’ to secure ‘a peaceful solution by non-violent means’ to the crisis, Rajiv Gandhi urged, ‘‘This is the time for India to act.’’ This again is the time, in the pause the UN has secured between Iraq War I and Iraq War II, for India to act.E-mail the Author
