When the leading lights of this NDA government look back on their first five years in power they will have to find some explanations for a contradiction. They will see that one of their greatest achievements was in the larger area of foreign policy and strategy making and that this was achieved by the boldness with which they threw the old holy national consensus out of some nondescript South Block window. They will also notice that if this boldness did not achieve more it was again because they failed in clearing out some remaining vestiges of that dangerous consensus. Dangerous, because such permanent ideas are contradictory to the very idea of higher strategic thinking, they dull the mind of the strategist and they give public opinion far greater say in policy-making than is needed. Essentially, even in the most active democracies, elected governments make foreign policy and then its leaders mould and nurse public opinion to support it. The statement MPs, cutting across party lines, forced the prime minister to make on Iraq earlier this week is, therefore, one more example of that contradiction. An establishment which has not shied away from overturning so many foreign policy paradigms — successfully — has now harked back to the old consensual approach. No wonder then that the prime minister’s speech was full of Nehruvian platitudes. We do not want a unipolar world, no one nation could decide for the rest of the world and, most significantly, a reassertion of our faith in the United Nations. It was no surprise that the speech evoked immediate appreciation from the one community the prime minister should have avoided to please, the old, left-socialist, Nehruvian, Congress consensus gang, which still confuses national interest with the non-aligned movement, national prestige with filibusters at multilateral jamborees and sovereignty with instinctive anti-Americanism. Odd, that a government that has seen a particularly successful foreign policy by defying just these notions should succumb to them so clumsily. While ‘‘we are one with whatever the UN decides’’ may be a useful line for so many Europeans and others loathe to oppose Bush or to side with him prematurely, it is the one thing we should have avoided. We can choose so many other formulations: That Iraq has to come clean; that the US cannot decide unilaterally and so on. But can’t we, please, and in our own supreme interest, go a bit easy in asserting such commitment to the UN? The danger in this lies not simply in the fact that at some stage the Pakistanis could remind us that since we had such faith in the UN, why don’t we also express it by implementing the 1947-48 plebiscite resolution on Kashmir. The danger is greater. If the principle that the UN Security Council resolutions authorising intervention in any situation that presents a global danger has universal legitimacy, what is to stop it from passing a similar resolution should Kashmir come to a boil yet again tomorrow? We will defy it, sure enough. But the touching words we speak today, expressing our faith in the Security Council, will come back to haunt us. Nobody should know better than us how unfair and ineffective the UN can be. In the past decade it has rubber-stamped every single thing the US has demanded of it and while it does enjoy the momentary glow of the latest French Resistance, it is unlikely that institutionally it will even be able to stand up to the powers that be. The world over it is known to be an inefficient, lazy, wasteful and ineffective organisation. It has done more for perpetuating dictatorships around the world than for furthering democracy. Every September, thugs and despots from around the world congregate at its General Assembly to hold forth to the world, but also to their domestic audiences. Not one of them may have voted for you, but they cannot ignore the fact that when you speak, so many other heads of state listen. Meanwhile, what has the UN done specifically for India besides providing lucrative secondments to so many in our very bored and underpaid bureaucracy and a plethora of do-nothing multilateral postings for our foreign service? In the Second World War, India raised the largest army in its history — with the possible exception of the Mahabharata. Several times more Indians died fighting fascism than have died defending their own frontiers since. Yet India got nothing in that post-war carving up of the world. Not even the suggestion of a permanent seat at the Security Council. And what has India got since? Through the Cold War it was saved only by the Soviet veto. Since that phase ended and the unipolar world was ushered in, we have profited from two factors: The increasing irrelevance of the UN and our own redefined relationship with the sole superpower. It would be doubly dangerous now to be pushed, by entirely ignorant and non-serious politicians, and a public opinion determined by touching emotion rather than cold reason, to be committed to a process of strengthening the UN, introducing new stresses on our relations with the US. It needs to be underlined that in the post-Cold War phase when the UN, under hopelessly ineffective secretary-generals, has been pushing new ideas of nationalism and self-determination, our clever new positioning, as a friend of Washington, has come very handy. We also need to remember that we do not even acknowledge the presence of the UN Observers’ Group in Kashmir and refused to give a visa to Kofi Annan just the other day for merely mentioning the K-word. Why, then, such sudden devotion to the UN? It is silly enough to think of the UN as some kind of a parliament of the world. How can any organisation where so many people — even the French — have a veto be fair to all its members? Similarly silly is the notion that it will suit all humanity and India if the US was able to carry its European allies with it. Further, it contradicts our own dislike for a unipolar world. If we would prefer a multipolar world, instead, nothing suits us better than the self-destruction of NATO. If the rise of the US as the dominant global bully was bad enough by itself, it was only compounded by a unified Europe acting as its unquestioning henchman. The new Franco-German rebellion has now made the very institution representing US sway over Europe, NATO, irrelevant. Nobody, except those living on the dominant pole, likes a unipolar world. The French may now hope they could be the second pole and teach the world their own special values, their taste for fine wines and cuisines, endless siestas, the glory of their public sector enterprises and trade unions. Good luck to them. For us, this reopening of the entire global power equation presents many opportunities. It was tough to manoeuvre in a world where the US made the rules, supported by all of Europe and Japan. Now there are many loose ends in that arrangement and the three countries that can see new opportunities are China, Russia and India. China, because they benefit directly from the weakening of the dominant pole — Beijing is the prime claimant of the second pole status. Russia, because the weakening of the US hold over Europe and the rise of another power bloc in western Europe, gives it a playground of its own where it could further leverage linkages with China, Central Asia and India, in that order. And India, because this breaking up of NATO, the increased and permanent US involvement in southern, central and western Asia gives it an entirely new leverage as the only stable, democratic and powerful nation in a wide arc of instability, extending from Israel to Burma, Almaty to Aden. We should, first of all, send a thank you card with a case of our own Sula or Grover Wines or the Marquis de Pompadour to the French for presenting us this opportunity. Then we need to get down to seriously figuring out a strategy to profit from this. For that, this government once again needs to think out of the box. The box is the old, Congress-style holy national consensus. The box is also the babucracy of the Ministry of External Affairs. The world is in too much of a flux. NATO’s self-destruction, the UN’s humiliation, USA’s isolation present us with historic opportunities. This game of chess is far too open — and promising — to be abandoned for the sake of nostalgia, or status quoist laziness. This needs robust political direction and leadership, which has been the hallmark of the NDA’s strategic and foreign policy establishment until the recent past. Write to sg@expressindia.com
