Wrong, Minister

India’s response to the deepening crisis on Iran’s nuclear plans ranges from the confused impulses of the government to the contrived indignation of the Left parties. On Monday, Foreign Minister K. Natwar Singh added a farcical dimension to it when, during an interview with NDTV in New York, he argued India couldn’t ignore Iran because of the “sensitivities” of India’s 150 million Muslims, a significant number of whom, he helpfully pointed out, are Shia.

The foreign minister’s remarks are fraught with fairly dangerous implications. Is he suggesting foreign policy is no more than an extension of domestic politics? Should, then, the Government of India immediately junk its hard position on Nepal, embrace the king and welcome his autocracy, keeping in mind the “sensitivities” of India’s 800 million Hindus? Or bring its Catholics into Indo-Italian ties? Where will this end: with relations with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan being held hostage to a surmise of emotions among India’s Sunnis? India’s engagement with the world — as, indeed, any nation’s foreign policy — must flow from a cold assessment of its strategic interests, its gains and losses. To reduce it to presumed anguish among individual communities, as Natwar Singh has done in the case of Iran, is to upturn diplomacy, disregard India and, most of all, insult Indian Muslims.

It is nobody’s argument that the Iran issue is not a complex one, a tightrope India has to use all its diplomatic skills to negotiate. In popular perception in India, Iran is a non-hostile Muslim country with which it can do business. As it happens, the American assessment

of Iran — ever since the hostage crisis of 1979 — is very different. Today Tehran’s new leader is resorting to verbal brinkmanship, threatening to, in effect, nuclearise the Middle East. At this precise moment, New Delhi is readying to sign a paradigm-changing nuclear deal with Washington and, equally, a gas pipeline project with Iran. India’s proximity to Iran is a clear and present hiccup. India is not required to abandon its friendship. All that it needs to do is make it clear that Iran must adhere to its commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty — which that country is a signatory of — and must not pursue the Bomb. A nuclear-armed Iran, one country removed from a nuclear-armed Pakistan, is, after all, not a recipe for stability in India’s near neighbourhood. It won’t do any particular good to Shias, in India or elsewhere, to bring them into the picture.