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A hotline to Burkina Faso

The last thing we need is the return of that old, suspicious, paranoid third-worldist rhetoric when the western world is actually worrying about us taking away their skilled jobs.

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From the CMP to the president’s address and now to the prime minister’s first address to the nation you see a subtle, yet determined, pushing of the envelope on economic reform. Some of the gloomier elements of the CMP, a near-total rejection of privatisation, doubts on power reform and private participation in airports and railways, were sorted out by the president. The prime minister has now clarified the larger view on integration with global markets and commitment to investments in physical infrastructure. If the idea of reform with a human face is greater state intervention ‘judicious and fiscally disciplined ‘ to accelerate distributive justice rather than wait for the old-fashioned trickle-down, you can’t dispute it too much. But one area where confusion and equivocation prevails is foreign policy.

I had said last week that in principle there was nothing wrong with a new government bringing along its own foreign policy, particularly in a globalising world where foreign affairs were echoing unprecedentedly in the domestic politics of democracies. But these changes must not be ideological and, thereby, predictable. Yet, even as the prime minister and his team are succeeding in deftly, painlessly, almost homoeopathically curing the initial trauma over economic reform, it is difficult to see where the foreign policy vision is headed. The discourse on foreign policy has remained frozen in the same rhetorical trap, reminiscent of our class X essays in the earnest, third-worldist, allegedly non-aligned seventies. Is the prime minister still unable to break out of this? Is it because his team is still weighted heavily in the field of economics? Or, though this is most unlikely, that this is not mere rhetoric and reflects his worldview?

Much of what this government has said on foreign policy is still mostly in the “all men should have good moral character” domain. But three things stand out. One, is the persistent shyness on the US. Nobody mentions the strategic aspect of the relationship. Nobody mentions the collaboration we have had in counter-terror operations. Similarly, while there is no particular need to mention Israel specifically, the repeated promise of expanding traditional relationships in West Asia is baffling, because the question you want to ask is, who with? The GCC states and Egypt are entirely in Bush’s bag, Iran is already a close friend, Iraq a colony and Palestine not a full state yet. All that is left is Syria. The third, and the most important, is the commitment to work towards a “multi-polar” world and it leads to three questions. Is a multi-polar world possible in the foreseeable future? If so, what are its “other” poles likely to be? And finally, will it necessarily work to India’s benefit? You can’t toss that last one aside because even the prime minister’s address promised an “independent” foreign policy governed entirely by “supreme national interest”.

There is plenty of debate already internationally on whether or not this is a unipolar world to begin with. Surely, the US is the most dominant power. But how many nations are actually intimidated by it any more than they were during the Cold War? It would take an entire treatise but you could actually argue that superpowers were much greater monsters in the bipolar world that some of us now feel so nostalgic about. Both the US and the Soviet Union continued to subvert, hector, even colonise weaker nations around the world, unmindful of world opinion which, in any case, was seen in a partisan light. Those (particularly in the Left and some sections of the Congress) who accuse the NDA of having been pusillanimous over the US invasion on Iraq forget Indira Gandhi’s own record over the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in our very neighbourhood. And Afghanistan was a genuine third world country, the third poorest, compared to Iraq which has the second largest oil reserves in the world and, until the other day, had the seventh largest army.


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We never let out as much as a whimper over the Soviet rape of Afghanistan, permanently blighted our claims to non-alignment with our backing of Kampuchea and Polisario. In contrast, on Iraq, even while we were claiming to be natural, strategic allies of the US, our parliament passed a unanimous resolution questioning the US move into Iraq. How many such motions did the Left or the Congress move against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the days of our supposedly independent foreign policy? So, while the question of which one of the two worlds is more imperialistic, bipolar or unipolar, is better left to ideologues of the Left, let’s examine the others.

Who are the “other” likely poles in this multi-polar world we hope to help build? The EU obviously has no such inclination. The last thing they want is to become adversaries of Washington and, should Kerry win this fall, would lose not a moment to bury the hatchet in a defeated Bush’s back. France? Nobody in Europe seems convinced of any moral considerations behind France’s opposition to the US in Iraq. First of all, you accept no such things from the modern world’s most mercantilist nation. Second, you must never forget that France’s Muslim minority is exactly as strong as India’s, nearly 15 per cent, so they have an internal “issue” just as we do. And third, in spite of the occasional spasm in Spain, they haven’t won a single ally and are currently salvaging themselves from isolation rather than becoming a new pole to rival Washington. What they will collect as their reward, instead, is things like exaggerated favouritism from nations like ours for their Airbus as we go looking for civil airliners.

Who else is left? Japan has problems of its own. China will tell you they are not ready for another two decades. And do you really want the other pole of this new dream world sharing your own borders? Let’s look for our “traditional” friends. Gadhafi starts his day with a salaam and mea culpa to the US. Cuba, Syria, North Korea, all nuisance states who are all vying to cash out, to collect what they can in return for good behaviour. Arafat who has converted a liberal, leftist and reasonably secular Palestinian movement into a purely Islamic one. Or you can check out Burkina Faso, try to build an entirely new “non-aligned” movement by striking friendships in Africa and Latin America as the new rhetoric says. You might find instead that they too have more pressing problems of their own, and not with the “sole superpower”, but with an array of three-letter words, like IMF, WTO, HIV and so on.

You can ‘ and must ‘ sympathise with them, and help where you can. But at a time when India has ceased to be seen (except in our own eyes sometimes) as a starving third world country, there is no real common cause between us and the old “comity” of Afro-Asian-Latino failed states. We are donors to IMF, beneficiaries of WTO, a “responsible” nuclear weapons power, have sizeable trade surpluses with China (Rs 7, 400 crore) and the EU (Rs 46, 000 crore) and are the toast of the democratic world, particularly with our latest peaceful and stable transition. Today’s world where globalisation is cutting so beautifully into unipolarity suits us fine and we should neither want to, nor think that we can, rock the boat. We have reached this far because we shed our xenophobia from the mid-80s onwards, junked our suspicion of the West, fear of the US (beginning with the Indira-Reagan meeting and cemented during the Clinton visit here) and abhorrence of the global market-place. Manmohan Singh is much too wise not to know that whatever the compulsions of domestic politics, the last thing we need is the return of that old, suspicious, paranoid third-worldist rhetoric when the same western world we were told to dread when we were in our teens, is actually worrying about us taking away their skilled jobs.


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