The UPA government looks increasingly like a band of nervous submariners sailing through hostile waters. They dive underwater at the first sensing of danger and then watch the world through the periscope. Except, the periscope in this case is news TV. Or frankly, why blame just TV, the entire media.
You can list countless examples of this peculiar behaviour by UPA 2. But let us confine ourselves right now to three. Not just because we follow the journalism schools’ three-example rule, but also because all three have the same unfortunate context, and a similarly self-defeating consequence.
First of all, I must send out an apology to real submariners, who are among the toughest, coolest and the most courageous sailors I use the term submariner here purely as a convenient metaphor. But the first example of this panicky submariner’s approach to governance came just this week, with the government at the very highest levels mostly in hiding, or responding to whatever the periscope revealed.
E.P. Unny, India’s finest political cartoonist by far and the Indian Express newsroom’s crown jewel, got it so brutally and brilliantly right with his caricature of Defence Minister A.K. Antony, wrapped in a toga, described as Mark-II Antony speech.
You’ve had other ministers go back and forth with their statements on sundry other issues. But a defence minister on an incident on the LoC? He now says he first spoke only from available information and now that he knew better, terrorists dressed in Army fatigues became not just Pakistani regulars, but also from their special forces.
And how did he find that out? Because the Army chief himself visited the spot, and brought back the facts. Where did he get them from? How does it square with his own unit registering an FIR blaming terrorists? Forget all that. You’ve now ducked under water, danger lurks, so do whatever you can to save yourself for the day.
Further, because the media and the BJP are screaming, you also give us an incredible innovation in governance at the top: the defence minister laying out the terms for a resumption of dialogue with Pakistan. Where is the external affairs minister? Where is the prime minister? Hiding underwater? Waiting for this new threat to pass? And never mind if it consumes your policy.
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The other two examples also tell you how only a weak and perennially nervous government lets mere incidents and 48 hours of talking-head outrage panic it into policy disasters.
The beheading of an Indian soldier on the LoC in January, and later the killing of Sarabjit Singh in a Lahore jail, followed by the usual procession of OB vans to their respective villages and the arrival of retired warmongers on studio debates, even had the prime minister breaking his silence and saying it could no longer be business as usual with Pakistan.
In one weak moment, he had abandoned a policy of engagement he had invested in over so many years. But you threw out Pakistani players from the Indian Hockey League, blocked their cricketers from IPL, cancelled a couple of academic seminars.
If revenge and punishment is what you were after, was this a sufficient tit-for-tat for the loss of two Indian soldiers’ lives? It wasn’t. It was self-defeatingly silly. Pakistani artists, players coming to perform in India is an exercise of India’s soft power that Pakistani extremists and militarists resent.
We now played right into their hands, our stupidity compounded by the fact that while we kept the players out, several Pakistani umpires and coaches continued to appear in these tournaments including one Asad Rauf, suspected of indulging in such mainstream Indian activities as match-fixing. We suspended trade, blocked the train and bus to Pakistan (which a mob, now of the Congress, again did at Amritsar this Friday), and, at least in the case of Sarabjit Singh, got even in somewhat greater if medieval style, by orchestrating a frenzy that led to the killing of a hapless Pakistani in a Jammu jail.
Of course, the OB vans, studio warriors and BJP hawks have all moved on. Nobody has returned to check on either Sarabjit Singh’s or the beheaded soldier’s grieving families. That was merely a story, a flavour of those 48 heady hours. But the policy damage endures.
Only weak leadership allows mere incidents to shape its policy. Leaders have to have the nerve, foresight, patience, thick skin and skill to navigate through periods of noise to protect their big ideas.
India has never had a leader, nor is it likely to have one (even if the next one has a name beginning with ‘M’) who would say something as stupid as he will never talk to Pakistan unless it becomes a friend. Engaging with Pakistan, through phases good and bad, has been a policy with every prime minister of India.
The BJP is now setting fantastic, perfect-world conditions for a resumption of dialogue. Even during the Kargil conflict and post Parliament attack, Vajpayee never broke contact with Pakistan. Nobody in the BJP had even whimpered in protest then. Now even the Congress, starting with Sonia Gandhi, is flogging its own government.
Which brings us to another significant point. We have never, never had a government in India whose foreign policy was set from outside. But UPA 2 is a sad exception. Historians could argue that its decline began with the Congress party openly upbraiding the prime minister for the Sharm el-Sheikh statement and forcing him to resile from it in humiliation. The government has not recovered since, as many others within the cabinet and outside took the cue that it was open season on the prime minister. His writ weakened.
Soon enough, and inevitably, his government had lost that one attribute without which nobody can govern, described in that untranslatable Urdu word, iqbal (see ‘The Great Indian Hijack’). Of course the prime minister cannot escape the blame for giving in too easily. But the UPA’s most damaging contribution in its 10 years will be the undermining of the office of the prime minister, and thereby the disturbing of the centre of gravity of India’s governance.
Postscript
A short footnote, however, would be in order. Even as we all vented in public debate and our government cynically bought peace with us all by throwing out Pakistani sportsmen, singers and businessmen, our Army had got even in its own way, killing not two but three Pakistani soldiers in the same general area where the beheading incident happened. This is precisely what the Army chief had said then in his press conference: that these are local incidents, and the Army knows how to deal with them.
Ok, the Army may have still fallen short of Sushma Swaraj’s expectations by seven, and in not bringing the heads back (she had demanded 10 Pakistani heads), but this is a very, very tough, efficient and unforgiving Army. And you can be sure that the score for the five lives lost in Poonch will be more than settled soon enough. Except, they won’t invite OB vans to cover this live.
This is not a victim Army, abandoned by the political class and the nation, or used as gun fodder. The last thing the world’s fourth most powerful Army deserves is the rest of us feeling sorry for it.
Also read: The great Indian hijack