Clarity begins at home

A nation which excuses its failures can excuse itself into complete disaster.

George Kennan observed that history doesn’t forgive a nation’s mistakes when explained merely in terms of domestic politics. A nation which excuses its own failures, he added, because of its traditional habits and considers these sacred, can excuse itself into complete disaster. The BJP/RSS have nurtured a dangerous belief that citizens whose matribhoomi (motherland) is India but punyabhoomi (sacred land) lies outside, are not worthy of being considered good citizens, and somehow, not entirely loyal. They believe that most Indian Muslims feel reassured only when our relations with Pakistan are mended, for that alone makes them feel that the Indian State is acting with wisdom.

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During the poll campaign, the BJP wooed Muslims with ardour and conspicuous attention, greedily accepting some of them as the BJP’s favoured drum-beaters. Certain sar-kari maulanas offered to repay this favour by diligently issuing fatwas to back the present BJP administration. However, recent exit polls didn’t demonstrate that these gestures had succeeded in securing additions to the BJP’s Muslim votebank.

Indians have shown good sense in maintaining on an even keel India’s relations with the US, Russia, the EU, Japan and China. Of course, there’s a tilt in our policies in favour of the sole superpower. This has followed the realisation that during a period of stress, embarrassment and psychological pressure, the friendly Bush administration can do without our criticism in a difficult election year. India’s hope, not all that loudly articulated, has been that the US, too, will show sensitivity to its core interests. Our policy-makers have remained mindful of India’s size and weight, and recognised that our policy articulation in specific areas must continue to reflect our broad interests and reach.

Not one of our political parties in has articulated certain strategic interests traditionally important for us. A couple of these are: self-reliance in a broad variety of weapons systems and supplies;and our ocean-related strategic interests, which include freedom of the seas and safety of passage through choke points, especially in the Indian Ocean. India needs to keep under review, even as we make the effort to structure better relations with our nuclear neighbours, China and Pakistan, their diligent efforts to strengthen their maritime and naval infrastructure. In recent years, this has led to work involving Myanmar’s coastal islands and the Gwadar Oramora area of Baluchistan in the Arabian Sea.

Our internal problems that concern religion, caste and ethnicity also need to be addressed. It needs to be repeated that any demands and suggestions that divide Indians from Indians must be eschewed as maintenance of national unity needs to be our principal strategic objective. In this context, a coherent strategy for the maintenance of domestic law and order has to be ensured and put into operation. This is the only way the nation can cope with separatist and insurgency problems. Above all, the Indian State, and our civil society, must constantly insist that our political and bureaucratic functionaries do not get involved with, and get contaminated by, lawless mafias.

India will need to structure a more focused foreign policy agenda than the various party manifestoes for this election appear to have done. Our policy-makers and articulators will need to concentrate on bilateral relations with all our neighbours. This agenda will have to be especially mindful of the problems currently facing Nepal and Sri Lanka. In recent times, India has omitted attending to these due to our domestic preoccupations and the national habit of delaying decisions. We usually tend to make up our minds only when problems become persistent, oppressive and unavoidable.

We need to confess that the NDA administration has dilly-dallied and refused to take several firm decisions that were required to ensure good governance within our country. For this, the first requirement is to ensure that our internal law and order situation remains satisfactory. The party in power attached importance to preserving certain less than significant votebanks, not merely the obviously important ones. In the process, the citizen could feel that day-to-day governance was being neglected. It was through this neglect that certain parts of Andhra Pradesh, the tribal belt of Jharkhand, unstable districts of Bihar, Naxalite regions in Bengal and the Bodo-Ulfa regions of Assam remained outside properly administered and stable areas.

The primary constitutional duty for this belongs to our state governments. It remains the Centre’s duty to encourage and assist state governments to ensure efficient maintenance of law and order, and fair and just governance. The Centre did take, in this context, certain initiatives in respect of counselling and assisting Bhutan. Why then did we remain passive in respect of Nepal? In our preoccupation with the broader cause of peace with Pakistan, we failed to even obliquely discourage Pakistan from making unfriendly moves meant only to hurt India, through their collaboration with the Jamaat-i-Islami and the Bangladesh intelligence services.

We need to ask ourselves what effect V.P. Singh’s effort to earn personal political kudos by mixing caste and communal considerations with eradication of poverty and the empowerment of the poor and the disadvantaged had in vitiating social peace and economic growth. Apologists have attempted to make a plausible case for the government’s hesitations and caution. However, a large, self-respecting country like India has to be conscious of its interests, capabilities and size. Unless one is able to solve problems of governance and management internally, and on its periphery, problems tend generally to fester. Festering wounds have a habit of becoming infectious, more painful and less capable of responding even to antibiotics. One example of a small problem growing larger is the case of Veerappan. The matter has festered on for nearly 18 years!

Certain sections of the NDA administration have suggested that its habit of delaying decision-making could have been inherited from the two short-lived administrations that preceded it, as also from the P.V. Narasimha Rao era. Rao’s brilliant mind, erudition and talent for explaining things away cogently, promoted his inclination never to take tough or prompt decisions. He is reportedly famous for having stated that not taking a decision is also a kind of decision.

His mental make-up reminds one of another Sultan of Delhi, Ferozeshah Tughlak. Ferozeshah, like Rao, could always calculate his moves in considerable detail. He too was able to frighten himself through imaging in picturesque detail potential dangers that could face him. Rao refused to respond, in any manner, to the destruction of the Babri masjid, and in the process eliminated the credibility of his party for a while.

During his premiership the subsidiary institutions on which the main Congress organisation had always been based since Gandhiji’s time were erased. Some of these remain to be revived. The Sewa Dal, the Mahila Congress, the Youth Congress and the Krishak and Mazdoor-related organisations of the party were starved of resources, motivation, leadership and allowed to wither away. He achieved a near complete decay of the party by nominating as his successor to the post of Congress president that peerless ‘vidushak’ of the era, Sitaram Kesri.

The bedrock for forging a cogent and coherent foreign policy framework is the internal strength and moral functioning of one’s State.

The writer is a former Foreign Secretary