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Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy and the Bomb
Even when thunderous editorials in the Left-leaning newspapers asked for transparency about the "diaologue", the two protagonists could turn a deaf ear to them and get away with it. They could afford to ignore carping comments because they had the confidence of their bosses. Talbott was a buddy of Bill Clinton and Jaswant Singh was chosen by Atal Bihari Vajpayee as his special envoy to mend India’s fences with the US. The BJP’s return to power in the summer of 1998 marked a paradigmatic shift in India’s foreign policy. Until then, the relations between India and the US were cold to the point that "estrangement" was the right word to describe them. It always puzzled observers why anti-Americanism was strong in Pakistan, though the two governments had the best of relations. The inverse was true about India where anti-Americanism held ground only in South Block and Left academia while the two governments pulled in opposite directions on most issues. As it transpires, the BJP was determined to change the mindset in MEA because it felt that in a unipolar world, the best bet was to be with the superpower. The commonalities between India and the US were too many. What’s more, the US establishment’s worldview on Israel and other issues coincided with that of the BJP. This explains why early in his prime ministerial career, Vajpayee sent Jaswant Singh on a secret mission to the Ambassadorial Roosevelt House in New Delhi as his interlocutor. How important the US was in the BJP scheme of things is borne out by the fact that Vajpayee wrote a special letter to Clinton explaining the circumstances in which India was forced to go in for Pokhran II. In his innocence, he overlooked how China and Pakistan would react when he admitted that the explosions were to take care of the threat their nuclear programmes posed to India. But for Talbott, the single point agenda was to bring India on board the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Pokhran II signalled the failure of the carrot and stick policy the US had been adopting to prevent India from going nuclear. The Indian deception was so foolproof that the US had no clue when Pokhran II hit the Clinton administration like a bolt from the blue. The US chose to overlook the fact that the BJP had committed itself to testing the bomb. It fell upon Talbott to persuade the Pakistanis not to follow in the footsteps of India and test a nuclear device of its own. His persuasive skills failed when the Nawaz Sharief government succumbed to public opinion and tested the bomb within a fortnight of Pokhran II. It signalled the severest setback to Clinton’s non-proliferation agenda. The sanctions the US imposed on India in the wake of Pokhran II could not have endeared the Clinton administration to the Vajpayee regime. It was against this backdrop that Talbott began his "dialogue". It had its ups and downs as when the Kargil war brought the traditional rivals to the brink of a nuclear war. But Talbott and Jaswant Singh stayed course though the dialogue did not yield anything dramatic. Public opinion in India prevented Jaswant Singh from going beyond a particular point on CTBT. As it turned out, even Clinton could not get the Treaty ratified by Congress. But this does not detract from the significance of the "dialogue" for India and the US. If today the US considers India its "strategic partner," Talbott and Jaswant Singh can claim to have played a significant role in the metamorphosis of their relationship. For Talbott, the high point of the "dialogue" was the confidence Vajpayee reposed in Clinton, whose intervention resulted in the withdrawal of the Pakistani intruders from Kargil averting thereby a possible catastrophic nuclear showdown. There are few parallels in diplomacy of the kind of engagement Talbott and Jaswant Singh had. Talbott, who was with Time newsweekly analysing international events before he stumbled into diplomacy, has put to great use his journalistic skills in writing this book. It is all the more riveting as he has several anecdotes to narrate like when George Fernandes was frisked in the US and I.K. Gujral failed to make an impact on Clinton as the US side had "trouble hearing what he was saying". A sequel to the book by Jaswant Singh will make the story of their engaging engagement complete. |
THROUGHOUT the "dialogue" that American
diplomat Strobe Talbott had with Indian Minister Jaswant Singh,
speculation reigned about the subject of their discussions and where it
would ultimately lead the two nations to. It is a tribute to their
hide-and-seek skills that even when "they met 14 times at 10
locations in seven countries on three continents," journalists on
the beat barely got anything on their deliberations.
