Sunday, May 19 , 2002		Books

Policy not inspired by nationalism
M.S.N. Menon

India's Foreign Policy and its Neighbours
by J. N. Dixit. Gyan Publishing House, New Delhi. Pages 363. Rs. 540

I MUST confess that I am outraged, first, by the title of the book, and, then, because it is a compilation of newspaper articles.

The author is not to be blamed for both. He has spent a life dealing with India's foreign relations. One, therefore, expected much from his writings. But, how is one to relish a book when there are publisher's mistakes on almost every page?

This is a book more on India's foreign relations than on foreign policy. About 115 pages are devoted to policy matters, the rest to India's relations with its neighbours. I am more interested in the 115 pages. The rest are records of failures in foreign relations.

India never had a well-thought-out policy towards its neighbours. Before World War II, we had a multi-polar world. After the War, we had a bipolar world. And, then, a unipolar world.

Nations were once free to make their foreign policies. But no more. During the last half a century, it was the USA that determined global policies for most of the nations. They simply followed in the wake of the USA.

Thus, America imposed the policy of anti-communism on most of the countries of the world in the post-War years. In the years that followed the cold war, it imposed the policy of globalisation, which was followed by the policy of human rights promotion. Now it is following a global policy against terrorism. No one wants to step out of line.

So, for all practical purposes, India does not have a global policy. It follows the policy of the USA.

Sure, the world is not happy with the present unipolar world, for it provides no freedom to a nation to choose its foreign policy goals. So, the world wants to go back to a multipolar world. But, unfortunately, even the greatest advocates of a multipolar world, Russia and China, are highly dependent on America, and are in no position to challenge the USA.

In these circumstances, nations play only a limited role in global affairs. At best, to change regional policies. India had its fair share of lurching from one policy to another in its region.

A country may set any foreign policy goal. But it is its economic and military power which will finally determine the course it can pursue and the status it can command in the world. India banked on its moral worth, but failed. And it trusted the honesty of others. They betrayed. And we wanted the world to believe that we are still beholden to the memory of Gandhi. All these made our foreign policy surreal.

Independent India had no clear foreign policy goal. For that matter, it had no clear political doctrine, economic policy or defence strategy. It talked of peace, but fought three wars with its neighbours. India was more serious about non-alignment. But, then, non-alignment was no policy. Nor was it a goal. It helped India to keep out of power blocs.

But was it truly out of power blocs? It was not. The mind of India was with the Soviet Union. Even Vajpayee supported the Indo-Soviet Treaty! But India's heart (that of the ruling class and the bureaucracy) was with America. These contradictions persist to this day with the nationalists within the BJP (a miniscule group) pulling in one direction and the traders and industrialists pulling in another direction. The BJP is condemned to look like Janus.

Dixit says that the Indian political and intellectual renaissance had broad strands. One tried to adopt and adapt the western model and its values in order to catch up with Western progress. The other was a reaction to the arrogance of the western rulers. He says that Bankim Chandra, Vivekananda and Dayanand represented the second trend. And Max Mueller and Sir Williams Jones helped India to re-discover its identity.

In accepting the Western model of development, Nehru ruled out a distinct Indian role in global affairs. He was ready to go with the socialist world. That India was like the Sun, radiating its civilisation influence throughout Asia, and even Europe— these ideas failed to inspire Nehru. Perhaps he was not in the know of these. Thus, India failed to develop a foreign policy based on Indian nationalism.

That is why India failed to have a meaningful and inspiring foreign policy in all these years. The BJP is trying to correct it through its ‘Look East’ policy. In fact, the so-called ‘progressives’ in the Congress, i.e. those with socialistic orientation, were afraid of recalling India's great past. They feared that this would strengthen revivalist trends. But more to the point: they were afraid that this would generate hostile reaction among minorities. So, nationalism was quietly given the burial for the sake of winning votes of minorities.

But India paid a heavy price for giving up its nationalism. Dixit mentions five areas of foreign policy failures: (i) in taking the Kashmir issue to the UN, (ii) in not reacting firmly when Pakistan signed a security agreement with the USA in 1954, (iii) in not being alert to the Sino-Pak nexus, (iv) in letting China take over Tibet without demanding a quid quo pro, and (v) in not going ahead with the nuclear programme after China exploded the bomb in 1964. India would never have failed in these areas had it been inspired by nationalism.

In a world dominated by the nationalist interests of the USA, India tried to pursue moral considerations. No wonder, it failed. Dixit is not exactly a nationalist, but in pointing out that the world is still governed by nationalist interests, he has done a good turn to the country, which is still under the spell of many idealistic hangovers.