India learning to play it both ways

FOREIGN Secretary Vikrim Misri’s measured remarks on his visit to Bangladesh with the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs in Delhi this week is a welcome return to the realistic middle ground for which India’s foreign policy has been well known.

Most interestingly, Misri addressed the Sheikh Hasina question with full forthrightness. He was speaking to his MPs, but, no doubt, the message was being read and heard in Dhaka equally carefully. The result was a fine balance, an adroit defence of a friend of whom you have not fully approved in the past nor in the present circumstances, but cannot fully wash your hands of.

Misri said Hasina was using "private communication devices" — sometimes called a phone or an ipad or a computer, via any number of service providers — to make the highly critical comments that she had recently done on the Bangladesh interim government and its chief adviser Muhammed Yunus as well as Dhaka’s lack of protection of the minority Hindu community in Bangladesh. Misri never once said whether India approved of what Hasina was saying. He pointed out that India’s ties with Dhaka were not dependent on a "single political party" but focused on the "people of Bangladesh."

So, let’s read between the not-so-finely-drawn lines. India, Misri was clearly saying, was ready to move on from its old tie with Hasina and try to restore a measure of normalcy with Naya Bangladesh — after all, it’s not as if Delhi has not dealt with not-so-friendly governments in its eastern neighbour before. Ask Ronen Sen, the old ambassador with a penchant for history, about the time when Mujibur Rahman, Hasina’s father, was assassinated that late night or early morning, depending on your sleep cycle, back in 1975, and why such a brutal event, if not an assassination, was waiting to happen. Ask the other ageing diplomat with a razor-sharp mind, Deb Mukharji, about his interactions with Hasina and Khaleda Zia and why the two women who ran the country between them for decades detested each other with such full-blown certainty, and why the August 4 "uprising" or "debacle", depending on how you saw it, was inevitable.

Let’s move on. Misri was telling Dhaka, even as he spoke to the Indian parliamentarians in Delhi. It’s been an ugly episode, ugly for us, too. Misri will never say this, nor will any serving Indian diplomat, but the fact remains that when India supported Hasina in her last victory this January as well as the last time she won, in January 2019, it had not-so-delicately held its diplomatic nose.

Involve the opposition parties, Delhi had told Hasina repeatedly, talk to Khaleda Zia and to the rest of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, ask them to participate in the elections, this is not a one-party state. Delhi’s advice to Mujib’s daughter was as much for herself, for the people of Bangladesh, whose loyalties were divided down the middle between the Awami League and the BNP, as for the safety and security of its own north-eastern states, several of which share the more than 4,000-km-long boundary between them.

India’s new tie with Bangladesh is as interesting as the one it is building with the Afghan Taliban. Only a few weeks ago, senior Indian diplomat JP Singh travelled again to Kabul to meet the Taliban Defence Minister, Mullah Yaqoob — who also happens to be Mullah Omar’s son. The meeting set off alarm bells in several parts of the neighbourhood, notably Pakistan.

Some Americans wondered if Delhi was making nice with the bad guys — although it is more than likely that the Deep States in India as well as in the US were fully on board with the move. Remember that the Taliban have not touched one brick of the US embassy in Kabul since the Americans fled two years ago; certainly, all sides are waiting for another round of the great game. Certainly, the Russians are obliging by removing the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan from their list of banned entities.

You might wonder about Delhi’s hyper-realism, and what exactly is going on. You might ask yourself: is it actually true that India wants to be friends with a regime that has banned women from singing, or girls from studying in schools beyond Class VI and kept most other human rights in abeyance? The fact is that India is taking a leaf out of the book the big powers have read and torn up, chapter by chapter, whenever they felt like it.

The simple answer is that India may be finally learning to play it both ways. To support the ghoulish Taliban regime because it helps protect India’s northern border once removed — it is Pakistan that has a border, not India, of course — and because India hopes that a friendly Taliban could sometime in the future come to its aid in allowing Indian operatives to put pressure on Pakistan on its northern frontier.

As the year comes to an end, the interesting change in the Modi government’s foreign policy in its third term is that it has no special friends or enemies. (The one exception, of course, is Pakistan). The decision to end the fracas at the Line of Actual Control and strike a deal with the Chinese was taken with the full force of knowledge that a military standoff at high altitude was being undermined by a burgeoning imbalance in bilateral trade. Perhaps, the Russians helped — who knows.

Defence Minister Rajnath Singh’s visit to Moscow this week is as much a part of this hyper-realism as is the decision to cut a deal with the incoming Trump administration, whatever it takes. The last time around when Trump was in power, some arguments — some as small as high tariffs around American chicken’s legs, medical equipment and super-expensive Harley Davidson motorcycles — had threatened to overtake the relationship. This time around, Delhi is not about to strike the iron with things so small and silly.

The moral of 2024 is also that power is not enough; it is the exercise of that power that is equally important. From Yunus’ Bangladesh to the Raj Kapoor dynasts who recently met PM Modi, the message is simple. Only if you stand long enough can you be counted.