What will it take to make Indian mouse into a tiger?

Prabhu Chawla's revelation (in Mail Today March 31, 2008) that the Communist Party of India (Marxist) played a role in canceling the Dalai Lama's scheduled meeting with the Vice-President Mr. Hamid Ansari tells us a lot about India’s foreign policy. Beyond the issues of non-alignment, independence and its new orientation is the reality that it is unusually timid.
I am reminded of the Russian poet Evegeni Yevtushenko's 1960s work “Monologue of a Polar Fox On An Alaskan Fur Farm”. The poem is an allegory on the subject of freedom in the erstwhile Soviet Union. A blue fox being bred for its fur in an Alaskan farm finds its cage door open. It leaves the cage for a while, revels in his new found freedom, dreams of the future life outside, and then he returns into the cage because as the poet notes, “A child of captivity is too weak for freedom.”
India is like that poor blue fox. For 60 years it has been in a cage, not always of its own making. And now when the door has opened, it is unable to cope, and finds greater comfort in remaining in its prison, rather than risking the joys and uncertainties of freedom.

Jawaharlal

It is no use blaming the communists for this predicament. The larger Indian intelligentsia, political formations like the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party must take responsibility for the state of affairs. As for the Left, its attitude is not remarkable. Through their history, they have set one standard for themselves, and another for the others. Their foreign connections, including funding, is seen by them as being part of socialist internationalism; similar activities of others are attributable to machinations of imperialism. China's policies — be they expressed in Mao's homicidal sweeps like the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution — are regrettable “errors” of a great man, while the mild pragmatism of our Congress party in seeking to maintain good ties with the United States is a sell-out to, what else, imperialism.
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's idea of non-alignment was to create space in the power blocs that emerged in the wake of the Cold War. But it came with a price, for example on Kashmir. Beginning 1953, after a war and many tortuous sessions with the United Nations mediators, India and Pakistan came close to resolving the Kashmir issue through bilateral talks. The protagonists were Pandit Nehru and the Indian government and the Pakistani governments, headed first by Khwaja Nazimuddin, and then by Muhammad Ali Bogra. Despite Sheikh Abdullah’s arrest in June of 1953, talks between the two countries were undertaken, with Nehru indicating his acquiescence, probably for the last time, for a plebiscite to decide the issue. But, the US decision in February 1954 to begin large-scale arms aid to Pakistan put paid to this.
But notwithstanding the paranoia of the Left, India was never important enough for the US to directly involve itself in our affairs. When Pakistan was ready to do their bidding, why would they have wasted their time on an argumentative and self-important basket-case that this country was till the 1990s?
Speaking to a TV channel last week, CPI(M) elder Jyoti Basu charged the United Progressive Alliance government with being far more pro-US than Jawaharlal or Indira were. Nehru may have been critical of America, but faced with a challenge across the Himalayas in 1962, the country he turned to was the US. The letter Nehru wrote to John F. Kennedy asking for a military alliance with the US in mid-November 1962 is still classified, but its summary prepared by S. Gopal reveals that for the father of non-alignment, the concept was both strategic and flexible.
For 20 years after she swept the elections of 1971 Indira Gandhi's world view dominated that of India. Both in her domestic and foreign policies, she followed a highly personalised style, one that tended to privilege personal over the national interest. So instead of depending on institutions like Parliament, Cabinet and Ministries, she worked her policies through chosen advisors. Little wonder, then, that the decision to conduct India's first nuclear test in Pokhran in May of 1974 was not based on any detailed assessment of why it was to be undertaken and what the government expected to do after the event.

Indira

What the Left finds so attractive about Indira Gandhi, reviled by many of them in her lifetime, is a selective reading of her foreign policy — her decision to hold back formal condemnation of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, her friendship with Cuba and Palestine, and her anti-American posturing. It ignores the fact that India's policy of détente, and then entente, with the United States was initiated by Indira Gandhi — the first during the Emergency itself and the second beginning with her second coming in 1980. Everything that has happened since — the economic liberalisation, the defence cooperation with the United States and indeed the Indo-US nuclear deal, have their origins in decisions taken between 1980 and1984.
The consequences of these policies have been far reaching. We already know what economic liberalisation has wrought, notwithstanding some carping criticism of “neo liberalism”. It has brought closer relations with the United States, which in turn has paid enormous dividends in terms of lubricating India’s political relations with a slew of countries ranging from Europe, the ASEAN and Japan.
This has had a noticeable impact in India’s relations with China. In Bush's first term, and till 2005, at least, the Chinese wooed India eagerly. The breakthrough decision to provide a political input on border negotiations in 2003, and the Agreement on Guiding Principles and Political Parameters, signed in April 2005, were part of this trend. They feared that the US was bent on “encircling” them by creating an alliance of democracies — Japan, Australia, India, Russia and the new Central Asian republics. But once they found that the Left had effectively stymied the Indo-US entente, the tone and tenor of their relations with India changed. When Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani visited Arunachal in 2003 we did not hear any protests from Beijing. But when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited the state in February 2008 the Chinese issued a formal protest.
What the Left has achieved is much more than torpedoing the Indo-US nuclear deal. Its stranglehold on the government has prevented any meaningful reform of the public sector, which includes the stultifying bureaucracy. It has succeeded in delaying India's steady incorporation into the higher tier of the comity of nations. The process began in the NDA period when India was invited to participate in a Group of Eight meeting in Evian and was followed by moves to accommodate New Delhi into the United Nations Security Council. The nuclear deal was a major detail that needed to be taken care of. The leading countries of the world could not have had India in the UNSC or the G-8, even while it remained a pariah in terms of nuclear and high-tech trade.

Choice

Our cage door did not open because the Americans pressed some lever. It did so for two reasons. First, after 1991 the Indian business class has discovered that outside the open cage door were not threats, but vast opportunities. The second was that India surprised the world by bucking against the US-led efforts to freeze its nuclear status as a “have not”. The Pokhran II tests of 1998 cut through the self-imposed prison constructed by our own rhetoric of disarmament.
Today those who push the so-called “independent” foreign policy for India, are actually seeking to persuade us that the prison never existed. They want to neutralise India by creating an association in the mind of the people with the now obsolete concept of non-alignment. The Left’s ambition runs deeper towards signing the country up with the alliance of autocracies — Russia, Iran, China, Venezuela and Cuba.
India is being offered a choice today. Hitherto, Indian policies were often determined by the actions of others. Today, New Delhi’s views and policies make a difference. India’s growing economic and military power, combined with the soft power that only a flourishing democracy and an open society can exercise, provide it with the wherewithal to become a truly global player. But while the US can offer us one option of faring forward into the new world, there is also the other— of going back into the cage.
The article was first published in Mail Today April 2, 2008

Past Imperfect: The Multiple Narratives of Bangladesh's creation

This article was triggered by Rahul Gandhi's claim that his family "divided Pakistan". It appeared first in Hindustan Times April 18, 2007

In a subcontinent where literacy and education are in short supply, it's not surprising that popular narratives, and even myths, take on a life of their own.Take the case of Bangladesh. We probably have two major versions of how Bangladesh was created in Pakistan, two in Bangladesh and one in India.
The Indian account is fairly simple and mostly accurate: geography compelled India to get involved in the Pakistani civil war of 1971.Through the determined leadership of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, it faced down the US, aided the creation of Bangladesh and inflicted a major military defeat on Pakistan.

So, as election rhetoric, Rahul Gandhi's statement listing the "division of Pakistan" as part of his family's achievements is hardly remarkable since it's based on how most Indians recall the events of those times anyway.
But the narratives linked to Bangladesh's two major political parties are more complex. The Awami League believes that Sheikh Mujibur Rehman and the movement that he led single-handedly created Bangladesh.
The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) prefers to shift the focus to the efforts of the erstwhile East Pakistan Rifles, whose rebellion provided steel to the movement.The leader of this struggle was Major Zia-ur Rehman, the man who later founded the BNP and became President of the country.

The Pakistani version of the events was visible in two successive statements of its official spokesperson, Tasnim Aslam. On Sunday, reacting to Gandhi's remarks, she said that it 'validates' the fact that 'India has always been trying to interfere in Pakistan's internal affairs'.
On Monday, she modified it slightly: "Maybe there were some circumstances; India took advantage of those circumstances to dismember Pakistan".

This duality is more striking in President Musharraf's autobiography, Line of Fire, which pins the blame on the 'wily' Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, incompetent generals and politicians, as well as on India, which "stabbed Pakistan in the back by attacking it across the border on several fronts in East Pakistan on November 21, 1971".

Historians would continue to debate whether the Indian military intervention was good, bad or even necessary.But the fact that Bangladesh firmly established itself as a nation, despite internal turbulence, indicates that the Indian role in its creation, however significant, was secondary. What was central was the circumstances around the emergence of Pakistan, the actions of its leaders in 1947-71, the criminal conduct of the its army in its eastern wing in 1971 and the determination of the Bangla people to safeguard their identity.

This judgment is not an 'Indian' pronouncement. It was arrived at by the Hamoodur Rehman Commission, appointed by the Pakistan government to inquire into the war. The report was readied by 1972 and declassified only in 2000 after large chunks of it were published in India Today. Though it grossly understated the number of people killed, ignored Bhutto's role and that of the 'butcher' of Dhaka, Lt Gen Tikka Khan, it did not quite whitewash the conduct of the Pakistan army in Bangladesh.

The division of their country, or the creation of Bangladesh, is clearly something Pakistan inflicted on itself. After the pre-emptive atrocities of its army in 1971, the chances of the two wings of Pakistan remaining one were nil. The Bangladesh government estimates that between March 1971 and the surrender in Dhaka in mid-December, the Pakistani military regime was responsible for the death of three million people. The Pakistanis claim that only about 26,000 people died. Scholars who study genocide place the figure at hundreds of thousands and rank it as one of the terrible events of the last century.

Since they are not works of history popular narratives do sometimes tend to be one-sided over-simplifications. But whether as folklore or history, the events surrounding the Bangladesh war continue to have a powerful bearing on contemporary affairs of South Asia. This is, of course, most manifest in Bangladesh, where the rival versions of the freedom struggle have led to a political deadlock between Hasina Wajed, daughter of the martyred Mujibur Rehman, and Khaleda Zia, widow of the martyred Zia-ur Rehman.

To an extent, this rivalry is a modern myth. Two days after Sheikh Mujib announced the formation of Bangladesh in Dhaka, Zia endorsed it and called on all Bengalis to fight the West Pakistan army in the name of the motherland. Zia was neither an opponent of Mujib, nor was he implicated in his assassination. He was merely propelled by several coups to assume the presidency of Bangladesh which, unfortunately, remains divided by the imagined history of its own freedom struggle.

Ignorance of history often leads to imagined grievances and imputed motives, which have their own baleful consequences. India's role in "stabbing Pakistan in the back" has for long been used as a means to justify Pakistani support for terrorist and separatist activity against India.In the case of Bangladesh, the multiple interpretations of its creation lie in the contemporary uses various parties wish to give to an event.

But the myth of Indira Gandhi being hell-bent on war is inaccurate. As the country's leader, her reaction was essentially defensive. The outbreak of civil war and the massacres in Bangladesh led to a huge exodus of refugees into India. This was when the Naxalbari movement was at its height and Maulana Bhashani, the peasant leader with pro-Chinese inclinations, was a major influence on East Pakistan's peasantry.

A prolonged civil war in East Pakistan, with violence spilling over into parts of India, was seen as a major threat to the stability of the region. In retrospect, Indira Gandhi's action may seem faultless, but they were fraught with a great deal of risk. By mid-1971, she knew that Indian policy risked confrontation with the US and China as well, and she carefully prepared for the eventuality.

In 1965, India had been forced to call a ceasefire because of a Chinese ultimatum, so a discarded Soviet proposal for an Indo-Soviet treaty was revived to give India some diplomatic-security cushion. This was a period when the Soviets were locked in a near conflict with China. Indira Gandhi travelled across the world in the face of US opposition to build a climate of opinion against Pakistan.

Only when everything was in place, by the end of November, were Indian forces asked to press the Pakistani forces in Bangladesh. Even then nothing was foreordained. Pakistan had the option of making a deal with Sheikh Mujib at any time, but it did not act. Neither did the US. Indian war plans were cautious. They did not initially envisage the capture of Dhaka; their aim was to systematically tighten the ring around it. Some good generalship on the Indian side and a great deal of softening up by the Bangla rebels led to the abrupt collapse of the Pakistan army.

No wonder Henry Kissinger's assessment, uttered at a crisis meeting in Washington at the time, "The lady is cold-blooded and tough," has become part of a popular historical narrative that rings true to many Indians even today.