RETHINKING FOREIGN POLICY

I wrote this in the Calcutta Telegraph of 2 June 2009. I floated a few out-of-the-box ideas about foreign policy; sadly, none came to anything. DARK HORSES IN THE RACE

The only surprise in the six portfolios Manmohan Singh announced at the outset was S.M. Krishna. After a more or less flawless career as chief minister of Karnataka and governor of Maharashtra, he has earned his spurs and been elevated to the Central cabinet. It takes ages in the Congress to earn your spurs; it is no wonder, then, that he is close to eighty. He has been given a portfolio in which he has no experience, unless one counts the foreign worthies who called on him in his earlier roles. With such long years in Indian politics, he must be a master of Realpolitik. But then, international Realpolitik is played by somewhat different rules. The real significance of his appointment was in the people whom Manmohan Singh had kept out of the foreign ministry — P. Chidambaram who, despite or because of his high intelligence quotient, finds it difficult to charm anybody, and Pranab Mukherjee, Manmohan Singh’s man for all seasons, whom he placed in another, more critical ministry — finance. The Prime Minister has put another dark horse to help Krishna in running around — Shashi Tharoor. If Krishna lacks energy, Tharoor would make up for it. The change of guard creates the possibility at last of a change of direction in foreign policy, heralded in his last term by Manmohan Singh’s befriending of George W. Bush. Krishna gave an inaugural press conference. It was a tame, probably orchestrated, affair. It was kept scrupulously clean of any new idea; even Pranab Mukherjee could not have been more boring. Perhaps the only sentence Mukherjee would have avoided was the hackneyed quotation from Vajpayee about neighbours being difficult to avoid. But a single flop is not enough to write off an entire minister. The most urgent issue the new foreign affairs team will face is Sri Lanka. After the Sinhalese took over from the British, they threw Tamils out of government jobs as well as tea gardens. They reinforced entry barriers into government jobs by making Sinhalese the official language. So the Tamils had a valid grievance. Prabhakaran did them a great disservice by starting an armed rebellion to remedy the grievance. Rajiv Gandhi compounded it by sending the Indian army to subdue him, and Prabhakaran responded with a tactical error — he had Rajiv assassinated. Thence followed the prolonged tragedy that has now led to the extirpation of Prabhakaran’s Tigers, and left Sri Lankan Tamils at the mercy of the Sinhalese. Pranab Mukherjee flew off to Colombo from time to time, and flew back with assurances from the Sri Lankan government. The time has come to deliver on the assurances; there should emerge one or more northern provinces with Tamil as their official language. But even if they did, they will do nothing to assuage the terrible human tragedy in northern Sri Lanka. We saw a lot of the Tamils on television; what struck me most was how starved they were, and how much poorer than their fellow Tamils across the Palk Straits. Since Sri Lankans are richer than Indians, it follows that their Tamils are even poorer than they. What the Tamils need is not linguistic nationalism, which today is an anachronism; what they need is development. It is a pretty useless word unless some specificity is injected into it. The first thing to do is to revive the traditional occupations of those Tamils, agricultural and fishing. Agriculture does not mean tea and spices as it does in southern Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan north is not lush green like the south; it is dry and parched like southern Tamil Nadu. It is fit to grow dry crops like cotton and oilseeds. What India should work on with the government of Sri Lanka is an agricultural plan for the north. First, the agricultural land should be surveyed and divided up into viable farms. Then they should be allocated to farmers or their cooperatives. The farmers should be helped to grow cotton and oilseeds. And India should give their produce — and all agricultural and plantation production of Sri Lanka — free access to the Indian market. While it does so, it should give the Tamils a thousand or two fishing boats as well. It should build up transport links. The time has come for Ram Setu; if the strong leader of the Opposition opposes it, he can be taught a second lesson that he will not win. Meanwhile, Indians should be encouraged to take holidays in Sri Lanka; it is a much more pleasant place for a holiday than most of India. Briefly, the immediate task for India in Sri Lanka is an economic one. Another neighbour that calls out for a change in policy is Pakistan. Pranab Mukherjee had a standard rant against it: that it should stop being the home of terrorists, and we would start being nice to it. He never noticed, however, that Pakistan experiences far more terror attacks itself than it makes on India. This has changed Pakistan in some radical ways. For one thing, although the Pakistanis are in such dire trouble, they blame India much less often for it. There was a time when India was accused of being behind all Pakistan’s troubles; now India hardly figures in Pakistan’s political debate. For another, dissent has emerged in Pakistan. There are many factions, and they speak with different voices. In other words, Pakistan is no longer the monolithic enemy that we have always depicted it to be; it is a congeries of parties, tribes, groups, gangs, which are at one another’s throats. If there are dissensions, then all Pakistanis cannot be our enemies; there must be some potential friends over there. I will not name names because anyone we target for friendship will become a target of Pakistani patriots. But Sind has been a battleground in which Muhajirs have more or less won against indigenes. Those Muhajirs were once Gujaratis and Biharis; they still have relatives in India. Briefly, none of today’s Sind residents has much enmity with India. The Punjabis, on the other hand, were professional India-haters; they have been the backbone of the Pakistani army. But today they have much to fear from the wild tribesmen of the northwest; some of them too may be ripe for friendship. Just how these friendships should be cultivated is an operational matter. But the time has come again for resumption of Indo-Pak conferences. It is also time perhaps for using the services of General Musharraf, who earns so much by giving talks in the US that he has managed to buy an expensive manor house in England — apart from the palace he has been given by his grateful nation in Islamabad. I am sure he is available to give advice for a fee. These are only two of the countries on which we would do well to rethink our policies. Manmohan Singh did the unthinkable and befriended the US. After that, nothing is unthinkable — not even the thought of becoming China’s biggest trading partner. There was a time when Manmohan Singh was a great believer in out-of-the-box thinking. It is time to take all hairy notions out of the box.