The Rediff Special

Diplomacy or Disaster?

Despite all the hype about I K Gujral's expertise in foreign affairs, India today stands smaller than at any time in recent memory in the community of nations

H D Deve Gowda, then prime minister of India, was furious. The election for filling up non-permanent seats in the UN Security Council had just been over in New York and the result showed that India had been trounced by Japan in the fight for the Asian seat.

Deve Gowda was angry not because India had lost so miserably, but because his foreign minister, I K Gujral, had put the PM in an unenviable position. Deve Gowda had always been aware of his handicap of not knowing enough about foreign affairs and had left everything concerning foreign policy entirely in Gujral's hands.

And Gujral had made Deve Gowda write letters to 90-odd heads of government virtually thanking them for their support even before the voting had taken place in New York. The letters were written on the basis of Gujral's confident assessment that these 90-odd countries would be with India in its bid for the Asian seat in the Security Council.

But, alas, when the tally was announced, India had secured a mere 40 votes. Deve Gowda's embarrassment was understandable: his inclination, born out of long experience in grass-roots level politics was to write a simple letter seeking support for India from members of the General Assembly.

"No," Gujral had told Deve Gowda, "These 90-plus votes are assured." When Gujral returned from a visit to the UN in September last year an anxious cabinet secretary, T S R Subramaniam -- who realised that the PM had put himself in a spot with his ill-advised letter -- asked Gujral for his final assessment: "Seventy-five votes at least, without any doubt. We may not win in the first round, but we will edge out Japan in the second round," Gujral confidently told Subramaniam.

But there was to be no second round and Deve Gowda was left with a lot of egg on his face.

Gujral's combined record as external affairs minister and as PM-cum-external affairs minister in the United Front government is a succession of such miscalculations, simplistic assumptions, all of which have been deftly covered up through astute media management and disinformation.

"The foreign policy of a government can be judged only on the basis of what it can produce," argues A P Venkateswaran, former foreign secretary. The implication is that the UF government has produced very little.

Adds Pranab Mukherjee, external affairs minister in the previous Congress government: "Our efforts are now paying dividends."

Despite all the hype about Gujral's expertise in foreign affairs, the fact is that at the end of nearly one-and-a-half years at the helm of foreign policy in the UF government, India stands smaller than at any time in recent memory in the community of nations, isolated than ever before.

A few distressing examples will suffice. A few weeks ago, The Vatican applied to enter the World Trade Organisation. The city state, which is the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church, did not want to become a full member. All it sought was the status of an observer.

There was only one country which opposed it: India. No one in the government -- neither in the commerce ministry nor in South Block -- is able to give a convincing explanation for this opposition. After India's complete isolation on this issue was starkly brought into focus before the entire WTO membership, The Vatican was admitted overruling Indian opposition.

Now, Egypt, Pakistan and Bangladesh respectively want the Organisation of African Unity, the Organisation of Islamic Conference and the Islamic Development Bank to be admitted as observers. Having taken the view that The Vatican has no commercial interests and should, therefore, be kept out of the WTO altogether, New Delhi is forced to similarly oppose observer status to these organisations as well, underlining India's standing as the oddman-out in the WTO.

No one in the UF government seems to be even considering whether it was worthwhile to put India in such a spot within the international tradebody when New Delhi was already having problems with the WTO as a result of the government's inability to come up with an internationally acceptable package on import restrictions.

"There is no coordination within the government on these issues," laments a senior South Block official. "How can there be, when a vision is completely lacking on engaging the rest of the world on problems that concern us?"

Pranab Mukherjee has his finger on the problem when he says the P V Narasimha Rao government tried to give an unprecedented focus to economic diplomacy in Indian foreign policy. When Mukherjee moved from the commerce ministry to South Block, he tried to institutionalise this focus.

The post of secretary (economic relations) in the ministry of external affairs was revived and he became the coordinating centre for all the economic activity in the government which had an external angle. It was considered imperative in an era where trade and investment determined foreign policy and strategic interests.

From that high in Congress rule, matters have deteriorated to a point where meetings called by the secretary (economic relations) are not even attended by senior officers from economic ministries.

A case in point was a crucial meeting called to discuss the American threat to approach the WTO on India's quantitative restrictions on imports. The Americans had given an ultimatum that 48 hours later, they would ask the WTO in Geneva to constitute a formal dispute settlement mechanism.

It was a dispute that could embroil the entire economic machinery of the government as the European Union and Japan joined the US against India. But such was the drift in the government that the meeting called to discuss the issue was not attended by the commerce secretary.

It was this attitude which, for instance, prompted Professor Jayakumar, Singapore's foreign minister, to plead with P Chidambaram, in June, that India should take a broader view of relations with Singapore -- and with South East Asia in general.

Chidambaram was in Kuala Lumpur -- representing Gujral as external affairs minister -- at the post-ministerial meeting of the Association of South East Asian Nations and a meeting of the ASEAN Regional Forum, Asia's nascent post-Cold War security arrangement.

Professor Jayakumar and other foreign ministers gathered in Kuala Lumpur found Chidambaram refreshingly different from anyone they had interacted with in the UF government, including Gujral.

More than four years ago, Singapore had promoted an "India fever" on the island, an effort to get the country interested in India. The joke in Singapore now is that under the UF government, the "India fever has turned into a cold". Most of the projects started by the Rao government involving ASEAN have been either scuttled by the present government or put in the deep-freeze. Yet, Professor Jayakumar's plea with Chidambaram was to take a long-term view of India's destiny which is closely aligned with ASEAN. Moreover, with the admission of Myanmar into ASEAN at the Kuala Lumpur conclave, India now shares a common border with the South East Asian grouping.

But in New Delhi, Professor Jayakumar's plea may well have fallen on deaf ears, Chidambaram notwithstanding. The impression clearly is that no one is even listening to such advice. All that is left of the Rao government's "Look East" policy is the continuing enthusiasm in the government to travel to South East Asia, more often than not on trips which are short on content, but high on protocol. Gujral himself is to travel to Singapore and Kuala Lumpur on one such visit.

But it is not only in economic diplomacy that the UF government's foreign policy is adrift. A few weeks ago, Lok Sabha Speaker Purno A Sangma lost a bitterly-fought election to the presidentship of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the umbrella body for law-makers across the globe. The victory of the Spanish candidate, Miguel A Martinez, once again heightened India's isolation in the community of nations.

Sangma's defeat was especially bitter because India had campaigned in this election on the plank that it was the largest democracy in the world and ought to be given the honour of IPU presidentship in the golden jubilee year of Independence.

Apologists for Gujral argue that in both these cases he is not to blame since these issues did not fall within the ambit of the MEA, which he heads. Such an argument does not hold water.

Both in the case of IPU poll and the WTO tangle, South Block has a coordinating role which it has been unable to fulfill, hamstrung by a debilitating lack of vision and stymied by a tendency to miss the wood for the trees. This largely is the result of Gujral's obsession with India's neighbourhood, for which the rest of the globe has been given the go-by.

South Block veterans assert that any PM who was in firm control of foreign policy would have firmly told Sangma that he should opt out of the race when it was clear that defeat was staring him in the face. Such a PM would have also told the commerce ministry to pull up its socks on the WTO issue.

"It is not a question of the PM being weak or strong," says an MEA official with long experience of dealing with international organisations. "Rao also headed a minority government, but he would have been very firm on both the IPU election and the WTO question. He would have plainly told those involved what was at stake."

Lately, to pre-empt criticism of a drift and to give an impression of activism beyond India's neighbourhood, the prime minister has been furiously travelling abroad -- from Africa through Europe across the Atlantic.

Unfortunately, these trips are a sad reflection of the state of Gujral's South Block -- confusion compounded by a surfeit of activity aimed at covering up the government's foreign policy shortcomings.

Take, for instance, Gujral's much-publicised visit to South Africa. The PM, stepped in Gandhian sentimentality, made his visit a pilgrimage in honour of the Father of the Nation. By the end of the visit it put off South Africans, a people who have just emerged from apartheid and are in a hurry to join the modern world which has left them behind because of an antiquated system.

No doubt, the South Africans respect Gandhi, but by labouring on Gandhian sentimentality during the visit, Gujral did more harm to Gandhism in South Africa. Deputy President Thabo Mbeki told Gujral as much at one bilateral meeting when he interrupted the PM who was going on and on about Gandhi: "We must go beyond sentiments," he said. "We need to look at the future."

It was the same story in Cairo, where Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak refused to address a joint press conference with Gujral. Indeed, Mubarak confirmed his meeting with Gujral only hours before the PM took off from Delhi on his African sojourn.

Gujral's earlier trip to Italy was similarly planned without any imagination: indeed, its whole objective was negative. Italy is completely out of the reckoning in current efforts to restructure the UN Security Council. It is unhappy about it and wants to scuttle UN reform.

Gujral is worried that the way things are going, India may not have much chance of getting a permanent seat in the restructured Council. He decided to stopover in Rome in the hope that New Delhi could team up with Italy in this effort.

The mindset at work in such negative initiatives is the same one that took Gujral on a disastrous trip seven years ago to Baghdad and Kuwait after Iraq occupied the tiny Gulf emirate. India risked global isolation as a result of that trip, but was salvaged by the timely exit of the V P Singh government and a return of normalcy and logic to South Block. This time round, it may not be as easy as in 1991 to restore equilibrium to a derailed foreign policy.

"After the end of the Cold War," says Venkateswaran, "India's foreign policy was in a state of drift. The non-aligned movement, on which much of our attitudes were based, also had weakened since the world became unipolar."

The Rao government began a process which arrested this drift, but it went out of office before the new direction of Indian foreign policy could take root. Instead of continuing on that road, Gujral has shaken up the entire edifice of India's external relations by his unrealistic 'doctrine' on the one hand and a complete lack of direction on the other.

Such a lack of vision and knee-jerk reactions which have acquired the dimensions on policy are beginning to take a heavy toll of India's place in the world. It is a drift for which future generations will have to pay dearly unless it is arrested forthwith.

K P Nayar/New Delhi

Kind courtesy: Sunday magazine

Tell us what you think of this feature