Jab They Met : Foreign policy and domestic politics
Jyoti Malhotra -
Monday, July 14, 2008 8:44 AM
The holy trinity descended on the capital on Saturday evening – National Security Adviser M K Narayanan, Foreign Secretary Shivshanker Menon and Atomic Energy chief Anil Kakodkar – seeking to win over a largely converted press to the advantages of the Indo-US nuclear deal.
But the way they tied themselves up in knots over spelling out the detail! India decided to tell the IAEA Secretariat to circulate India’s negotiated draft agreement to the 35-member IAEA Board after the Left announced that they would withdraw support to the UPA on July 8, said Narayanan. But hadn’t the government told the Left that it would not initial the agreement without the Left’s concurrence, chorused the press. Why did it do so on July 7 before the Left announced that it would withdraw support? Narayanan looked nonplussed, until Menon came to his rescue. That is because we were negotiating the text until July 7, he said. But hadn’t the government been saying forever, off the record of course, that the negotiated text with the IAEA had been frozen nearly three months ago? No, said Menon. Kakodkar said conversations were still being carried on over the phone right till the end. Our man in Vienna finally signed on the dotted line only on July 7, he added.
One month later, all these tiny pinpricks against the Left will be completely forgotten as India drops all its moral pretensions about being a non-aligned nation that believes in non-violence – although the Foreign Office and hair-splitting word-makers will find a way around that as well. Even if India’s nukes are now sanctioned by the rest of the world, doesn’t mean that India doesn’t continue to believe in the non-violent dream, they will argue.
The current politicking and alleged horse-trading to save the government over the nuclear deal means that for the first time in a long, long time, foreign policy has dropped its holy cow veneer and come right down to earth to mess about in the cesspool of home-grown politics.
In this version of Jab We Met, South Block has deigned to descend from the imperial heights of Raisina Hill to the plains where Samajwadi party and other MPs live to forge a new direction that will change India forever.
In this bargain, the way both sides perceive each other will also be changed forever. Fact is, the intersections between foreign policy and domestic politics must be tightened. We cannot continue with the compartmentalized sanctioning of foreign policy being an airy-fairy creature which allows us to dream our Gandhian dreams, while the cut and thrust of realpolitik belongs to some other dirty hole somewhere.
Of course we are like this only. Time we took a good, hard look at ourselves, warts and all.