Of diplomacy and democracy

Applying the test of a statesman, how some contemporary figures in India fall short of the needed stature.

A.G. NOORANI

THE Jan Sangh had three passions: hatred for Jawaharlal Nehru and total rejection of his credo - secularism, socialism and non-alignment; and preference for an alliance with the United States, whether the U.S. wanted it or not; hatred of Pakistan and yearning for India's great power status, not in modern terms but as in the revival of a "Greater India" with Hindutva as its credo. Its heir, the Bharatiya Janata Party, follows suit. Its ideologue Jaswant Singh provides an "intellectual" flavour in florid English.

On July 30, 1990, Jaswant Singh told a Mumbai audience that "the legacy of the former Prime Minister, Mr. Jawaharlal Nehru should be rejected in toto" (The Times of India, August 1, 1990). He said: "Somewhere the essence of India got eroded in the last 43 years. Gai (cow), Ganga and Geeta have now become communal symbols." His imagination had run riot, evidently. The legacy of secularism had to be discharged as well tacitly. His "strategy" is simple. Offer the U.S. India's services as its "man in Asia", lord it over the neighbours - little Nepal must be punished for five months after the Kandahar hijacking; in Sri Lanka, terrorism of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) must not be condemned; the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) must be ignored - and aspire to great power status with American help. It matters not that the U.S. is too realistic to cooperate in this quixotic venture which will harm its interests besides India's own. It has its own distinct interests vis-a-vis each country in South Asia and in Asia generally; especially an interest in good relations with China. Like Pakistan in the 1950s, the BJP regime seeks American friendship only to "contain" a neighbour; not because it values the relationship intrinsically.

But Jaswant Singh has been out to create public opinion in support of his delusions in one press interview after another. Sample one statement made while in the U.S.: "There is now a very interesting coincidence of India's national interests and the security of the U.S... How to convert this reality of interests into an alliance of interests is the task before us" (The Times of India, April 13, 2001). The Americans would not be flattered to be told that their "security" depends on a "coincidence" with India's "interests". This, however, explains Jaswant Singh's hasty responses to U.S. proposals on the National Missile Defence (NMD) system on May 2 and his unsolicited offer of help on Afghanistan. That he had to beat a retreat on both reveals how far removed he is from public opinion in India.

He holds that India "should play a pre-eminent part in the affairs of the world... How many people know that... we had a border with Iran in 1947? Or that the legal tender of Kuwait till 1938 was the rupee?" He might have added that Aden was once governed from Bombay. Imperial delusions of grandeur produce folie de grandeur, when translated into policy. "So, when we talk about Indonesia or Central Asia or the Gulf, it is because of our interest and our sphere of influence." He had met President George W. Bush the day before. "What happened yesterday is the start of a new era." Now six months later, he is still absorbed in his reverie.

NO discussion of diplomacy in Indian democracy can be complete without a reference to Jaswant Singh's predecessor Inder Kumar Gujral, who projected a "Gujral doctrine". No one mentions it now because it was intellectually an exercise in self-promotion. (For a detailed critique vide the writer's article "The Gujral doctrine", The Statesman, September 23-25, 1997). The Ganga Waters Accord with Bangladesh was due to Jyoti Basu, not Gujral. He had a historic opportunity to put relations with Pakistan on an even keel by implementing the Joint Statement of June 23, 1997 which envisaged working groups, inter alia, on Kashmir. Vajpayee ridiculed it. Gujral aborted the accord. Had he implemented it he would have made history. He seeks to get into the history books by talking incessantly about "the Gujral doctrine" to anyone who lends an ear.

What an informed correspondent revealed recently confirms long-held suspicions that Gujral was at heart a hardliner particularly in the light of his comments before and after Agra. A report in The Telegraph (July 22, 2001) deserves quotation in extenso: "One of the myths about Indian diplomacy is that there are hardliners and softliners on Pakistan. In the Indian 'Establishment', you cannot deal with Pakistan and be what peacenicks would call a 'softliner'. When he was Prime Minister, I.K. Gujral, who was miffed at criticism that he was soft on Pakistan, told this correspondent: 'Do you think I will give away anything to Pakistan? I am as much of a nationalist as anyone else.' He stressed that his 'Gujral doctrine' did not cover Pakistan."

Morgenthau has written of politicians who "by devious means gain popular support for policies whose true nature they conceal from the people," momentarily. This is not what Gujral did. His art lay in concealing the true outlook of Inder Gujral from the people, especially from his Pakistani interlocutors.

Like Gujral, Vajpayee is also all things to all men. On October 17, 2001, Vajpayee told a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) function at his residence, at which Panchajanya editor Tarun Vijay's book An Odyssey in Tibet was released: "There is no proposal to resume dialogue with Islamabad till they give up the Kashmir issue." (The Asian Age, October 18). He knows, of course, that this is an impossibility. It was no compliment to the Muslim women, collected by the RSS to woo Muslims, that Vajpayee should tell them, on October 4, 1998, at the height of Indo-Pakistan tensions, that he wanted friendship with Pakistan. "Even brothers sometimes fight with each other" (The Statesman; October 5, 1998).

Such tactics are fundamentally different from those adopted by statesmen determined to do the right thing but who face a hostile public opinion. Morgenthau points out: "Not only must democratic foreign policy make concessions to public opinion, but it must also present its foreign policy in terms acceptable to public opinion. That is to say, it must make it appear as though it responds to the emotional preference of public opinion to a greater extent than it actually does. It must cover those of its rational elements that are at least likely to find favour with public opinion with a veil of emotional pronouncements which are intended to conceal its true nature from the public eye. It is for the objective observer to distinguish between public pronouncements on foreign policy that reveal and those that conceal the true nature of the foreign policy actually pursued, by correlating pronouncement with action."

Do we have a negotiating position on either Kashmir or the border dispute? Why offer talks to Pakistan when judging by L.K. Advani's stand (The Times of India, October 21, 2001) all we have to offer Pakistan is, it should cry quits and go home. The Chinese feel the same way about our offers of talks on the border. We have no concessions to offer. The impact of this duality on public opinion is disastrous. When times compel us to talk, the public will scream.

In the final analysis the leader, if he is to deserve the name, must stake his very survival on the success of a policy. It will not do to say that public opinion "will not stand for it". If the policy is necessary in the national interest, the leader ought to stick his neck out and try to alert the people. As George F. Kennan wrote: "History does not forgive us our national mistakes because they are explicable in terms of our domestic politics... A nation which excuses its own failures by the sacred untouchableness of its own habits can excuse itself into complete disaster" (American Diplomacy 1900-1950; Mentor, 1952; p.73)

But then, we do not live in an era of great men. Heroes walk alone. Smaller men pander to the crowd. With variations Henry A. Kissinger's description of the American scene applies to most democracies: "Domestic politics has become more important to political survival than the handling of foreign policy. What is presented by foreign critics as America's overweening quest for domination is very frequently a response to domestic pressure groups, which are in a position to put the spotlight on key issues by promising support or threatening retribution at election time and which support each other's causes to establish their own claims for the future... Simultaneously, ubiquitous and clamorous media are transforming foreign policy into a subdivision of public entertainment. The intense competition for ratings produces an obsession with the crisis of the moment, generally presented as a morality play between good and evil having a specific outcome and rarely in terms of the long-range challenges of history" (Does America Need a Foreign Policy?, Simon and Schuster, 2001).

The test of a statesman, as Kissinger points out, is his ability to recognise the real relationship of forces and to make his knowledge serve his ends. No policy is better than the goals it sets itself. In a democracy, public support is indispensable to the success of foreign policy. The statesman's success in this will depend on his ability to persuade the people to accept his vision and his judgment of the limits of foreign policy. "In a society of sovereign states absolute security is obtainable only by reducing all other states to impotence.... For absolute security for one country is absolute insecurity for all others" (Kissinger; The Necessity for Choice; Chatto & Windus, 1961; p.148)

PEOPLE feel comfortable only in absolutes. They distrust the relative. In a neglected classic, his doctoral thesis A World Restored (Gollancz; p.329) Kissinger defines the problem of diplomacy in democracy in terms that have never been excelled: "The statesman is like one of the heroes in classical drama who has had a vision of the future but who cannot transmit it directly to his fellow-men and who cannot validate its 'truth'. Nations learn only by experience; they 'know' only when it is too late to act. But statesmen must act as if their intuition were already experience, as if their aspiration were truth. It is for this reason that statesmen often share the fate of prophets, that they are without honour in their own country, that they always have a difficult task in legitimising their programmes domestically, and that their greatness is usually apparent only in retrospect when their intuition has become experience. The statesman must therefore be an educator; he must bridge the gap between a people's experience and his vision, between a nation's tradition and its future. In this task his possibilities are limited. A statesman who too far outruns the experience of his people will fail in achieving a domestic consensus, however wise his policies; witness Castlereagh. A statesman who limits his policy to the experience of his people will doom himself to sterility; witness Metternich."

Post Script: Jaswant Singh reveals that he presented Pakistan's High Commissioner Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, a committed bibliophile, with a copy of "a very fine book Negotiating Across Cultures" (Strategic Analysis; DSA, October 2001; p. 835). One assumes that the former read it and must hope that the latter will not. Written by Prof. Raymond Cohen and published by the U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 1991, its references to Indian diplomats are unflattering: "If an official felt that he could not defend a position before public opinion - Parliament and the press - he would subvert it - whatever the wishes of his Minister" (p. 99). A serving American diplomat told him that "Indians walk round with a 'chip on the shoulder' and suffer from a melancholia derived from the thought that the world is looking down on them. Another identified a 'Krishna Menon Syndrome'... compounded of a mixture of arrogance and hypersensitivity... a perceived imputation on their intellectual ability, any sign of arrogance or superiority, would produce an explosion" (p. 99). Jaswant Singh might have done worse - by presenting instead his own book, Defending India.