Elections are generally not won or lost on foreign policy issues. Not even in the United States where the administration is obliged to heed public opinion. The British Conservative party under so distinguished a leader as Mr. Winston Churchill lost the election in the wake of victory in World War II. And it survived one of the worst humiliations in British history – the Suez fiasco in 1956. It had only to replace its leader, Sir Anthony Eden, by Mr. Harold Macmillan in order to win the election that followed. In India’s case, only relations with Pakistan and marginally with China can be said to interest the common voter. He does not care about what is happening in faraway lands. It is, therefore, rather surprising that the president of the Bharatiya Janata party, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, should have thought it useful for electoral purposes to raise the question of India’s stand on the Falklands issue and even more surprising that the minister for external affairs, Mr. PV Narasimha Rao, should have found it necessary to reply to him.
It is possible that Mr. Rao has not been reported accurately. As such it will not be fair for us to say that he has extended support to Argentina in its conflict with Britain and in the process deviated from the official policy which is to regret the use of force by Argentina and to hope that a way will be found to resolve the dispute peacefully. But it is important to emphasize that the government of India must be guided above all by its appreciation of the national interest. This country has close economic and other ties with the United Kingdom. Thousands of its students study there. Hundreds of thousands of people of Indian descent and nationality have settled there. Britain has been a source of significant aid to this country. Only recently it raised its contribution to the International Development Agency, the World Bank’s soft-lending agency, principally with a view to enabling New Delhi to continue to get substantial loans from it on easy terms. There can, therefore, be no doubt that if forced to choose between Britain and Argentina, we would have to choose Britain. As it happens, no great moral issues are involved. The Falkland Islands do not belong to the category of colonies waiting to become free. The people there are not Argentinians. They are British, not just by virtue of their passports but of their ethnic origin. It can be argued that we too liberated Goa in 1961 by the force of arms. We did send our troops into what was then a Portuguese colony but we did so to end the agony of our people under foreign domination. The more pertinent comparison would be with Andamans and Nicobar. Mr. Subranian Swamy is quite justified in pointing out that by the kind of logic Argentina is claiming the Falklands, Indonesia could lay claim to Andamans and Nicobar. As a rule India has not defined its policy in reference to the nature of regimes. But as a functioning democracy committed to decent norms of behaviour, it cannot be indifferent to the fact that Argentina is ruled by a cruel military dictatorship which has not been known to be particularly solicitous about the safety of its own citizens against right-wing goons.