Even a cursory reading of Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee’s speech at Jawaharlal Nehru University last Saturday is enough to show that he is pleased with his conduct of foreign policy. He has good reasons to be.
Mr Vajpayee’s handling of India’s relations with other countries, especially with its neighbours who doubtless felt uneasy with Mrs Indira Gandhi, has been highly popular so much so that he has come to be regarded not only as one of the few successful Janata ministers but also a possible prime minister. Indeed, if any Janata leader has raised his public stature considerably after the party came to power in New Delhi in March 1977 and if any former Jana Sangh leader has managed to persuade the people, including its detractors, to forget his past, it is Mr Vajpayee. This is a tribute to his suave, charming, urbane and disarming personality as well as to his skill.
In addition to general goodwill, the policy has also yielded some concrete results, the most important being perhaps the agreement with Pakistan over the Salal Dam in Kashmir. The agreement with Bangladesh on Farakka, too, is a distinct improvement over the interim one which Mrs Gandhi had negotiated with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
Requirements
This, it can be argued, is not a great gain for this country because in the past three years it had withdrawn as much water from the Ganga as it desired and it remains open to question whether the Bangladesh authorities will in fact implement the other part of the agreement which calls for diversion of Brahmaputra waters into the Ganga so that the requirements of the two countries can be adequately met.
But even if this argument is taken at its face value which in fairness it should not be, it cannot be denied that contrary to widespread fears earlier, there has been no significant exodus of the members of the minority communities from Bangladesh and General Zia-ur-Rahman has decided to seek popular endorsement of his title to rule the country. The first development may or may not have anything to do with the relaxed relations between New Delhi and Dacca but the second clearly has. For it is difficult to believe that General Zia would have agreed to hold any kind of election if his relations with this country had remained as tense as they were when Mrs Gandhi was the prime minister.
Mr Vajpayee had come in for some criticism after his visit to Pakistan in the first week of February on the ground that he has provided General Zia-ul-Haq and his advisers an opportunity to revive the Kashmir issue. Much of this criticism was a legitimate reaction to the writings in the Pakistani press and the statement of the Pakistani leaders. It has since died down because in fact Pakistan no longer has the capacity and the requisite international support to be able to reactivate the dispute.
The minister for external affairs was open to criticism on another count. It could have been said with considerable justification that by going to Islamabad and by inviting the chief martial law administrator to New Delhi, he had facilitated the task of the military rulers in convincing their people not only that they had come to stay but also that they were acceptable even to an India which had just managed to retrieve its democratic institutions and freedoms. But hardly anyone made this criticism apparently because most of us, who are concerned with such issues, do not appreciate that the concept of non-interference in a neighbour’s affairs does not involve the obligation to lend respectability to a military regime.
In this case another aspect of the regime’s character should have been a matter of concern for Mr Vajpayee. For, by introducing penalties such as whipping, hanging in public places, and chopping of hands for petty crimes like theft, General Zia and his colleagues had demonstrated beyond dispute that their rule represents a return to a past which, to put it mildly, cannot be idolized.
This relapse, which even a year ago hardly anyone in his senses could have believed was possible in any country in the sub-continent, need not have worried New Delhi if India itself did not have a sizable Muslim population or if a large section of the community was not already under the influence of the obscurantist ulema. But in the given context, the government’s indifference on this aspect of recent developments in Pakistan has been truly shocking.
Perhaps, as it appears from the timing of the visit (it took place on the eve of the vidhan sabha elections in Andhra, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Assam all of which have a large number of Muslim votes), it is possible that Mr Vajpayee was influenced, if not guided, by electoral considerations. But one did not have to wait for the election results to know that the trick would not work. Indeed, this could have been easily anticipated in view of the fact that for whatever reason a vast majority of the Indian Muslims are sympathetic to Mr Bhutto under sentence of death.
Anxiety
Thus on available facts, the government’s anxiety to accelerate the pace of the so-called process of normalisation of relations with Pakistan could be justified only if it was part of an overall plan to promote economic cooperation in the region a la the Shah’s proposals, India and Iran being its cornerstones. But be that as it may, that prospect has now become highly uncertain. Even if the new regime in Kabul is as non-aligned as it claims to be and even if it does not try to promote trouble in Pakistan’s North-Western Frontier Province and Baluchistan, it will be a long time before Islamabad and Teheran feel sufficiently reassured to think in terms of active cooperation with it.
All that apart, there is one neighbour, China, regarding which the government remains wary. Irrespective of whether this wariness is the result of a careful assessment or the Prime Minister’s rather strong feelings on the border question, China’s unprovoked aggression in 1962 and its all-out support to Pakistan in Islamabad’s armed conflicts with this country in 1965 and 1971, it is justified. China has been a difficult neighbour since it moved into Tibet in 1950 and there is not much evidence yet to suggest that it is about to leave this country alone to sort out, on the one hand, its internal problems like the Naga, and Mizo underground activities and its relations with Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal on the other.
But however difficult, China does not constitute the main challenge to India’s policy-makers, not right now at any rate. This comes from the United States which the Janata government has been bending over backwards to befriend.
Tarapur has become an obvious bone of contention between the two governments. Even if by some chance the 7.6 tonnes of enriched uranium which Mr Carter promised during his visit to New Delhi is delivered, the United States has in effect unilaterally torn the agreement regarding the supply of this fuel and it has done it in a manner – through a regular legislation – that makes it well-nigh impossible for the administration to continue to honour its contractual obligation. And irrespective of whether Tarapur has to be closed down as is likely, or India succeeds in developing an alternative fuel which is bound to take at least a couple of years, the plant threatens to become a symbol of Indo-US estrangement.
Capacity
The United States has never possessed the capacity, economic and military, to establish what the theoreticians of Pax Americana love to call an international order under its auspices. The Soviet bloc stood outside the reach of its power when America was at the zenith of its power in the late ‘forties and the early ‘fifties and non-aligned countries managed to defy it to a certain extent. But till the mid-’sixties when, in its arrogance, it allowed itself to be sucked into the Vietnam conflict, it was the dominant power in every sense of the term. This it has long since ceased to be, though it still remains the strongest one. To cite some indicators, the dollar has been under pressure more or less constantly since 1971; the country has most of the time since run up huge trade deficits; the Soviet Union has caught up with it in strategic nuclear weapons and surpassed it in conventional weapons; the Kremlin has, with the help of Cuban troops, made it lose face in Angola and in Ethiopia and above all, the United States and its Western and Japanese allies are no longer able to assure continued economic growth for themselves and are, therefore, not in a position to offer expanding access to their markets to developing countries.
But while the power to do good has declined, its breath-taking self-righteousness and the desire to impose its will on other countries in the name of non-existing world order has not. This must make it difficult for India to practise vis-a-vis the United States its policy of genuine non-alignment, an euphemism for leaning heavily towards it.
Perhaps Mr Vajpayee and his aides have paid some attention to this and other larger problems of foreign relations. But if they have, they have kept their assessments a carefully guarded secret.
The Times of India, 17 May 1978