Author: Brahma Chellaney
Publication: The Hindustan Times
Date: June 14, 2001
A Weak, soft, corrupt, pusillanimous
republic. That is the popular perception about India among Indians. Like
the leadership it has, the republic appears weak in the knees. It displays
a poverty of ambition, moves tentatively forward in the style of an old
man's gait, and has a predilection for weak-kneed policies. As A.P.J. Abdul
Kalam once put it memorably, "A nation of a billion people that thinks
like a nation of a million people."
India has had a series of weak governments
led by fainthearted prime ministers. But the popular feeling that India
is frail in the knees has never been stronger than under the present government.
It may be a mere coincidence that
Atal Bihari Vajpayee has had two knee surgeries as Prime Minister - on
one knee after Lahore, Kargil and Kandahar and on the other immediately
after he set off on the wrong foot to "walk the high road" with Pakistan
military dictator Pervez Musharraf. The Prime Minister's physical condition,
however, parallels the state of the nation.
Walking the high road to enlightenment
will not be easy, or medically advisable. After all, the "defining moment"
at Lahore was reached by bus, Kandahar happened through a special, terrorist-laden
plane sent from New Delhi with the foreign minister as the terrorists'
chaperon, and Kargil occurred as India slept blissfully under the Lahore
lullabies. Given those walk-free debacles and Vajpayee's own difficulty
to keep his feet, the "high road" seems too arduous to traverse, even with
ambulifts.
Neighbours know they can trample
on India's interests and go scot-free. In fact, Pakistan's subversion and
China's containment have gone to India's knees. That gives confidence to
smaller neighbours to play against Indian interests. India's shrinking
base in Bangladesh and Nepal has resulted in New Delhi now identifying
its stakes with one party. But the Awami League and Nepali Congress are
loath to say or do anything that could be publicly construed as supportive
of India.
With ambiguous friends like those
insecurely in power and opposition forces openly hostile, India-bashing
is endemic there and in Sri Lanka. New Delhi has only to blame itself for
the anti-India feelings in its neighbourhood.
Firstly, India refuses to grasp
a central principle of international relations -power respects power, and
the meek always remain weak. In contrast to India, China employs its growing
power to inspire awe, and none of its neighbours dares to mess with its
interests. With its pursuit of naked power politics, Beijing sells arms
to all of India's neighbours (except Bhutan) and buys ubiquitous influence
in their affairs of state.
No political party in this region
(not even the Nepali Congress whose main opponent is a pro-Beijing communist
alliance) will speak against China, even though, unlike India, it is not
a status quo power and does not baulk at making open threats. In contrast,
even a rumour is enough, as happened in the Hrithik Roshan case, to spark
anti-India violence.
Secondly, India is not a reliable
friend. It is indeed risky to be a buddy of India because New Delhi has
a record of not standing by its friends in the region. Lacking consistency
and the courage of its convictions, India can, out of the blue, drop a
friend and embrace a foe. A classic example is the manner Rajiv Gandhi
overnight turned the Tamil Tigers from friends to foes. The bottom line
for others is simple: To have a weak, whimsical friend like India is to
ask for trouble.
The Indian republic does not stand
by its friends even within its frontiers. Vajpayee's disastrous Kashmir
ceasefire facilitated the methodical elimination of a large number of police
and intelligence moles in the Valley.
Thirdly, India has not realised
the importance of securing international respect. In fact, time and again
it exhibits a low level of self-esteem. It constantly searches for approbation
from major powers.
A nuclear-armed nation that wakes
up after foreign invaders have captured a vast swath of its strategic land
and that capitulates to hijackers ignominiously can never be looked at
with respect by any neighbour, be it puny Bhutan. In fact, such events
bared India's ineptitude and reinforced its image as a clumsy, bigheaded
nation that claimed victory in Kargil when Bill Clinton to this day takes
credit for getting the Pakistanis fully out.
While major nations go to great
extent to provide a moral veneer to their foreign policy, India unhesitantly
discards its principles whenever politically convenient. Short of putting
Musharraf on trial in absentia, India did everything possible to show him
as a murderous general. He was painted as a war criminal who masterminded
Kargil, a traitor to peace and democracy, the architect of IC-814 hijacking,
and the sponsor of terrorism. Now, without retracting any of those charges,
India is expectantly waiting to sup with him.
Fourthly, India continues to show
that Indian military lives are cheap and expendable. More than 1,200 Indian
military men were sent to their death in the jungles of northern Sri Lanka
in a purposeless intervention that has left India to this day with no friends
in that island-nation. India succeeded remarkably in alienating all sides.
Almost every day brings news about
a couple of security personnel killed in Kashmir. As grimy old men play
grimy little games that steadily mess up the Kashmir situation, no one
pauses to reflect how much longer the ungrateful republic can expect its
troops to unquestioningly lay down their lives. To make things worse, the
present army chief has been ecstatically sucking up to the government by
making political statements in public, hailing first the ceasefire and
now the U-turn on Pakistan.
New Delhi is now rewarding the rogue
general, responsible for more than 500 Indian military fatalities in Kargil,
with the "peace" talks he desperately needs to get a degree of legitimacy
denied to him and to contain the risks of further Pakistani sovereign defaults.
How callously India treats its men who sacrifice their lives was shown
recently by Vajpayee who, in belated comments, said that "a mountain was
made out of a molehill" when Bangladeshis coldbloodedly murdered and maimed
16 BSF soldiers.
No State that treats its military
men as cannon fodder can be a great power or a respected nation or even
stay united for very long. Contrast the Indian unconcern over Indian lives
with the way China dealt with the world's sole superpower over the Belgrade
embassy killings and the more recent death of its fighter pilot.
Fifthly, the greatest harm to Indian
interests has been inflicted by abrupt policy changes driven by the personal
eccentricities of those in power, who have little regard for institutional
mechanisms or for professionals. Brahmanical guile can never be a substitute
for statecraft.
Sixthly, India's adversaries know
its conspicuous weaknesses and exploit them. From Nagaland in the Fifties
to Kashmir today, they have recognised that there is no better way to take
on India than to mire it in internal-security problems, especially given
the lack of Indian will to impose retaliatory costs. A weak-kneed nation
stuck in knee-deep of internal problems is a guarantee that it will eventually
go down on its knees.
Today, any enemy knows that an excellent
route to strike further blows against India's infirm knees is through its
open frontier with Nepal. Under Nepal's flawed democratic experiment, forces
inimical to India's interests, particularly the United Marxist-Leninist
alliance and the underground Maoists, have thrived. These are the very
forces that stand to gain the most from the palace bloodbath and the resultant
damage to Nepalese political institutions.
This leaves New Delhi with only
two options: Either to stem Nepal's growing attraction as a staging ground
by revising the open-border policy, or to move India's outer security perimeter
to the Nepalese frontier with China-occupied Tibet. It is not clear that
the septuagenarians and octogenarians who lead India by their chins understand
that a continued open border without deep security safeguards is an invitation
to disaster.
India is a young nation acquiring
the attributes of its ageing, ailing leadership. Although home to one-sixth
of the human race, India is hardly in a position to stand up and be counted.
The frailty of its knees points to the need both for a generational change
in Indian politics and for cleaning up the rot in the halls of power.
