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My Foreign Policy? Sure! But you
gotta' pay!
Dilwala Singh
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A country should
tremble with fear when foreign policy becomes a street issue.
When Americans in streets started talking about Vietnam, the
country suffered humiliation. Today, Americans talk Iraq all the
time, and Washington is tying itself up in knots. New Delhi is
carrying its foreign encounters in total secrecy; a fact that
the entire top brass of the media knows and virtually no one is
speaking about. This deviousness is being propagated and
justified. |
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 For
decades, the Indian establishment has sold the idea that it takes
immense pride in its democracy and freedom without regard to the
disconnect between what it says and what it does. Indian
policymakers regularly say one thing and do another. That has been
the experience of the Sikh community over the decades but now we
have been noticing that the same affliction has also come to bear on
the foreign policy of
India.
Such a shuffling approach has become the hallmark now that no one in
New Delhi is prepared to even state the basics of a foreign policy
that has confused not just the country but also the world.
Now, the world
is not clear about where
India stands,
and the country is paying a heavy price for this.
New Delhi
is carrying its foreign encounters in total secrecy, a fact that the
entire top brass of the media knows and virtually no one is speaking
about. What is worse is that this certain deviousness is being
propagated and defended and justified on the basis of arguments of
money and commerce.
Take the case of
India-US civilian nuclear deal. Who does not see or realize that
here was a naked shift in foreign policy to turn
India into a
junior ally of the United States? But where has been the effort to
take the country into confidence? The government has been trying to
camouflage the shift with arguments centering on nuclear commerce.
After sections of the media and the nuclear scientists exposed the
myths behind this argument, the government was virtually stopped in
its tracks. But the efforts are on. There is no movement on sharing
this new vision of the US with the countrymen. New Delhi thinks that
the overtures of friendship — military and strategic — will somehow
go unnoticed at home. Of course, till now at least not one leader in
the ruling Congress in India is willing to admit that there is a
consensus in the country. If anything, the proceedings in Parliament
in the past few months have reflected more than adequately that the
larger opinion is against the nuclear deal.
 Last week,
India
launched a satellite and projected it as a commercial venture. "We
charge money and launch satellites," was the line that
New Delhi
tried to sell. Where is the noise in the media that the launched
payload was an Israeli spy satellite and the government well knew
the fact that it will also harm India's traditional allies? Not
being India, Israel was more honest. Its government has been more
frank than Indian government was with its own people. Israelis were
told that their government will now have an eye, thanks to India, to
spy on Iran and Syria, and will get images in cloudy weather, and
through the night, of military and other activity in those countries
from different strategic angles. New Delhi, despite entering into
the deal three years ago, has kept a furtive silence, and even
today, not a single official has the authority to comment on this
complete departure from the foreign policy consensus accepted by
India.
In
Palestine,
of course, the reaction has been of "deep dismay and
disappointment". The news of India's help in launching the spy
satellite was all over the Arab and Israeli media. The silence of
"friends" like India has come in for sharp comment by Palestinians
individually and collectively. The Indian government, for the first
time, is being included by the Palestinians in their list of those
who are supporting
Israel.
Two more spy
satellites are in the India-Israeli queue, but Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh and minister of external affairs Pranab Mukherjee do
not have time or responsibility to explain whether now
India accepts
the Israeli definition of the term "enemy." Israel has launched the
satellite to spy on its enemies. What has India done this for? To
spy on "friends"? Or will we be told that India has earned a lot of
money by hiring out its launching pad, and had done the same for
Italy?
 So commerce will
now justify launching of spy satellites against any country? Has the
media raised its first finger to ask Congress Party's official view
on Israel
now? Why are Communists and the Muslim community silent? Or should
we understand that the India argument from now on is to sell
interests to the highest bidder?
The myth that
India has
never been divided on foreign policy has been shredded to pieces
after Kandhar and nuclear deal. The satellite has blown a new hole
into it. The fracturing of the consensus will only end up educating
the people more about the way India has been carrying out its
foreign policy. The Indian government is narrowing its vision to
absurd levels. The Muslim minority is watching it and the
consequences will be dangerous. India must understand that what it
will do to a ethnic minority in the name of new shifts in foreign
policy will also impact the relations of this minority and other
minorities with the Indian government.
The past week
also heard
India's
deafening silence on the Israeli blockade of
Gaza.
India is
inching towards the West, away from poor Palestinians. Commercial
good sense, perhaps. New Delhi's current crop of leaders is perhaps
forgetting that those who had embraced the Palestinian cause were
leaders of stature far taller than them. It was for a reason, well
argued reason that they had decided not to give diplomatic
recognition to Israel. The inhuman blockade of Gaza where one and a
half million people have been placed in a concentration camp,
without electricity, water, medicines and food, has not drawn even a
murmur of protest from this amazingly callous and compromised
government. The breaking of the wall by the people, mostly women, on
the Egyptian border is an indication of utter desperation, with the
pictures of the old and the young struggling back with food supplies
for their families further endorsing this. An India that has seen
the Partition, an India that has seen what poor Bangladeshis went
through just before 1971, has no moral ground to stay silent.
 A country should
tremble with fear when foreign policy becomes a street issue. When
Americans in streets started talking about
Vietnam, the
country suffered humiliation. Because Americans talk Iraq all the
time, Washington is tying itself up in knots. Now, in
India,
the average citizen may not understand the intricacies of the Hyde
Act, but he knows that somewhere along the way the Congress and its
allies have decided to go along with the global superpower. The
Indian poor are not accepting this situation. The Indian minorities
may be silent but it is no secret what they feel. coupled with the
fact that the economic policies of the government are only for the
rich to get richer, the next election will see these voices
traveling to the ballot box and producing results that Washington
will be little able to do anything about. When a country comes down
to a level where it is ready to sell its voice and its soul for a
song, the poor, the deprived, the minorities, the already silenced
and those with a rare strait called character make sure that the
sale stops.
30 January 2008
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