AS India enters the sixth decade of independence, the nation’s foreign policy faces a paradox. The nation’s hesitant globalization since 1991 has produced extraordinary economic and political benefits on the world stage. Yet a renewed surge of ultranationalism threatens to limit India’s regional and international prospects. While all empirical trends point to improved Indian standing in world affairs over the last decade and a half, the nation’s foreign policy remains trapped in fear, self-doubt, and an over-determination of national security threats.

Nothing illustrates this trap better than the recent debates on the relationships with the United States, China and Pakistan, easily the three most important accounts of the nation’s foreign policy. All three debates have been marked by ultranationalism. Unless it can consciously shake off this burden that has so possessed the nation’s elite, India’s response to the extraordinary foreign policy opportunities at hand will remain under-whelming.

But first the reality of India as a major beneficiary of the current wave of globalization. This is reflected on the economic front in the form of sustained high growth rates that have touched nine per cent, an expanding share of global trade, the impressive international forays of Indian capital, and the prospect of India emerging as one of the world’s top five economies. The rapid improvement in India’s relative economic standing in the world since 1991 has also seen dramatic transformation in India’s political ties with the major powers.

For the first time in the last sixty years, India now has positive and expanding relations with all the great powers, including the United States, Europe, Japan, China and Russia. Its trade and investment relations with Asia, Middle East and Africa are booming. Even Latin America is now on India’s foreign policy radar. Yet a seething sense of discomfort pervades India’s debates on the United States, China and Pakistan. Some would add Bangladesh to the list. The impulses of ultranationalism appear to have taken such a strong grip over the right and left of the nation’s political spectrum, that the centre is finding it difficult to hold.

 

This was evident during the domestic debate on the Indo-US nuclear deal since it was signed on 18 July 2005 by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and US President George W. Bush. The deal in essence sought to liberate India from its pariah status in the global nuclear order and reopen the door for international civil nuclear energy cooperation that was suspended when New Delhi conducted its first nuclear test in 1974. India in return agreed to separate its civilian and military programmes, place the former under international safeguards, and cooperate with the international community in preventing further proliferation of nuclear weapons. For decades the world insisted India could either keep its nuclear weapons programme or have access to global atomic energy markets. Bush altered this paradigm by saying India can now finally have it both ways, much like the five nuclear weapon powers and permanent members of the UN Security Council.

 

The world largely saw President Bush’s decision to make a nuclear exception for India and seek changes in the three decade old US domestic non-proliferation law and the international rules of nuclear commerce as a sweetheart deal for New Delhi. Yet within India, a surreal debate turned this unprecedented opportunity into a threat to the nation’s nuclear deterrent. As India faced up to the long overdue separation of civilian and military nuclear programmes (and thereby lend accountability and efficiency to both), the BJP and the CPM, ganged up to reinforce the wavering in the atomic energy establishment that was reluctant to reform the manner in which it had done business over the last few decades. While the DAE’s fears on the potential break-up of a large empire were understandable from the perspective of bureaucratic politics, the rank opportunism of the BJP and the CPM plumbed new depths.

The BJP, which initiated the nuclear negotiations with the United States after 1998 and would have loved to clinch the nuclear deal the UPA government finally concluded with the US, was first off the mark, raising dark questions about the separation plan. The BJP had in fact offered to place 14 reactors under international safeguards in return for a lot less than what the UPA got from Washington. Yet it was now raising the bogey of a ‘cap’ on India’s nuclear weapons programme.

The Left which is supposed to be a natural critic of atomic militarism and should have been demanding greater transparency from the DAE, was now joining it in whipping up ultranationalism. Anything goes in the cause of anti-imperialism. In May 1998, the communist parties opposed the nuclear tests and demanded, much like US President Bill Clinton and the Chinese leader, Jiang Zemin, that India stop weaponisation and deployment of nuclear weapons. When President Bush was reversing the policy of Clinton and Jiang, the Left rallied the most hawkish forces in the country and was prepared to countenance an expansive military nuclear programme in the name of an ‘independent nuclear policy’.

 

Both the CPM and the BJP chose to fire their guns from the shoulders of the atomic energy establishment, which brought to the fore all the excessive fears of the foreigner nurtured during three decades of technological isolation. The DAE finally agreed to offer a separation plan amidst President Bush’s visit to India in early March 2006. Both the GoI and the Bush Administration bent over backwards to accommodate the concerns of the DAE Chief Anil Kakodkar who had gone public with his gripe, with or without authorisation from the political leadership, on the eve of the US President’s visit.

A second round of atomic paranoia unfolded as the US Congress began to consider the modification of American domestic law to facilitate civilian nuclear cooperation with India in the spring of 2006. It was one thing for Bush to say India deserves a nuclear exception, but it was entirely another matter to convince the Congress to change a long-standing law that had strong bipartisan support. As the House of Representatives and the Senate began to lend a legal basis for the July 18 deal, the Indian debate went into a paroxysm of nuclear morbidity. Every sentence in the two versions of the bill was treated as some kind of American political imposition on India and an invitation to nuclear slavery.

As a bunch of retired scientists of the atomic energy establishment joined the chorus of protesters, and chose to appeal to the Parliament on the eve of the monsoon session in 2006, the BJP and the CPM jumped at the political opportunity to kill either the nuclear deal or the UPA government. Facts were of no consequence in this opportunistic political manoeuvre. Any pragmatic approach would have recognised that the US Congress is an independent branch of the US government, that India was not bound by the US legislation but the bilateral agreement it would sign with Washington, and that in convincing the US Congress to go along, some minor political concessions on the part of New Delhi and Washington might be necessary.

As the BJP and CPM together rode a wave of nuclear nationalism, the UPA government went on the defensive and the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh simply caved in. Fearful that the nuclear controversy might threaten the very future of the government, Singh made a bow to the nuclear hysteria and set himself up to morph a historic diplomatic achievement into a political defeat.

 

The prime minister’s reluctance to confront the nuclear hawks inside and outside the government ensured the survival of the government, but it laid the basis for huge costs in terms of constitutional governance and flexibility in the conduct of the nation’s foreign policy. The tragedy is only partly about the fact that both the government and the opposition allowed one department to define the national security parameters.

In agreeing with the opposition parties and nuclear critics that the DAE had a veto over the government’s prerogative to conduct diplomacy, the PM came close to abandoning his constitutional obligation to lead the government. What should have been a political call and a reaffirmation of the principle that the government is more than the sum of its departments, Manmohan Singh chose the soft option of appeasing the DAE that wrapped itself round the flag and claimed to be the final arbiter of India’s national interest. This, of course, would have consequences for the conduct of foreign policy elsewhere.

 

The ultranationalism whipped up by the DAE, BJP and the CPM on the Indo-US nuclear deal would soon complicate India’s delicate negotiations with China on the boundary dispute and Pakistan on the question of Jammu and Kashmir. While chauvinism disguised as anti-imperialism might be a cheap tactic against the faraway US, ultranationalism is an uncontrollable monster in the negotiations with China and Pakistan. Given the long tradition of anti-Americanism in India, it is always easy to play on the distrust of Washington. (That there was no debate on India’s complicated nuclear deals with Russia and the kind of safeguards conditions India accepted with Moscow were never debated in the Parliament or elsewhere just proves the point.)

Even as it dresses up the defence of nuclear sovereignty against the US as anti-imperialism, the CPM might soon find that the right is far more effective in mobilising hyper-nationalism against China and Pakistan. If the Left finds it easy to tap into Muslim resentment against the US, mobilising Hindu national chauvinism against China and Pakistan is bread and butter for the BJP. For unlike the nuclear question with the US, the issues with China and Pakistan are about land – which is at the core of territorial nationalism and thus highly vulnerable to manipulation.

Negotiations with China and Pakistan will not succeed without tempering India’s territorial nationalism, finessing the notion of sovereignty and softening the boundaries. Both the boundary question with China and the Kashmir problem with Pakistan demand imaginative solutions that skirt around the territorial problematic. They are bound to run into intense opposition from the right and the national security establishment. If the Left ended up encouraging the DAE to defy the UPA government on the nuclear question, we now have the spectacle of the Indian Army openly obstructing a reasonable settlement of the Siachen problem with Pakistan and opposing any modification of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act in Manipur.

 

The Left claims that it is all for reconciliation with China and Pakistan. If negotiations with these countries are, however, put to the same ultranationalist treatment that was meted out to the nuclear pact with the US, they will be dead in no time. The CPM today insists that whatever the prime minister said in the monsoon session of the Parliament on the nuclear deal is cast in stone and cannot be modified even a wee bit to preserve the essence of the Indo-US nuclear deal.

Were a similar approach to be adopted vis a vis China and Pakistan, there would be no prospect for any negotiations with either neighbour. Take for example the agreement on guiding principles on boundary settlement signed by the two governments during the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s visit to India in April 2005. One of the key elements was the notion of adjustment of competing territorial claims in Aksai Chin and Arunachal Pradesh on a practical basis. That reflects a long overdue and pragmatic Indian departure from the argument China was the aggressor and had no claims on either territory.

In fact the 1962 resolution of the Parliament, following the brief military clash between the two governments that year, demanded that India get back every square inch of the territory occupied by China. If we were to apply the Left prescription that government statements and Parliament resolutions are sacrosanct, no negotiation with China is possible. In trying to bind Manmohan Singh to his nuclear statements in the Parliament during August 2006, the CPM has only opened up space for the BJP and the national security hawks to prevent a reasonable negotiation with China on the complicated boundary question.

 

That bristling territorial nationalism lurks just beneath the surface in India’s expanding engagement with China came into view on the eve of President Hu Jintao’s visit to India in November 2006. A straight forward factual assertion, by the Chinese envoy to India, of Beijing’s long-standing claims over Arunachal saw a visceral response from the Indian media and the Parliament. Even more significant were the attempts by the national security establishment to put in place country-specific restrictions on Chinese investments in India. If the most hidebound institutions in the government had their way, China would have figured in a list of three ‘enemy countries’ – China, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Interestingly the Left picked up the cudgels on the China investment issue. While it opposes foreign direct investment from other sources, Chinese money is kosher for the CPM. On the question of Arunachal, the CPM had little to say. But it is well-known that the CPM believes China was right and India wrong in 1962. Yet its blind double standards on the nuclear issue vis a vis the US and the territorial issue in relation to China seem to hardly bother its leadership.

The political opportunism of the BJP is even worse. It was Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Jaswant Singh and Brajesh Mishra who, by stealth, engineered a pragmatic shift in India’s policies towards China. They in fact broke the mould of Indian policy by agreeing with China that the boundary issue needs a ‘political settlement’ on the basis of ‘give and take’. If in power they were prepared to look beyond the emotive 1962 Parliament resolution on the boundary question, which insists on all or nothing, in opposition they were ready to attack the Chinese claims on Arunachal. It is also likely then that they will oppose any settlement that must necessarily compromise India’s territorial claims on the China boundary.

 

On Pakistan too, it was the BJP leadership that opened the door for creative negotiations on the Kashmir question, going beyond the 1994 Parliament resolution that proclaims entire J&K as part of India and the 1972 Shimla Agreement which the Indian side presumes contains the essence of the settlement along the Line of Control. The UPA government has built upon this framework and is considering an interesting template for the final settlement of the J&K question in its back-channel negotiations with Pakistan.

This involves five broad principles: no change in territorial status quo, symmetric autonomy to both parts of J&K, open borders, a joint supervisory mechanism between the two Kashmirs for improving the human condition in the state, and progressive demilitarisation in return for an end to terrorist violence. While this framework provides perhaps the best possible option to move forward in Kashmir, it is bound to run into incredible resistance from the national security establishment, as well as the centre and right of the Indian political spectrum.

 

The liberals, who reject ultranationalism and overblown security concerns, believe the policy changes towards China and Pakistan are welcome and long overdue. But conservatives, hawks and xenophobes, who were mobilised in droves against the nuclear deal with the US, will be ready and eager to occupy the ultranationalist space that the Left has generated by aligning with the right in the debate on the Indo-US nuclear deal. The Left might believe it is possible to be liberal towards Pakistan and China while defending nationalist sovereignty vis a vis the US, but it is impossible to be both.

The transformation of India’s relations with the US, China and Pakistan needs an approach that is based on self-confidence, a commitment to pragmatic resolution of long-standing foreign policy problems a readiness to challenge the traditional perspectives on national security, and a willingness to think out of the box. Such an approach is also needed in the long delayed attempts to improve India’s relations with the smaller neighbours and take the lead in promoting regional economic integration and shared prosperity in the subcontinent. Only consistent, all encompassing liberalism, or neo-liberalism if you will, and a rejection of ultra-nationalism will allow India to transform its regional security condition and elevate its global standing.