Point Blank: Luck Plays A Huge Role As India Struggles To Script A Coherent Foreign Policy

We have a grand strategic relationship with the United States. It is the grandest of all the strategic relationships we have, the showpiece, the role model, the piece de resistance. We have other strategic relationships as well. We have a strategic relationship with Mongolia. We have one with Namibia as well. Even Kazakhstan.

We have over two dozen strategic relationships at least. Nothing compares though to the one we have with the United States, the mother of all strategic relationships. It is the shiniest example, one that keeps our Amreeki Bhakt Indians particularly chuffed and puffed, though not our farmers and dairy-wallahs and fisherfolk so much.

Our foreign policy establishment has painstakingly brought the relationship to this level, stacking up nearly all the eggs here. We began sidling up soon after the Son of Pokhran, ignoring naysayers who argued it would be the kiss of death. It has not been a bottom up phenomenon but a top down one, with as the clarion call. It was billed as a close up, close bonding, mint breathy, intimate strategic relationship, the one that got better the closer you got till you were two hearts beating as one.

From ‘Mint Breath Bonding’ to Daily Verbal Lashings

Look closer. Is it really? Nah, it is more of a spit and polish type of relationship. Everyday someone or the other in the Trump administration, from Trump downwards, whether it is the Secretary of State, the Treasury Secretary, sundry advisers like Peter Navarro, White House major-domos like Stephen Miller, or even that new model Barbie spokesperson, anybody and everybody in fact, spits out a steady stream of undiplomatic epithets at New Delhi.

Every day, as the song goes, the paper boy brings more. Then every day our prime time foreign policy analysts apply the Humpty Dumpty polish attempting to put it all together again. Russia very bad very bad, we are lectured, even as Trump curtseys Putin the same way a 19th century Russian vassal would treat royalty from the House of Romanov.

You can hear the obsequiousness in Trump’s after-event comments, see it in his body language, and smell it in the forward retreat of the quickly re-congealing red lines, from cease-fire to portents of a full-blown agreement.

All the while Putin polishes to good effect the still-clanging echoes of Nineties German Unification era American promises against NATO expansion made famous by James Baker- `not an inch Eastward’, not an inch.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova, keen observer of ironical beauty that she is, was moved to exulting on viewing the vast expanse of Alaskan carpet-scape, “They spent three years telling everyone Russia was isolated, and today they saw the beautiful red carpet laid out for the Russian president in the US.” Putin has Trump on a string, while sitting on a rainbow. He’s going to take it nice and easy.

India on the Sidelines of the Red Carpet

Ah, such beautiful, seductive red carpet that Trump sometimes lays out. We are nowhere in its swirl. What happened that makes American Bwana say if we are strategic partners we better start acting the part? If we are getting such vituperative lashings daily in public, imagine what the heat must be like in the kitchen. The smell in our noses says the rot is not in Denmark. We are not being told something here. It seems that the current crème de la crème of our Indian foreign policy blokes look and dress and speak as though they are men of action. But that’s as far as it goes.

Other than the behind-the-scenes marshalling for exotic travel medals, 28 in ten years and counting, our foreign policy lot have precious little to show for their efforts. They are more like characters in an absurd play in search of a plot. Well, the sad fact is not all the medals in the world equals one putative Nobel Peace Prize. All of them put together is not going to save us from the quandary we face. 

Strategic Misreading and Scriptless Diplomacy

Working backwards ipso facto style it is possible to make a convincing argument that the most charitable explanation is our strategic geniuses comprehensively misread the cue cards and the script of the play they were part of where they mistook bit roles for lead roles. The lead actors sometimes call up to brief the side characters of the real goings-on, giving local audiences the impression that a grand play is afoot. 

In the larger play, the script is being rewritten even as New Delhi mutely watches. We have no lines to speak, no cards to play. The others hold the strong cards. A US trade adviser accuses, Look, India is “cosying up to China.” Delicious Chinese irony.

It is the same China which Prime Minister Vajpayee, explaining away the Son of Pokhran, said was the basis of our nuclear tests, telling President Clinton, “To add to the distrust that country has materially helped another neighbour of ours to become a covert nuclear weapons state. At the hands of this bitter neighbour we have suffered three aggressions in the last 50 years. And for the last ten years we have been the victim of unremitting terrorism and militancy sponsored by it in several parts of our country, specially Punjab and Jammu & Kashmir.”

He couldn’t bring himself to name the bitter neighbour in the letter that Clinton administration duly leaked to the New York Times, which is how we knew about it.

Groundhog Day in Geopolitics

See, again, the same confusion of roles. It’s Groundhog Day all over again. We were told after May by our military brass, with the sanction of the higher ups, that in the Hall of Mirrors, we were actually fighting China again while all the time we thought we were fighting Pakistan. We chuckled as we told ourselves we won. Yet we find ourselves in the strategic dog house, all our foreign policy planks crashing like ninepins.

Ipso facto, Trump either didn’t buy our argument or worse. It is the latter we should be concerned about, a night without end. Trump treats China which buys much more oil from Russia than we do with kid gloves in inverse proportion that he reserves his contempt for us, with Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir Ahmad Shah, Pakistan’s 11th Chief of Army Staff, ensconced in throne-lap. 

Trump is being more than indulgent to Munir, a la King Kong atop Empire State Building to Jessica Lange, sticking FTO label on Baloch separatists, dreaming of a Trump Oil Corridor in Islamabad’s Backyard Badlands as Munir nibbles his ear. Three years is a long time in power. Munir is on song. Where does that leave Delhi? Dependent on outcomes.

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In Ukraine. In Islamabad. In Washington. Dependent on Beijing’s calculus. Reduced to just so much BRIC-a-brac. A ship out in the raging storm in a series of moonless, starless nights, without anchor, sail, or rudder or oars. In other words, the famous, very famous, ‘strategic autonomy’ in full play. Our stylishly kilted men of action are also singing, with the sirens as choristers. Luck be a lady tonight! 

V Sudarshan is the editor of The Free Press Journal