India’s evolution as a major player in world affairs, which our size, situation, resources and talents ought to have made us long ago, keeps accelerating both our problems and our opportunities. On a cluster of issues that canhave far-reaching consequences for us, there is frustratingly little we can do, notably the disastrous Western intervention in Iraq but also the other West Asian crises, which foment the terrorism plaguing us. Afghanistan, while generating our most immediate threat, provides the most promising opening for our potential. A resurgent Taliban has only led the West to succumb to a strategy of coexistence, if not cooption, while Pakistan—through the plain facts of geography and also its active hostility—severely curbed our room for manoeuvre. But Delhi’s convening of the international donors conference is an index of the potential for Indian initiatives.
Nepal showed even more impressively how positive our influence can be, thanks to the quiet diplomacy that helped establish the basis, howsoever unsteady, for peaceful democratisation. Of other neighbours, the unsettled are as unsettling as ever: happily, the India bogey appeared to be diminishing as a factor in Pakistan and Bangladesh politics, but the residual tendency to exploit the bogey remains a serious obstacle to progress.
The resumption of the Pakistan peaceprocess, despite the Mumbai blasts and other terrorist manifestations, was a triumph of maturity over provocation and hope over possibility. It suits everybody to relax over Indo-Pakistan relations: India looks statesmanlike, General Musharraf looks creative, for the world one potential flare-up looks less imminent. That terrorism based in Pakistan, if not mandated by it, has spread beyondJ&K to other parts of India, and that our neighbour is again seeking dominance in Afghanistan, is bad enough. Coupled with the rise of Naxalite undermining of law and order within India, this combination of militancies surely calls for a higher order of statecraft.
It is one of those issues—like Kashmir, the Northeast, the decline in the quality of governance—on which progress desperately cries out for national consensus. Sadly, while India’s international interactions are increasing, our political horizons become more parochial. Beyond those in government directly responsible, there seems hardly any consciousness of the nature and magnitude of the threats we face and the influence we can extend. While policymakers in other countries increasingly include India in their reckonings, we languish in the morass of the past, almost unwilling to develop the intellectual or mechanical apparatus essential to take us beyond adolescence. A distinguished friend’s question goes to the crux of it: "You want, rightly enough, to be treated as a first-class power, why do you act like a third-class power?" Despite all our failings, our economic progress and strategic and military heft are thrusting a world role on us. But economics is not enough; even aGNP that moves in giant leaps won’t really count unless instruments of state action and the broad strategic thinking evolve, within government and within national discourse.
This need was sharply underlined by what passed for public debate on the issue that threatened to drown out all our other concerns in 2006—the ‘nucleardeal.’ Undoubtedly, aspects crucial to our national security are involved here, as are many aspects relating to the international role opening up for us—from relations with Iran and China to a general conception of the freedom of action we allow ourselves. That the US has made some dreadful decisions is unquestionable; so is the fact that all states act in self-interest. Neither fact prevents benefits from a good understanding with the US—benefits already apparent in improved approaches to us from a whole swathe of countries, from Europe to Japan. There is movement even on China, which had till recently taken few pains to hide its (not unjustified) sense of superiority over us. There is reason to believe it is extending a promising, if problematic vision of engagement, at least partly because it sees Indo-US cooperation as something it should offset. But, almost unwilling to recognise our strengths, or the options that greater power opens up, we persisted in fear of being fettered to American designs.
The American ‘deal’ does bring out the dilemmas of being a major player, and the conflicting considerations that need balancing. Bismarck said dealing with the great powers of his day was like "keeping five balls in the air without letting any fall." Today we will have to keep more—but we must start with a consciousness of the wider elements involved, and with confidence in ourselves.
(The author has served as Indian ambassador to China, Pakistan and the US.)
