An over-hasty endorsement?

THE VAJPAYEE ADMINISTRATION has engaged Mr. Richard Armitage, a special envoy of the U.S. President, in an unnecessarily gratuitous manner indicative of New Delhi's crass and impetuous move to craft an ill-defined strategic shift in its ties with Washington. Coinciding with the new U.S.-India consultations in New Delhi last week, the Prime Minister, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, publicly welcomed the relatively less controversial aspects of Washington's latest initiative about a new missile defence system. In the process, Mr. Vajpayee desperately sought to contain the damage caused by the External Affairs Ministry's unthinking ebullience in hailing and endorsing the new American strategic `vision'. If the only merit of that earlier statement was its implied calculus, a reaffirmation by Mr. Vajpayee about the security imperative of a credible minimum nuclear deterrent was a belated signal now regarding India's inevitable strategic priorities in the changing global context. The extraordinary nature of Mr. Armitage's diplomatic brief encouraged his Indian interlocutors to raise the discussions to a new pitch over a wider gamut of bilateral ties as well. Of particular salience is the top American official's studied move to herald the present moment as a beginning towards a ``new relationship''. However, a bilateral initiative to map the contours of such a bond runs the risk of collapsing in its `boost phase' itself if the Vajpayee administration cannot change course decisively and hold out credible assurances of safeguarding India's strategic independence.

The real significance of Mr. Armitage's mission can of course be traced entirely to the conscious effort by the U.S. President, Mr. George Bush, to create a new environment of international strategic consensus. Mr. Bush's transparent gameplan is to persuade the ``friends and allies'' of the U.S. to acquiesce in his unilateral decision to build a missile defence shield. The system, whose technological parameters will be upgraded, is meant to insulate the U.S. from weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and biological armaments, which might be hurled at it by those not willing to reckon with the logic and power of America's gigantic nuclear deterrence. While there is no doubt that the U.S. has identified India as a ``friend'' for this purpose, the question of an equal sense of security for America's ``friends and allies'' and others remains unanswered still. New Delhi does not appear to have posed this question in all its starkness.

The Vajpayee administration should curb its cavalier tendency of this kind to make a false start and later seek to correct it if forced to do so by public opinion. New Delhi's new and implied call for balancing the interests of the U.S. with those of the others is also a sequel to the diplomatic intervention by Russia, which remains unconvinced by Mr. Bush's current charm offensive. For India, regional stability is closely linked to the possible responses of China to Mr. Bush's plans and Beijing's assessment of Pakistan's existential dilemmas. Pakistan has now made common cause with China in opposing Mr. Bush. Mr. Armitage has certainly packaged Mr. Bush's immediate plans as a limited missile defence scheme to meet the dangers posed by those outside the pale of international law as seen from Washington. Yet, there is nothing definitive that the U.S. will characterise Pakistan as a `rogue state' and view India's strategic compulsions in that light. New Delhi should in any case eschew unworkable zero-sum calculations of a cold war-style sub-text in South Asia in this post-Cold War period. More importantly, New Delhi will do well to mull over the global and regional consequences of a U.S. missile defence system - in particular, China acquiring ``asymmetric warfare'' capabilities.

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