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A Prime Minister's road trip and after

Harish Khare

How do we insulate the pursuit of diplomatic affairs and strategic interests from the vagaries of a domestic discourse that remains mired in sensationalism?

PRIME MINISTER Manmohan Singh has just come back from an overseas trip that can only be described as a success. In France, the Prime Minister competently leveraged India's new economic clout into advancing a vital strategic objective of breaching the restrictive Nuclear Suppliers Group. In New York, he talked down to a haughty General and adroitly warded off the Bush-Rice pressure to toe the American line on Iran's nuclear designs. By no means a bad road trip.

For once, Indian diplomacy was able to use to its advantage fault-lines in the "enemy" camp. The Indians took full advantage of the split between Pakistan's traditional anti-India foreign office and the pragmatic Presidential establishment. The Pakistanis were reduced to crying on Condoleezza Rice's shoulders; she in turn had to argue the General's case with the Prime Minister. The Indian camp was also aware of the fact that the Bush-Rice team did not have the full backing of the traditional cold warriors in the State Department for the Manmohan-Bush civilian nuclear agreement of July 18, 2005, and care had to be taken that this initiative was not sabotaged by traditional anti-New Delhi voices on Capitol Hill. Indian diplomacy emerged unscathed.

Curiously enough a section of the media delegation that accompanied the Prime Minister chose to take an extremely negative view of how Dr. Singh and his aides conducted themselves with international interlocutors. There is an inexplicable inclination to swallow hook, line, and sinker any disinformation dished out by the Pakistani foreign office. And, it must be conceded, the Pakistanis have sized up most of the Indian media's leading lights and are getting better by the day at exploiting our editors' and anchorpersons' personal egos and professional needs.

What is worse, the media have managed to create the impression of a rift between the Prime Minister's Office and the Foreign Office. Even worse, the attack on the Prime Minister's Office is being seen as inspired by the Ministry of External Affairs. Some of the negative notice has to do with a minor faux pas by the Prime Minister's media adviser but much of it had to do with petty personal reasons.

It would be a mistake to allow these misperceptions to acquire a life of their own. Senior decision-makers would be doing themselves a disservice if they were to get distracted by motivated reportage.

The cacophony generated over the Prime Minister's Paris-New York visit invites a larger question: do we have the requisite collective national assurance to engage with an outside world where decision-makers have necessarily to sort out the substance of diplomacy from the cacophony of sound-bytes?

For too long our political class has been extremely comfortable with a discourse of moral outrage vis-à-vis the outside world; but this world has changed dramatically in the age of globalisation and the Internet. Uncertainties are the only certain feature of the new global scene. As a country we remain uncertain of all the advantages that have accrued to us since 1991.

As a polity we no longer have confidence in our national leaders to deal with any degree of competence and sangfroid with foreign players. This is curious because since Jawaharlal Nehru's days Indian diplomats have made their presence felt in global forums.

As our polity became more and more fractured and our political class less and less cosmopolitan in outlook and thinking, we lost that sense of assurance of saying the right thing.

As our political leaders lost credibility at home they also lost their efficacy in diplomacy. Habits of distrust and dispute in domestic politics became an impediment in the conduct of foreign policy. When out of power political parties and leaders are all too prone to taking extreme positions; when conducting the affairs of the Indian state, the same gentlemen begin appreciating the complexities and different moral values at work in the world.

The larger question, then, is: how do we insulate the pursuit of diplomatic affairs and strategic interests from the vagaries of a domestic discourse that remains irresponsibly mired in sensationalism? Can the political class summon the requisite maturity to pursue national interests without being detained by petty distractions?

Admittedly, no Prime Minister or Foreign Minister can presume to have the licence to sell the store away. Since we live in the age of coalitions, a Prime Minister or a government per se does not even enjoy the autonomy in decision-making to overturn established equations and paradigms. As in domestic politics, so in foreign policy every initiative is subject to negotiation with coalition partners and party colleagues.

At the same time, conduct of foreign policy has to get operational in a different policy stratosphere where policy-makers pretend to be sovereign equals. The international system has each national decision-maker as a legal representative of a sovereign state; but each one is aware of the other's limited domestic support, authority, and legitimacy. While traditional power instruments do often remain in play, much of diplomacy hinges on minimising one's own internal weakness and exploiting the other's domestic vulnerability.

Over the next few months Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will have to negotiate at home his two initiatives — the U.S. nuclear deal and the peace process with Pakistan. He and his team will need to develop the finesse not to get bogged down by political leaders' old habits of disputations and grandstanding and the media's new culture of controversy. Above all, he will need the unambiguous and ungrudging support of his own party. The premium will be on maturity and clear-headedness.

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