The Hindu : Palestine: India must speak out

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Wednesday, Apr 03, 2002

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Palestine: India must speak out

By Inder Malhotra

To those who keep a close watch on this country's conduct of its foreign relations, the External Affairs Minister, Jaswant Singh's statement on Israel's escalating military attack on the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority's Chairman, Yasser Arafat, at Ramallah came as a rather pleasant surprise. This was so because Mr. Singh and the Foreign Office he presides over have usually been coy about criticising Israel's high-handedness vis-a-vis the Palestinians, even when it is egregious, as it surely is now.

For several decades, New Delhi's West Asia policy had been not only over-exuberant in its support to Palestine's legitimate cause but also gratuitously offensive to Israel. To restore a balance to it was therefore necessary and desirable. However, the Narasimha Rao Government that was the first to establish full diplomatic relations with Israel had by and large performed the balancing act.

The BJP-led ruling coalition appears to have pushed the pendulum to the other extreme at least partly because the expanding India-Israel relations have acquired a strategic and defence supplies content that is important to Indian security. The fact that Israel, like India, has to face terrorism, including suicide bombing, also matters. But this is not the entire story.

Since the qualitative change in relations with the United States is of even greater significance, there has also been at work the thought that it would be advantageous not to say anything critical of America, of course, but also of Israel that enjoys Washington's almost complete support. For instance, when last year Israel first started massive retaliation for terrorist attacks by Palestinians even the U.S. remonstrated with it for using ``excessive force.'' But India preferred to slur over the whole thing.

There was no question of this going unnoticed either in Chanakyapuri or in Arab capitals. Arab complaints that New Delhi was ``diluting'' its support to the Palestinian cause inevitably followed. South Block responded in a carefully calibrated manner. A Minister of State for External Affairs, no longer holding that post, was asked to make an appropriate statement at an international conference in Durban (of which few took any notice) but nothing was said in Delhi.

More importantly, the Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, wrote a personal letter to Mr. Arafat that the Palestinian leader found both welcome and reassuring because it said that support to the Palestine cause was ``historic, traditional and a cardinal part of Indian foreign policy.''

When the current crisis assumed alarming proportions — with Mr. Arafat besieged in his own headquarters with Israeli tanks and troops pounding it relentlessly — the South Block stuck to its earlier style. It said nothing in New Delhi but directed its Deputy Permanent Representative to the U.N., A. Gopinath, to make an appropriately strong statement that predictably went largely unreported and unnoticed.

Mr. Singh's terse remarks in Shanghai three days later, and that, too, in reply to a question by a senior Indian journalist accompanying him, were, in fact, a somewhat milder version of what the envoy had told the U.N. Security Council.

In New York, Mr. Gopinath had described President Arafat as the ``embodiment of Palestinian nationhood'' — an expression first used by Mr. Vajpayee in his letter to the Palestinian leader — and added: ``The way President Arafat is being treated is shocking." Mr. Singh's phrase was: ``To subject President Arafat to this treatment is to denude the Palestinian people of the sense of their nationhood. This must stop. What must also stop are acts of terrorism.''

By an interesting coincidence, Mr. Arafat and Mr. Vajpayee are once again in correspondence with each other. An emissary of Mr. Arafat, Hani Al Hasan, will deliver a letter from him to Mr. Vajpayee on Wednesday. The letter itself is dated.

For, Mr. Hasan had come to India well before the start of the current crisis primarily to attend the CPI Congress in Kerala. But its meaning and significance are clear enough.

In any case, it should give the Vajpayee Government an opportunity to be heard on the most reprehensible and ominous situation in a region of vital interest to India more loudly and clearly than has been the case so far. Israel surely has a right to defend itself against terrorism. But the way it is going about it — with obvious American support — would not bring peace and certainly not end terrorism. And what kind of a fight against terrorism it is that the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, publicly regrets that he did not kill Mr. Arafat in 1982? He is now threatening to ``exile'' the Palestinian leader from the country of which he is the elected head. Besides attacking Ramallah, the Israeli army has also invaded Bethlehem, Christ's birthplace.

As a friend of both Israel and America, India must tell them unambiguously that any illusion Mr. Sharon may have of finding an alternative Palestinian leadership, after destroying Mr. Arafat, that would meekly accept peace on Israeli terms is a dangerous delusion. The comprehensive ``land for peace'' proposal of Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah is a better way out of the cruel impasse West Asia is caught in.

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Palestine: India must speak out