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French Minister for breathing `new life' into ties with India
By Vaiju Naravane
Although a French Foreign Ministry press communique describes Kashmir as an issue of international concern, diplomats in Paris are now laying the accent on the "bilateral nature of the visit", a change of tack not unrelated to the furore caused by the U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell's remarks on the international nature of the issue.
Since he assumed office last May, Mr de Villepin, one of President Jacques Chirac's most trusted lieutenants, has undertaken a flurry of high-profile international visits. These include Washington, Moscow, the Middle-East, Africa — and not just France's former colonies — Germany and the European Union headquarters in Brussels. Given the French interest in South East Asia and the nature of the country's ties with China and Japan, it is significant that he has decided to make India and Pakistan his first stop in Asia.
The silver-haired de Villepin, described as the President's grey eminence, is bringing a clear message: France fully intends to win back some of its lost prestige and importance in world affairs; President Chirac, elected last May with a thumping majority, is the sole arbiter of French foreign policy.
Mr. Chirac did not find the former socialist government's public and rather moralistic espousal of the human rights cause to his taste and the change is evident with France refraining from publicly evoking Chechnya with the Russians.
As a major regional power, France continues to be worried about the "hegemonic factor'' and has repeatedly spoken out against a world totally dominated, politically, economically, culturally and technologically by what a former Socialist foreign minister described as a "dangerously simplistic hyper-power".
However, while it has not given up its goal of building a large coalition of nations, India among them, that could serve as a counterweight to U.S. domination, Mr. de Villepin has tried the soft approach in an attempt to distance himself from the harsh truth games so favoured by his predecessor.
"Let us not argue about semantics. It is not too much power that threatens the world, but a power vacuum,'' he said recently in an obvious bid to improve France's trans-Atlantic dialogue.
A writer, a poet and political pamphleteer, Mr. de Villepin describes himself as a man of action. In his recently published book The Cry of the Gargoyle, an impassioned pamphlet propounding selfless political activism in France, he advocates movement, action and results. "Only action can pull our country out of the rut,'' he says in his book, a scathing indictment of France as a society ruled by self-interest and influential cliques that have promoted a ''court culture''.
There is an inter-dependence, the Minister maintains, between the world situation and various "regional crises" whose gravity should not be underestimated.
"This is true of India and Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Middle East. We cannot simply get used to lowering the tensions, then forgetting about them. Our duty to produce results is very great. Our people no longer want solutions in the air, they want progress, results.''
Mr. de Villepin will try hard to breathe new life into the Indo-French relationship now somewhat over-shadowed by India's increasingly cosy ties with Russia and the U.S. There have been suggestions that France should use its influence with the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates to open up another channel of influence to temper Pakistan's Kashmir policy.
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