DIPLOMACY CANNOT COUNTER CHINA'S CHALLENGE

G Parthasarathy, a well-meaning retired career diplomat, is considered a hawk by a lot of woolly-headed analysts. They continue to blindly believe that the interests of a nation as big and as potentially economically powerful as India will be best served by being a harmless dove in an international environment where the power of a large nation needs to be projected and protected by its military strength. While Parthasarathy does represent the somewhat more realist face of the foreign policy establishment that is trapped in a compartmentalised and Nehruvian mindset, there is little doubt that even he is somewhat stuck in the same dysfunctional mould that has prevented India from properly activating what it needs to, to even reactively face the challenges that it must successfully deal with.

Parthasarathy's column in the Times of India of June 29, 2009, exemplifies the deep-rooted disease that has enervated the Foreign Office which, like most other government departments, functions in splendid isolation and with a misplaced arrogance. Thanks to a colonial legacy, career diplomats, like their counterparts in the IAS, have placed themselves at a hierarchical rung at which they will not be found in any other modern nation. With most politicians of today having a zero or at best a unifocal world view, foreign policy formulation and response has fallen into the laps of career diplomats who themselves are not trained or equipped to holistically address all issues intimately connected to it. To make matters worse, they are focused on preserving and promoting their turf even at the cost of national interest.

China, as Parthasarathy brings out correctly, is of late displaying a "new aggressiveness" in its approach to India, including issuing of "not too thinly disguised warnings about its territorial claims to Arunachal Pradesh which it refers to as Southern Tibet". Even more ominous is the fact that it has now begun to display its proactively developed military might openly, going to the extent of asking the US to recognise that Indian Ocean is a "Chinese sphere of influence". It has also unilaterally extended its maritime boundaries with Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and the Philippines. There are other areas too where China is now aggressively working against India's interests. It may be recalled that last year it had tried very hard to prevent the Nuclear Suppliers Group from giving the required unanimous clearance for the Indo-US Nuclear Deal.

The latest agreement that China has signed with Myanmar for a 20 million tons oil and a 100 billion cubic meters gas pipeline, has not even been mentioned by Parthasarathy even though this is one deal that will not only take Myanmar firmly into the Chinese orbit, but will also, without a doubt, lead to the establishment of a Chinese military base in that country and open up an all weather route to the Brahmaputra Valley, making annexation of Arunachal Pradesh and a lot more easier for them. Having secured the deal with Myanmar, they have already started showing "growing aggressiveness" in their claim to the entire state of Arunachal Pradesh.

Was the Indian Foreign Office sleeping for all these years when China was working on Myanmar? Why was India looking west to that disastrous gas pipeline from Iran through Pakistan when it should have done every possible thing to get the Myanmar pipeline and more that the Chinese have got, knowing fully well that China was aggressively expanding its military influence in the region and had been claiming an Indian state for decades?

The blame for this new game-changing threat rests solely on the shoulders of the Foreign Office and the NSA, both of which have to date shown little or no understanding of the strategic security threat that India faces from China. This absolutely straightforward and unbelievable deduction is based on the simple truth that India has neither developed a credible reactive response - proactive is not even on the horizon - nor has shown any intention of doing so till now.

See the irony which no one wants to even whisper about because it exposes this country's security apparatus completely? At the time of Independence, Tibet and Myanmar were India's buffers and its spheres of influence. In the background of the experience of the Second World War, India should have not only done whatever was needed to keep them in its fold, but should also have actively developed a naval capability to make the Indian Ocean it sphere of influence too. Tragically, India forgot it all. But the Chinese up north did not. So, 62 years down the line India has lost all three and they are now are almost firmly in the bag of a China that never forgot to see far ahead.

There will perhaps be no parallel in the world where such a tectonic shift has taken place in the balance of power with the adversely affected nation doing absolutely nothing about it at any stage. For this criminal neglect, one day we will have to pay.

These developments are serious enough to give sleepless nights to those leading India. But, thanks to the sedating advice they seem to be getting from India's babus, they are not even concerned. What, for example, is the solution being offered by Parthasarathy to "deal with the strategic challenge that China poses in our Indian Ocean neighbourhood"? Proactive diplomacy. Period. What else does he say? He advises Indian service officers that "mature nations do not speak strongly or publicly about military deployment on disputed territories"! The Chinese don't think so; they speak aggressively about their military ambitions and intentions and openly call Arunachal Pradesh "Southern Tibet".

Is Parthasarathy's advice meant for a "mature" nation or a "weak" one that obdurately refuses to learn lessons from its own history, thanks to its security and diplomatic structures being in the vice-like grip of strategy-blind babus? Come to think of it, is their anything else that he can suggest? No. His expertise as a career diplomat ends there. But the nation's interest does not. Unfortunately that is something that no one wants to admit and that is something that has not ever been holistically dealt with in a government that works in water-tight compartments stifled by generalist babus. That is why India has a cop as its NSA and, yes, a cop, in a global first, heading an elite military commando outfit called the NSG. The disease is very serious and terribly deep-rooted indeed.

Can a nation be really so dumb as to believe as a national policy that the growing might and aggressiveness of China can be contained merely by talking and writing papers high in moral content with no hard power to back them? Was 1962 not lesson enough? Why is the better informed and equipped military leadership quiet about this hijacking of the nation by a few timid and self-serving generalist babus who are intent only on increasing the power of their own cadres to the exclusion of all others, nation be damned?

With every passing day, the Chinese are tightening the noose around India, the one country that they think will be in a position to challenge their dominance in the long term. Could they have ever done, or even thought, what they have, had they had civil services cadres of the type that India has and pushed the PLA out of the highest decision making loop, as these services have in India to create their own empires?

India is on the verge of becoming a super power. We may not be able to see it but the Chinese saw that a long time back. And they took proactive steps to be in a position to counter our rise. That is why China is only going to get more aggressive in the months and years ahead and will, without any doubt, use its military to humiliate and put India back and into an inferior position as it had done in 1962, at a time of its choosing.

The only way, as even a child should know, to prevent that from happening is not through something as ridiculous and meaningless as proactive diplomacy but by enhancing something as real and substantial as military strength. Only that can make the Chinese understand that the result of 1962 cannot be replicated. Will India wake up to this reality before it is too late, or will it allow its nose to be put to the ground by amateur generalists who cannot see and do not know?

Image source: Social Earth
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Readers may also like to read:
1. Facing the challenge of China's military modernisation
2. China and India:winning wars vs defending the country
3. India's 'Power': weakness=virtue, strength=immorality
4. China and India: bully and forever bullied
5. Democracy, morality and national interest
6. Myanmar lost to China: India's encirclement complete

MYANMAR LOST TO CHINA: INDIA'S ENCIRCLEMENT COMPLETE

Forget the threat from the Taliban or Pakistan. The real threat upon India is not from the West. It is from the forgotten, far away East. The Chinese have just signed a deal that will complete the encirclement of India on land and sea from all sides. The Chinese Army will soon be within breathing distance from India's border with no Himalayas to stop its march into India whenever China wants, as one day it certainly will, to bag claimed Arunachal Pradesh.

The latest development, facilitated by decades of neglect of Myanmar by India, may well prove to be an even more colossal a blunder than was the "gifting" of Tibet to China by Nehru in the fifties. At that time, in one fatal stroke, Nehru blindly converted India's buffer against China into that nation's buffer against India, without securing India's interest in any manner whatsoever. That enabled China to move its troops forward by more than a couple of thousand kilometers to sit right on India's head and inflict on it, in 1962, a humiliating defeat, a rout so complete that any self-respecting nation would have vowed never to forget and allow to happen to it again. Not India, which, instead of learning any lessons, chose to simply bury its head in the sand and pretend as if China did not exist.

The Chinese have just signed an agreement with Myanmar's military junta to build an 1100 km long oil and gas pipeline from Kyaukryu on the West coast of Myanmar to Ruili in the Yunan province of China. Construction will start as early as September this year. The pipeline will transport 20 million tons of crude coming from the Middle East and Africa annually to China. The gas pipeline, which will be further extended by another 1700 kms within China, will transport 12 billion cubic meters of gas annually, to be increased to 100 billion cubic meters in a few years. Compare this with the 29.2 billion cubic meters that will flow eventually from the KG basin gas wells of Reliance Industries and you will get an idea of the enormity of the deal. There is also talk that later more oil, not just for China but for Korea and Japan too, could flow through this pipeline. This agreement comes on the heels of China beating India to win a 30 year concession from the military junta besides launching construction of hydroelectric projects in that country.

For long, as India has known too well, China has been eyeing a shorter trade route to Europe via Myanmar because not only will it reduce the transportation route by over 1200 km and cut shipping time to Europe by over a week, it will also enable it to avoid the pirate infested and strategically significant Malacca Straits. The signing of this pipeline agreement is only going to accelerate development of this trade route.

China's National Road 320 presently ends at the border town of Ruili. The construction of the pipeline to that town will certainly be followed by a road from there to a sea port on the Myanmar coast. Once the railway line between Kunming and Mangshi is also ready, Myanmar railway, which ends at Lashio, will be only 143 kms away from China. It will then be only be a matter of time before the two networks are linked, enabling Chinese freight to be carried right up to and from a Myanmar port to China without any transhipment. Myanmar has also proposed a tri-nation road network between China, Bangladesh and Myanmar, which China is much interested in setting up.

The security and strategic implications posed by these developments for India are so grave that it is a wonder that there has been virtually no national debate and no media interest. The focus of the nation has not been allowed to move beyond the Tailban and Pakistan, both of which pose not even a fraction of the danger that these developments will in the next few years. If things move at the speed Chinese have shown recently, within a decade or so, a large percentage of Chinese freight traffic from other ports further east will get diverted to least two Myanmar ports that will then perhaps handle more Chinese freight than any other port. This freight will move to China through the entire length of Myanmar by road and rail. More oil and gas will also start flowing along the pipeline.

With so much of its economic activity becoming dependent on Myanmar, China will get the perfect excuse to expand its military presence in and around that country. That will, first of all, lead to deployment of Chinese Navy in considerable strength in the Bay of Bengal, within handshaking distance of the Andaman Islands and a little more than shout away from the West Bengal coast. Let no one be in any doubt that it is only a question of time before China gets Myanmar to give it a permanent Naval base on its soil. On land too, the Chinese will get proactively involved in protecting the pipeline and the rail and road traffic, necessitating the stationing of at least some military personnel in Myanmar.

In any case, thanks to these excellent lines of communication, the Chinese Army, known as the People's Liberation Army (PLA), will be in a position to roll straight into the Brahmaputra Valley through Myanmar, bypassing the harsh and high Himalayas completely. Winter will cease to India's friend against China, forcing it to physically deploy a large number of troops in Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram to meet this new threat. What the Chinese might do to inflame insurgency at that stage or get into some sort of a military pact with Bangladesh is anybody's guess. One thing is sure: they will do whatever it takes to hem India militarily and make it easy for China to simply lop the North East off.

It is not an accident that China has supported the military junta since it came to power 21 years ago and vetoed all Security Council resolutions against it. It foresaw long back that it needed Myanmar in its national interest and stuck to the task of securing that without wavering. India, on the other hand, has remained completely confused, as always. It has been gripped and weakened even more by vague but "supreme" moral pangs that have caused it to place democracy and Aung San Suu Kyi above all else. That is why, it has done nothing except resorting to a weak "engagement" with the junta that has got it nothing and has allowed Myanmar to fall right into the lap of a Dragon that is fully alive to its strategic interests that dictate that it should build and display its military might in the region.

The Chinese may have given up Mao's disastrous economic and social policies but they have not for a moment forgotten his immortal quote: power grows through the barrel of a gun. India, on the other hand, despite having foolishly placed itself at the business end of that barrel once, still hates power as being something "immoral". As a result, over the last 47 years, as China has grown stronger, India has meekly allowed itself to grow comparatively weaker.

This had to happen and will continue to unless India completely overhauls, professionalises and contemporises its national security set up which has been hijacked by selfish and greedy generalist career bureaucrats who advise politicians who themselves have not even a clue of this complex subject. They have proved time and again over the last 62 years that they are no more than ham-handed amateur middle-men who are more interested in asserting their "superiority" over the military - usurped deviously after the British left, thanks to ignorant politicians - than letting accountable professionals and political leaders respond with alacrity to meet the nation's security needs.

Myanmar never wanted to go into the arms of China; it was always wary of the dragon. It wanted India to be its partner. But India, as one Myanmar leaders said, did nothing and just "sold" it to China. The same India that has been embracing a series of military dictators in Pakistan because its national interest demanded it, found it very difficult to apply the principle to Myanmar, ostensibly because of democracy. More disturbingly, however, it seems that it is the obsession of India's career diplomats with the West and its glamour, coupled with their continuing strategic blindness, that has ensured that India's far away East has always remained neglected. The mindset that led Nehru to quickly bid goodbye to the people of the region from India when Chinese troops reached the outskirts of Tezpur in 1962, remains essentially unaltered.

That is why, while China is securing deal after deal in Myanmar and making the country increasingly dependent on it, India which had a large number of Indians living and working in Myanmar till the fifties, initially only helplessly watched them being thrown out, and has since done the same as China has shown increasing interest in that country. As a result, focused and result oriented Chinese government officials working with a clear strategic vision, have beaten India comprehensively to acquire not just a foothold but what is going to turn out to be near complete control over Myanmar.

See the irony? China is going to start building pipelines, highways and railways through the length of Myanmar soon. India, on the other hand, has not yet been able to finalise a contract for a gas pipeline from there either overland through Bangladesh/Assam or across the Bay of Bengal. Now that the Chinese have beaten them to the contract, they will undoubtedly buy up any spare gas that Myanmar might think of selling to India, killing India's project completely. While the Chinese have been making inroad after inroad into Myanmar, some Indians led by former Petroleum Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar, once a career diplomat, have been pushing for a gas pipeline from Iran through Pakistan to India, despite the fact that it will prove to be a huge security disaster. Criminal neglect of the East by India continues.

The British had envisaged Tibet as India's buffer to the North. In the East, that role was to be played by Myanmar (then called Burma). In the fifties, India lost Tibet to China. Almost half a century later, the same script is being written in Myanmar. India's obsession with a much smaller country, Pakistan, its puppy love for all things Western and its inward looking mindset that has cost it heavily all through history have led it to lose Myanmar too to the Chinese. India's encirclement is now complete.

The price for this inexplicable and absolutely inexcusable strategic blunder is going to cost India so heavily that 1962 will pale into into insignificance. India's failure to prevent Myanmar from going into the Dragon's mouth will ensure that Bangladesh will also follow suit soon, and very willingly. Even the thought of what the situation will be 20 years hence is disturbing.

Will India's leaders and their generalist, colonial henchmen learn any lesson and do what it will take to keep India secure, no matter what the cost of this near-Himalayan blunder? A leadership and bureaucracy that have not got for India new artillery guns for over 25 years and that routinely take decades to provide weaponry required to meet even huge existing shortages, can hardly be expected to start being visionary, proactive and quick in decision making. Thanks to them, India, now surrounded by hostile powers from all sides, is more vulnerable than it ever has been since Independence. And the way things are, the situation is only going to get worse.
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Readers may also like to read:
1. Facing the challenge of China's military modernisation
2. China and India:winning wars vs defending the country
3. India's 'Power': weakness=virtue, strength=immorality
4. China and India: bully and forever bullied
5. Democracy, morality and national interest

INDIA'S 'POWER': WEAKNESS=VIRTUE, STRENGTH=IMMORALITY

The uprising in Tibet is the latest in a long series of developments in India’s neighbourhood that has exposed India’s congenital inability and lack of desire to get itself to be counted as even a small player, forget a major one, in the region.

The ongoing protests against Chinese oppression in Tibet have seen India bend twice over backwards like a little nation so that the Chinese are not annoyed at all. All the cacophony about “morality” that accompanies other developments to influence India’s response - national interest be damned - is conspicuous by its almost total absence. This time, it is neither morality nor national interest which is determining India’s official and even media response to what China has been doing in Tibet for 60 years.

This time, it is an unashamed, unacknowledged acknowledgement of the utter relative weakness, not economic but military, that India has allowed itself to sink into vis a vis China. It is that unaddressed asymmetry and the terrifying fear of a Chinese retaliation to forcefully settle their long held claim over Arunachal Pradesh which has forced the country into pushing its lofty moral stances under a very dirty rug,

But, weakness somehow manages to find the strangest of moral ruses. There are voices comparing Tibet with, would you believe it, Kashmir and even the North East to justify the prostration to the Chinese! We conveniently like to forget many inconvenient truths. Had India wanted, for example, it could have claimed Myanmar with nearly the same justification that China has claimed and taken Tibet.

Tibetans do not claim Arunachal Pradesh; the Chinese do, on their behalf! The Dalai Lama has been driven out of his country by the invading Chinese; in Indian Kashmir, Kashmiri Hindus have been driven out by fellow Kashmiri and Pakistani Muslims! But, for the most dishonest of “moral” reasons, we gag the Dalai Lama and praise the Chinese who use the foulest of words for this apostle of peace to avoid talking to him; we pretend that homeless Kashmiri Pandits don’t exist and give enormous respect, time, importance, understanding and sympathy to the masters of AK47 wielding killers fielded by Pakistan to usurp Kashmir.

Last year, when the military junta in powerless Myanmar was facing a revolt from monks, ‘conscience keepers’ of India were up and awake, berating India for not taking the side of the monks. Very few were then concerned that India had already lost much ground to an aggressive and focused China and that any abrupt reaction against the junta would drive Myanmar almost totally into the arms of that country. It did not matter to them that the Chinese were working steadily to get a very easy route through Myanmar into the plains of Assam, to cut off and capture most of Arunachal Pradesh, whenever they decide to, with ease. All that mattered to them was the “morality” of supporting democracy in Myanmar and the unacceptability of supporting military dictatorship. National interest? That is all bunkum, said one illustrated TV personality.

Exactly the opposite happened when the Musharraf, the General responsible for occupying parts of Kargil, overthrew a democratically elected government in a military coup. Then there was no moral outcry, no calls to break ties with the military regime that had launched an attack on India and show solidarity with the forces of democracy. On the contrary, the practical voice which was most heard was that we had to do business with whoever was in power in Pakistan. The moral brigade was in fact the first to forgive the General and begin a long lasting “love affair’” with him. Was all this due to an enlightened understanding of national interest or was it because of something more fundamental and disturbingly so?

Ever since India gained Independence thanks mainly to the moral force of Mahatma Gandhi’s words and actions rather than any conventional force, India has fancied itself as a global moral voice, a sort of continuation of the Mahatma’s legacy. Gandhi’s morality and non violence had no space for “weakness” at all. It was the unusual actuation of great, uncompromising strength which did not need any weapons. Indeed, in retrospect, it is clear that that was the only strength which could have defeated the British; militarily there was just no chance.

In Independent India, unfortunately, somewhere that concept has got seriously distorted. The reality of global power play of nations has simply not been grasped fully in its harsh, violent and ambitious dimensions, despite many rude wake-up calls. There is a peculiar paralysis when it comes to talking about and with strength.

In fact, in India, we weirdly hyphenate strength with immorality; it is not something to be sought or flaunted. Unfortunately, that has become our national ethos. Being macho might be fine for the Americans and the Chinese, but that is not the arrogant path that India should tread. On the flip side, great virtue is associated with weakness, as if only the weak and the meek tread the moral path. Perhaps that is true, for the weak often have little choice, as confronting the strong will lead to only one result. You can keep calling the possession and use of strength by any uncharitable epithet to justify your weakness; if you succumb to it, as India has done almost always done since 1947, except in 1971, the moral part is nothing more than a camouflage to fool you own countrymen and even yourself!

Why has this state come about? Is it because at some level we are still in the mental frame that we got into to drive the British out of the country? Then the moral question was straightforward: the colonial foreigner had no right to rule over this vast land. He knew that too.

However, for an independent country aspiring to be one of the great nations of the world, the questions are many more and far more complex. Morality cannot be the determinator that will make an aggressor see your reason. Nor is it a workable tool to take a practical view of the globe in which countries fight essentially by the rules of the jungle when it comes to the crunch. Only the fittest have survived till now; there is every reason to believe that might will continue to be almost always right in future too.

The Americans know this elementary stuff. So do the Chinese, who are working furiously to ensure that they too get securely into the “right” lane of might which the US has made all its own. Indians, despite being thrice as many as Americans and almost as many as Chinese on this planet, just don’t seem to get it. We want to continue to make believe that we are in a separate lane all of our own and claim that our weak moral lane is the right one which will not be challenged by those in the lanes of might! This strategy is probably the only practical one which will work for, say, Fiji, Mauritius, Tonga, Cuba and the like. Not for a country that is almost a sub continent.

This raises another question. Does India have no world view commensurate with its size and strategic importance? Has India not yet woken up to its role, responsibility and power as India the nation? Does it still continue to think small and react like those hundreds of pre-British era kingdoms whose tiny world view virtually ended at the boundaries of their little kingdoms? Or does India still view itself as the age old spiritual and cultural entity it has been rather than the huge political reality that it is today in a world whose map has been, and will continue to be, shaped by power and force, no matter what Indian “delusionists” may tell you?

India’s internal political, bureaucratic and social dynamics are clearly dominated by forces trying to cut up the country into smaller and smaller “estates” and groups whose vested interests they champion as supreme, no matter what happens to the country. The few voices trying to take a larger, holistic national view are invariably drowned out by the force, even blackmail, of small pressure groups fiercely protecting their small turfs.

That is another reason why there is very little serious national political debate, awareness and interest in matters related to foreign policy and India’s engagement with its neighbours. Whatever little there is, is concerned mostly about the effect that any action or response will have on the many constituencies that we have created in babudom and the society. This is the effete and self destructive “soft power” that India projects to the world, garnished with immoral morality.

India is the prime real estate that has been most invaded and attacked in the history of all of mankind. It should, therefore, have logically been most alive to and concerned about the challenges that it faces or may face in future to its standing, interests and even existence. It was the country's economic prosperity and its riches that had repeatedly attracted invaders in the past. Emboldened by the total lack of organized vision and strength, and the prevalence of petty and destructive internal divisions, they were able to achieve easy victories, often with a smaller force.

With so many historical lessons to learn from, including those received after Independence, India should have been fully committed to addressing the mistakes of the past so that history does not repeat itself. But, it is a matter of serious concern that nearly the same weaknesses continue to mark national response to the challenges that the country faces from its aggressive and hostile neighbours, forget the rest of the world.

When are we going to learn what we should have learnt many years ago? Even as China demonstrates its unflinching resolve to aggressively protect its national interest and bullies us into meek submission, there is nothing to suggest that we are even thinking about where we have gone wrong to find ourselves so belittled again, and where we should go from here.

The paralysis appears to be almost complete and irreversible. Perhaps it will take the US to get India to show some movement and spine befitting its size and potential strength. It will do that not because of any moral love for India, but because it will see for India in America’s national interest what India should have seen on its own!
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Readers may also like to read:
1. Facing the challenge of China's military modernisation
2. China and India"winning war vs defending the country
3. China and India: bully and forever bullied

COSTS OF CONSCIENCE

At last a refreshingly candid column recounting the costs of misplaced morality and conscience that the country has had to pay, and still is paying, by first virtually surrendering Tibet to China and then allowing the Chinese to gain a strong foothold in Myanmar, which we ignored.

In an illuminating column in Mint on October 09, 2007, Dr Bharat Karnad, a professor in National Security Studies, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, has questioned the projection of India’s democratic credentials to actively shun national interest in order to promote democracy in the extended neighbourhood, a demand that is being vociferously made by bleeding heart and juvenile analysts who have little understanding of what national interest entails. Dr Karnad argues that the actions of the military junta in Myanmar have had a far less heinous outcome than the marching of Chinese troops into Tibet with the aim of eliminating independent Tibet, to which, as I have said in my earlier posts, India meekly surrendered.

With the Chinese Army ensconced in Tibet and claiming the whole of Arunachal Pradesh as part of China, Dr Karnad argues that India simply cannot afford to allow the Chinese to consolidate their position further in Myanmar, which can be used by them for an easy entry into the plains of Brahmaputra in any future war. Quoting a Myanmar leader, he says that India has already ‘sold’ Myanmar to China, a country that has not allowed the internal developments in Myanmar to deflect it from pursuing its supreme national interests.

The views of Dr Karnad almost completely reflect what I had said in my post entitled ‘Democracy, Morality and National Interest’, where I had brought out that this ridiculous positing of national interest with the airy-fairy planks of democracy and morality, a legacy inherited from Nehru, has already cost us dear. Unfortunately, as I had said then, protecting Nehru’s legacy has taken precedence over protecting national interest.

The country has paid, and continues to pay, a very heavy price for the long dynastic rule of the Nehru-Gandhi family, which has not only prevented an objective analysis of the many ‘Himalayan Blunders’ of Nehru, but has also compelled us as a nation to praise and follow them, to the continuing detriment of national interest.

A nation which rightly aspires to claim a seat on the high table of global powers, cannot base its international responses solely on morality, which is the empty and helpless talk of the weak and the meek. In any case, our ‘morality’, which comes into play only when we justify our ineffective responses to the security challenges that we face, is quickly forgotten when it comes to our internal political processes and behaviour, which are marked almost wholly by immorality.

Our democracy has become a ‘Mockocracy’, as I had written earlier. Paradoxically, this degeneration does not upset some of our analysts and media luminaries because they do not want to be eased out of the intoxicating power circuit which seems to have consumed their conscience.

Yet, they unhesitatingly recommend an adolescent ‘moral’ and democratic response to the happenings in Myanmar by asking the country to decide as to on which side it wants to be when the monks come marching in there!

DEMOCRACY, MORALITY AND NATIONAL INTEREST

The recent crackdown by the military junta of Myanmar against popular unrest led by Buddhist monks has once again brought to fore the foreign policy paradigm that India has remained rooted to since the time of Nehru. Words like ‘democracy’ and ‘morality’ are being bandied about to guide India’s response to this development in our immediate neighborhood.

National interest, it appears, is a bad word, if it does not measure up to the yardsticks of democracy and morality. Some juvenile analysts even believe that democracy elevates us above the grandiose power of China! Others think that winning the ‘respect’ of a besieged country and the world at large is ‘national interest’!

This fanciful and, in my view, utterly ridiculous positing of foreign policy and national interest against the airy-fairy planks of democracy and morals is a legacy inherited form Nehru. He kept singing ‘Hindi Chini bhai bhai’ even as China annexed Aksai Chin, Tibet and large parts of India territory, placed Chinese troops right on our heads, and exploded a nuclear bomb, taking China into a totally different international orbit, while India not only missed that bus but also faced a humiliating military rout. If only Nehru had heard Mao shouting at the top of his voice:’ Power grows through the barrel of a gun’. Earlier, Nehru had stopped Indian troops from reclaiming the rest of J&K occupied by Pakistan in 1948 and had rushed to the UN, offering a plebiscite in Kashmir. This claiming of a high moral ground by him while losing real ground has cost the country so heavily that it is amazing that the right lessons in hard, practical international relations have yet not been learnt.

Unfortunately, protecting the legacy of Nehru has taken precedence over protecting national interest. This does not permit this huge country to look at itself as a strong, confident nation which matters at the global stage. Even a small country like Bangladesh, which we helped create, shows us a big thumb and blatantly permits anti India activities on its soil. Will any other large country allow such nonsense in its backyard? Morality is more important to our armchair political commentators, no matter what price the nation has to pay.

And what is this silly talk of ‘democracy’? Our entire neighborhood has hardly ever had democracy, particularly of the sort that we ‘enjoy’. Why suddenly this outrage about Myanmar, which has not seen democracy since the times of Nehru, when we meekly surrendered our right to keep Burma within our sphere of influence created by the British, and watched helplessly as thousands of Indians were thrown out of that country? Democracy is nothing more than a system of governance, a means to take a nation and its people forward. It is not an end in itself, as many romantically believe, to be placed above national interest, which they don’t understand. It can, and should be, discarded for a better system, if it does not remain responsive to the ever changing internal and external dynamics that nations have to deal with.

In India, democracy means many different things to different people. To an illustrated analyst and owner of a TV channel, the stock exchange is a symbol of democracy! It does not strike him that by that yardstick, China and Pakistan are much better democracies, since their stocks have outperformed Indian stocks in the last five years! To some others it means saying, writing and showing what they feel like, without any restraint whatsoever. To others, it means turning the Parliament into a joke, nay, a national shame, telecast live to the world. To some more it means total freedom to loot this country by forming a fearless and shameless politician-bureaucrat-criminal-police-media nexus that can thrive only in our brand of democracy. What is the ’high ground’, even relevance of this democracy in relation to international policies and engagement?

Nehru’s talk of morality was because of his fatal blindness to national strategy and even history, despite the Second World War which happened before his very eyes, and the global cold war, and the war of ideology, which began immediately thereafter. Morality is the talk of the weak and the meek. And of those who lack the historical perspective and future vision of the practical world that man has lived in since time immemorial.

A nation which bases its policies and responses primarily on such irrelevant considerations is not likely to survive for long. In any case it cannot claim its rightful place based on its size, resources and population, for which power is a prerequisite. I do not see any other nation being stymied by such juvenile talk and debate. The meek shall not inherit the earth, if past and present experience is anything to go by. The sooner we understand it, the better.