FAILED DIPLOMACY

THE FACT OF THE MATTER IS THAT EVEN WITHIN SOUTH ASIA, INDIA IS GROPING IN THE DARK, DRIFTING AND PATHETICALLY LOOKING AT THINGS MOVING AWAY FROM A SUPPOSEDLY GLOBAL PLAYER'S ORBIT

So the Chinese have come inside India by about ten kilometers in Ladakh. The only good thing about this latest foreign policy crisis is that the UPA government is not in denial! Unlike the joke of the 1960s when the refrain was “not a square inch of land have we lost” when we literally gave away thousands of square miles to China this time there is the sober realisation that we have blinked—and with this the presumption that somehow Beijing is going to be talked into withdrawing back to the original line of control.

What is happening to Indian foreign policy is for all to see — the inability of New Delhi to move on with anything meaningful, especially with critical neighbors in the region and beyond. The fact of the matter is that even within South Asia, India is groping in the dark, drifting and pathetically looking at things moving away from a supposedly global player’s orbit. And China is just the latest add on. The fact of the matter is that in South Asia, there is not a country that “likes” India.

Forget Pakistan where we continue with our 66 years of obsession and with a country that our political and diplomatic troubles are not going to subside anytime in the future. But what about Bangladesh, Nepal, Myanmar and Sri Lanka? economic assistance and is set to play a major role in the development of the civil society in a part of a world that has seen no stability for several decades. Pakistan can be expected to play the role of a spoiler, because it is opposed to seeing its arch enemy fiddling in its backyard.

But why this mess and ineptness even in our neck of the woods? The UPA government—despite all its protestations to the contrary—has mortgaged Indian foreign policy to the States to the point now that for instance Tamil Nadu and West Bengal are able to call the shots on Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

There is a disturbing and terrifying implication to the political expediency and paralysis in New Delhi — the negative fallout on Indian intelligence agencies. Already CBI is being pilloried for being a government mouthpiece. And where does all this leave the Intelligence Bureau and the Research and Analysis Wing — the twin agencies that are critical to the conduct of foreign policy, especially as it pertains to fighting terrorism, domestic and foreign? Mercifully Indian intelligence agencies will be spared of any further damage by political hacks and opportunists who have drained and weakened a foreign policy establishment that is still the pride of the nation.

(Dr Sridhar Krishnaswami is head, School of Media Studies, SRM University, Chennai. Views expressed are of the

author.) There are troubles galore although there is the wishful thinking in some official and non- official quarters that the so-called winds of change in Yangon is somehow going to be beneficial to bilateral relations. The forward looking posture in Myanmar-India relations is somehow pegged to a thinking that the latter is going to wean itself away from China.

To some extent there is a lot of wishful thinking on Myanmar and only for the reason that the junta has successfully played up a theme that its grip on totalitarian scheme of things is a thing of the past. The ground realities are such that the military leadership has quite some distance to go in letting loose its grip on a system that had been virtually locked up with its keys thrown away since the 1960s. Although Aung San Suu Kyi may be seeing a different environment today than the years she was in house arrest even she would attest to the fact that there are miles to go on the road towards even a semblance of democracy.

So where is India left with in Nepal, a country with whom New Delhi has had difficulty in the past and a former kingdom that had never liked the way India had treated it. The fact now remains that China is aggressively posturing itself in that country and for more than just strategic reasons. Getting economically closer to Nepal would mean that the latter’s dependence on India weakens and closer economic relations with Nepal means that a gateway for Chinese goods to India becomes easier. It is for this reason that China has been spending billions of dollars in many infrastructure projects, on hydro-power and telecommunications.

But where the UPA government has been pathetic in regional foreign policy has to do with Sri Lanka. The waning days of the civil war in 2009 saw Colombo move closer to China and to some extent Pakistan to the point that anytime New Delhi now tries to up the ante against Sri Lanka the government in that island nation does not hesitate to wave the China flag.

As if all this is not enough, India is about to dabble in another dicer setting in the months to come — Afghanistan. The so-called American “total” withdrawal is going to see New Delhi playing a prominent and critical role and with a major trouble maker watching almost gleefully from the sidelines. India has pumped in $2 billions by way of