India adopts pragmatism as ruling mantra

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COMMENT: India adopts pragmatism as ruling mantra

By V. M. Gokuldas

 

May 2:

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FOR any Indian with a conscience, it would be difficult to be elated,

what with a third of the population living in poverty. But the fact

is that India has not had it so good for a long, long time. No, there

is no golden age on the horizon. But coming to terms with the past

and doing well enough in the present to look to a bright future seems

reason enough for celebration.

But Indians are too busy with their daily chores to celebrate. Give

them their numerous socioreligious festivals, and they are happy.

They have a vibrant economy making rapid strides. A growing market

makes India attractive to one and all. After decades of Cold War

hiatus, they have good relations with the world's only superpower.

President George W. Bush is indeed very happy with India's ties with

its regional adversaries, Pakistan and China, which are improving.

 

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the father of India's economic

reforms, may be a political lightweight. But last month, he engaged

fruitfully with China's Wen Jiabao and Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf.

Having done that, he flew into his favourite region — Southeast Asia —

for the second time since he took office in a surprise electoral

victory for his Congress Party last year, and an equally surprising

renunciation in his favour by its Italian-born leader, Sonia Gandhi.

 

Leaders from 106 nations celebrating 50 years of the Asia- Africa

Summit at Bandung elected India as the leader to speak for them. They

must have done so in the realisation that China and India and India

and Pakistan have resolved to live in peace with each other. It must

have been a heartening experience. Together, this disparate group,

representing 73 per cent of mankind, can hope to be heard with a

little more respect by the industrialised world that is forever

looking for new markets.

 

Peace prospects undoubtedly make South Asia more attractive to

investors. Note the alacrity with which Reebok, in the wake of

Musharraf's visit to Delhi, announced plans to make India the hub for

its penetration of the Pakistani market. Be it India, or the rest of

the Third World that is readying for its NAM Summit at Havana next

year, numbers are proving to be their strength more than ever before.

 

Despite the visits of Wen and Musharraf and, before that, US

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, South Asia isn't exactly shaping

up as a zone of peace. But tensions are palpably reducing. Not that

India's border disputes are likely to be resolved soon. But the

parties find it prudent and politically correct to say that they want

to resolve them without resorting to unilateral means.

 

Jingoism is out; pragmatism is in. This is evident from India's

plans, not made public yet, to invest to the tune of US$2 billion

(RM7.6 billion) in Pakistan, provided things go well, over the next

five years. Bilateral trade is to multiply and touch US$10 billion by

2008.

 

Barely two years ago, there were half a million heavily armed

soldiers ready to fight along the Line of Control (LOC) in Kashmir.

Now, divided families have begun to board buses to travel across the

same LOC. Both India and Pakistan appear to have tacitly agreed to

freeze the LOC into a mutually accepted international border. To a

Kashmiri, no matter where in the world he or she may be located now,

there can be nothing more satisfying.

 

For over four decades, India has lived with the trauma of defeat to

China in 1962, something even the 1971 victory over Pakistan and

creation of Bangladesh could not ease. Indeed, Atal Behari Vajpayee's

justification for the 1998 nuclear tests, secretly conveyed to then

US President Bill Clinton, was that India considered China its

principal adversary. But seven years on, India and China talk

of "strategic partnership". Wen flew to Bangalore, India's Silicon

Valley, and found Indian techies willing to exchange their software

for his hardware. Nathu La, the narrow Himalayan pass through which

the Dalai Lama fled from Tibet way back in 1959, will soon see a

revival of the ancient trade route. The Dalai Lama's name was

probably not even mentioned during the Wen visit.

 

Looked at from New Delhi, a few obvious road blocks on this South

Asian highway are clearly visible. One: India and China may at some

stage get down to resolving their border dispute, but how do India

and Pakistan resolve the Kashmir boundary issue without considering

the areas Pakistan ceded to China? A three-way solution may be the

only answer. Two: Wen once again reiterated a closer India-China-

Russia partnership; how would the US look at this troika? And three:

both India and Pakistan are for a gas pipeline with Iran but, as Rice

made it clear, the US would have none of it. Will the pipeline remain

a pipedream? All in all, the India-Pakistan rapprochement, though

driven partly by Bush's eagerness to see peace in what Clinton, his

predecessor, called "the most dangerous place in the world", is bound

to bring dividends to South Asia as a whole. More so because it is

accompanied by an India-China bonhomie. Many of India's neighbours,

who have seen opportunity for themselves in the two-way rift in the

past, will find it necessary to forge economic ties rather than

promote political and religious extremism. The South Asian

Association for Regional Co-operation (SAARC), held to ransom by

India-Pakistan shenanigans, can now hope to blossom as a regional

grouping. For India, a permanent membership of the UN Security

Council, albeit veto-less, as enunciated by Kofi Annan, may still

depend upon the US's worldview.

 

But it is gathering goodwill with better ties with neighbours, making

its bid stronger than ever before. This makes celebration doubly due.

 

n V.M. Gokuldas is a New Delhi-based writer.