In diplomacy nice guys end up last

Their war, not ours Coomi Kapoor THE INDIAN EXPRESS Friday, October 12, 2001

Our simplistic belief grants that there is a right and wrong side in every international dispute and that the world will give us due credit for ethical posturing. Our fuzzy thinking on foreign policy bequeathed to us by our first prime minister Jawharlal Nehru is that as in spaghetti westerns the good guy eventually comes out on top. Ironically, Nehru’s propensity to turn international forums into pulpits for lectures on morality was cited by Henry Kissinger in his classes at Harvard as a shining example of how not to conduct diplomacy.

Our foreign policy initiatives over the years have been largely confined to convincing the rest of the world that we are the good guys in Kashmir. After all we regularly go through the motions of holding elections in Kashmir, even if only five per cent of Kashmiris came out to vote. We may have posted huge numbers of military and para military troops in the state, but we do have a free press and a human rights commission to make a hue and cry whenever there is an excess of brutality. We are after all a democracy which permits unlimited free speech, unlike our neighbour Pakistan which has even dismantled the limited oligarchy it once practised. We believe in peace, but across the border they have been busy fomenting violence in our territory, training terrorists in their camps. We are always willing to engage in talks with Pakistan, even if we are not willing to yield an extra comma in the endless on-again off-again Indo-Pak meets.

Already India is a target of terrorism due to Kashmir. Perhaps we should learn a lesson or two in foreign policy from the Chinese, who realise that in diplomacy nice guys end up last. Any smart Indian shopkeeper will tell you that the first rule when trouble erupts in the marketplace is to try and keep out. As they say,‘‘hame kya lena hain.’’

Unsentimental choices Gurcharan Das The Times of India, August 14, 2005

Seeing India emerge as the globe’s potential back office and a rising economic power, the world has now started to equate us with China rather than Pakistan. Thus, we are feeling better and more self-assured. But we shouldn’t allow this to go to our heads. The fact is we cannot go it alone in the world, and the smug, new autarchic rhetoric in parliament should be nipped. Everyone needs friends and allies. The world distrusts a nation that is everyone’s friend. Such a friend is unreliable.

I owe this lesson to Henry Kissinger, who taught the introductory course in international politics when I was an undergraduate at Harvard. This was during the spring of 1962, before he became famous. He taught the basic lesson of the Arthashastra, which is that there are no good or bad nations; there are only powerful and powerless ones. The leader’s duty is to relentlessly pursue his nation’s self interest. His own hero was Metternich, who sketched the map of 19th Europe at the Congress of Vienna and brought a “century of peace” to Europe. He said that when nations pursued their self-interest, it led to a balance of power, predictability and peace.

Because I couldn’t follow Kissinger’s heavy German accent, I used to sit in the front row of his class. To my dismay, he would look at me and hold up Nehru as an example of how not to conduct foreign policy. This distressed me for I passionately shared Nehru’s idealism. Kissinger felt it was dangerous to have dreamers in power, because they injected morality into foreign relations. Because of his own likes and dislikes, he thought Nehru might have compromised India’s national interest with regard to China. Although I dislike Kissinger, I think he may have been right.

To avoid repeating our failures of history we need to make choices. And we need an unsentimental awareness of our national self-interest in the 21st century. This is a talent scarce among argumentative and sentimental Indians. When the chips are down and there is a war, we may do worse than have America as an ally. If that is true, then we should not allow our personal dislike of Bush’s Iraq policy to compromise India’s growing friendship with the United States.