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Rice just doesn’t get it

For all their blinkered insensitivity and gratuitousness, Condoleezza Rice’s recent remarks about the alleged irrelevance of nonalignment do serve a useful purpose. They underline the vast conceptual gulf that separates the world views of the United States and India despite the two countries being “strategic partners.” Secondly, they provide a glimpse of the unrealistic and even dangerous expectations Washington has of New Delhi. According to Dr. Rice, no nalignment has “lost its meaning” now that the world is no longer divided into rival blocs; instead, she posits a new alignment based on the “values of a common humanity” and mutual support for “opportunity and prosperity and justice and dignity and health and education and freedom and democracy.” She might as well have mixed in motherhood and apple pie. Plus Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and extraordinary renditions; agricultural subsidies and unsustainable lifestyles; pre-emptive war, missile defence, and the weaponisation of space, not to speak of ‘tactical’ support for regimes that murder, torture, or imprison opponents and continue to find themselves on the right side of the veil of freedom.

Dr. Rice is kind enough to characterise India as “a good and strong emerging multiethnic democracy.” In her world view, the U.S. will lead this country and “other free nations like Japan and Australia and Korea and our allies in Europe” as well as “other large multiethnic, multi-religious democracies like Brazil and Indonesia and South Africa” towards an “effective, principled multilateralism” based on “common values.” To any objective observer, it is clear this alliance of “free nations” and “multiethnic democracies” is nothing but an attempt to revive the old antagonistic mindset on a new basis, with China, Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, “rogue states,” “failed states,” and Islamic states as the target of its exertions. The end of the Cold War has posed new challenges to the non-aligned countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. To be sure, NAM needs to modernise and renovate itself by building South-South economic, corporate, and technology linkages. But the political agenda of democratising international affairs has never been more relevant. Dr. Rice must be made to understand that India wants excellent relations with the U.S. but is not interested in any alignment or exclusive attachment. It is unfortunate that despite the close interaction between the two governments over the past decade, official India has not been able or willing to send this simple message across. External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee and his team may have signalled a turning point through their prompt and clear response aimed at putting Dr. Rice in her place.

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