REVIEWS
Compelling read
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This book must be counted among the handful of serious and absorbing contributions made during the last 55 years to understanding India's foreign policy, writes MUCHKUND DUBEY.
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DR. C. RAJA MOHAN'S book Crossing the Rubicon: The Shaping of India's New Foreign Policy is a fascinating and comprehensive account of India's post-Cold War foreign policy. It elegant prose, racy style, brilliant analysis and the wealth of material makes it a compelling read. There is on display in this book, a journalist's flair for detail, constructing stories as well as an insider's view and a scholar's penchant for research and documentation.
The author tries to demonstrate that, during the 1990s, there was a transformation of India's foreign policy and a fundamental shift in its basic premises. During this period, the country's foreign policy evolved from idealism to realism, from Third Worldism to forging structures and institutions of cooperation with countries, which really mattered. This change, according to the author, was facilitated by and coincided with India's self-consciousness about its potential to merge as a major power in the international system. This was the foreign policy of a resurgent India of the Second Republic.
He somewhat oversimplifies the past to drive home his thesis. He asserts that anti-Americanism was ingrained in India's foreign policy. This is in spite of the fact that India had a continuing and sturdy bilateral relationship with the United States. India was one of the largest recipients of U.S. aid until the early 1970s. At the initial stages, the U.S. played a crucial role in the development of India's nuclear and space technologies. Bold initiatives were taken from time to time by both sides to impart momentum and new dimensions to the bilateral relations, for example, during the time of President Kennedy, Rajiv Gandhi and President Reagan.
According to the author, India followed a policy of Third Worldism at the cost of national self-interest. In saying so, he does a grave injustice to the stalwarts of India's freedom movement and to exceptionally gifted and typically pragmatic civil servants, who shaped and conducted India's foreign policy all these years. The author complains that till the early 1990s, India's foreign policy remained anchored in multilateralism. The fact is that a very small proportion of our diplomatic talents and resources has been devoted to multilateralism. Most of our diplomats have been busy making friends, developing understanding, selling India and Indian goods and services and micro-managing bilateral relations.
The end of the Cold War was a great divide in modern history. Among others it marked the end of ideology in inter-State relations. Most governments were obliged to adjust their foreign policy to this new reality and jettison the ideological baggage. This process started in India from 1989-90. After all, it was the United Front and Chandrashekar governments, which, in the context of the 1991 Gulf War, extended to the United States the overflight and refuelling facilities, forged an institutional mechanism for military cooperation and agreed to a joint naval exercise. What the successive governments later did was to carry forward this mandate of history.
By far, the most interesting parts of the book are those where the author reconstructs history and present sequential accounts of events. He really excels in his stories of the Kargil event, of the Lahore and Agra Summits and of the evolution of India's nuclear policy. The Chapter on relations with Russia makes fascinating reading. In the chapter "Returning to the West", the current Atlantic Divide is depicted in scholarly fashion. The countries on the European side of the "Divide" have come to be governed by post-modernistic values of peace, cooperation, equality, international law, multilateralism and substantial surrender of sovereignty. The country on the other side of the "Divide", i.e. the United States has retreated to the pre-modern values of unilateralism, balance of power, aggressive nationalism and untrammelled recourse of force. The author strangely believes that India's interests are best served by lurching to this side of the "divide".
The author is almost flawless in his analysis in the Chapter on India's relations with smaller neighbours. I entirely agree with him that India should shed its obsession with Pakistan and devote more energy and time to deepening relations with its smaller neighbours, that it should take unilateral initiative for integrating their economies with its own, that it should never act unilaterally in its relationship with them and that it should promptly proceed to modernise its old bilateral treaties with Nepal and Bhutan.
This otherwise admirable account of India's foreign policy is marred by two fatal flaws: exaggerated claims and wishful thinking about the achievements of India's foreign policy and the assumption that the route to improving relations with any country or region is through the United States. Every high level official visit converts a normal bilateral relationship into a strategic one. Every proposal on the anvil represents a historic breakthrough. Every project is a part of a grand design. And even a commonplace remark by the Indian Prime Minister, like U.S. being a natural ally, is of epochal significance. The present government would not have found a better scribe to chronicle the saga of its great deeds.
As regards the centrality of the U.S. in promoting India's regional and global interests, the author forgets that there are serious limitations arising out of its perception of its national interests, to the U.S. delivering the goods for India.
Besides, an exclusive reliance on the U.S. option has often come in the way of India exploring other options, particularly those lying within the domain of its domestic jurisdiction, for enlarging the space for the cooperation of its foreign policy.
One can differ with the author's interpretation of events. But there can be no difference on the seminal quality of the book.
This book must be counted among the handful of really serious and absorbing contributions made during the last 55 years to the understanding of India's foreign policy.
Crossing the Rubicon: The Shaping of India's New Foreign Policy, C. Raja Mohan, Penguin/Viking, Rs. 450.
The reviewer is the Former Foreign Secretary, Government of India.
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