Shekhar GuptaA busy foreign policy season first up in a new prime minister's tenure is a gift, a bit like cricket's equivalent of batting powerplay when easy hits are available. And Narendra Modi is not one to waste that opportunity. From Kathmandu to Kyoto and from Thimphu to Tokyo, foreign engagements have already enhanced the new Prime Minister's stature. This will be followed, in very rapid succession, by the arrival of Chinese President Xi Jinping and then the PM's annual pilgrimage to New York for the UN General Assembly with its breezy, prime-time bilaterals on the sidelines.After Rajiv Gandhi, Modi is our first Prime Minister who can wow domestic as well as international audiences with his personality and style. I would be tempted to say though that if we go by the drums and the flute in Japan, his sense of drama is dignified yet effective, in the manner of Jawaharlal Nehru.The form of diplomacy, the happy glow that relaxed, problem-free summits offer, is however very different from real foreign policy challenges where strategic interests clash. The truth is, whatever our notions of a rightful place on the global high table, our challenges and opportunities are today mostly in the neighbourhood. This is also where most of our strategic and tactical threats and unexpected dangers lie. They can trip up the best. A leader in a democracy is tested not over the larger global issues on which there is a wide, almost permanent consensus. He is tested on issues on which there are differences, and which play significantly in domestic politics.At this point for India, all such issues reside next door: Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, even the Maldives. In Japan, promising to continue with the nuclear doctrine he inherited from his predecessors, Modi said quite wisely and maturely that on such issues of high strategy democracies follow continuity. But you do not expect Modi to stretch that to his entire foreign policy because the one thing he is not is a force for the status quo. He will change things, particularly in the neighbourhood where India's real interests lie. He is, after all, India's first prime minister genuinely and unapologetically from the ideological Right, and you do not expect that to not reflect in both his worldviews, larger and narrower.You could argue that he is India's second prime minister from the Right, and that Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the first. But there is a distinction that is more than subtle. Vajpayee was an old-time pacifist and, temperamentally, in the conciliatory Nehruvian mould. It is not to say he wasn't different. He could be tough too, as in firmly turning down all truce offers on Kargil until all infiltration was cleared and responding to the attack on Parliament with a military build-up so menacing that a punitive war looked imminent. Or with Pokhran-II so early in his tenure. But his toughness was not so much of the Right, it was more like Indira Gandhi's. His deep liberal commitment showed in the way he humoured Kashmiris, even the Hurriyat-remember, he went to Srinagar and said he was willing to expand negotiations within the wider framework of humanity, not just the Constitution. .preferred-source-banner{ margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom:10px;}This also showed in his persistent attempts to reach a negotiated settlement with Pakistan, in spite of betrayals. Modi has already shown you he is different in the way he cancelled talks with Pakistan, just because its high commissioner met Hurriyat leaders, till now a routine, periodic and passing blip on the media radar.So how different is Modi going to be as man of the unadulterated, post-Nehruvian Right? The history of other important democracies does not help as evidence is utterly contradictory. In the US, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were presidents of the conservative Right, but both made peace. Nixon reached out to China, pulled back from Vietnam and abolished the draft. Reagan made peace with the Soviet Union which he had once described as the Evil Empire. But from the same ideological stream two presidents, Bush Senior and Junior, made multiple wars. Take Israel. You couldn't find a Zionist leader more right-wing than Menachem Begin (prime minister, 1977-83). In the forties, he had led Irgun, the underground guerrilla force widely called terrorist. In fact, on the United States' liberal east coast there were even demands that he be denied a visa. But he made peace with Anwar Sadat, taking Henry Kissinger's advice to trade territory (Sinai Peninsula) for full legitimacy from his strongest enemy, Egypt, and won a Nobel for peace. But from the same ideological stream, a man more modern and westernised, Benjamin Netanyahu, has only been waging war. We do not know yet which route Modi will prefer, but all we can say for sure is that he will be way to the right of Vajpayee.Looking at the peacemakers first, it is interesting to recall how Kissinger described Reagan, possibly the most polarising Republican president until Bush Jr. "He was a major president of a particular period. Eight years earlier, he might have failed, eight years later, he might have been less relevant," he told fellow Harvard scholar and contemporary Stephen Graubard in a 'Lunch with FT' conversation in 2008. Reagan became president when America was still reeling from the humiliation of Vietnam, and later Iran and an economic downturn. But this was also when Japan was flush with surpluses (sounds familiar?) and invested endlessly in US bonds to finance Reaganomics.It was also when the Soviet bloc was already shaky, under the weight of its own contradictions, exactly as Nehru had predicted to Dwight Eisenhower in a famous (and later declassified) conversation in the White House gardens in 1956. If you follow Kissinger's logic, then the timing of Modi's rise also becomes important. India has suffered a loss of self-esteem over the past five years and that offers him some low-hanging fruit. The big powers, by and large, are friendly towards India or trapped in their own issues. America, under Barack Obama, has become a self-confessed leading-from-behind power. Russia is busy wrecking its neighbourhood and hoping to somehow keep commodity prices high enough to pay for its adventurism. The Chinese are building up for global domination and it is unlikely they want to be distracted with India just yet. It is the rest of the neighbourhood that is red hot. In Pakistan and Bangladesh, we have leaders who want better relations with India although both are weakened by their domestic situations.Modi has given mixed signals so far. His first act of inviting all SAARC leaders for his swearing-in put him in the Vajpayee-plus mould. But his subsequent cancellation of talks was probably the most peremptory response from India in recent years to what was, in fact, a routine and familiar provocation. With this he raised the bar for himself, and for the Pakistanis, really high on further engagement. It is early days yet, but the test will be: is Modi, while being tough, also patient and far-thinking enough to understand the value of strategic restraint, a principle both his predecessors pursued and which ultimately made gains for India (Vajpayee on Kargil and Parliament attack, Manmohan Singh on 2611)? Graver provocations could arise, and if Modi wishes to keep the option of strategic restraint, he will need to create for himself strategic space, and a hierarchy of escalatory measures to satisfy public opinion while not letting things spin out of control.POSTSCRIPT: I have recounted in the past, in National Interest, some of my conversations with Vajpayee in moments of strategic crisis, with his permission. One deserves repetition in this week's context. He gave me an audience in the last week of December 2001, just when our forces were massing on the border, a fortnight after the attack on Parliament, and a war looked a certainty. "So are you really going to war, Atalji," I asked as we sat in his garden that sunny afternoon sipping overly salted soup."Dekhiye," he said, "everybody wants to go to war, particularly the armed forces, they really want to thrash Pakistan." And then after the customary endless pause: "But I am asking the chiefs, when the history of this war is written, what name will be given to it? The war of destruction of Pakistan, liberation of Kashmir, annihilation of the Pakistani army, what? We must have a clear objective before we go to war. We can't launch what history would merely call a war of anger." After an even longer pause, he resumed the thought process: "The problem with a war is, how you start it, when and where you start it, is in your hands. But how it will end, and when, is never in your control. That is why the decision to go to war is never taken lightly or in anger.""But with this kind of build-up things could go out of control, Atalji," I said, "and war may actually begin." "Isko Brajeshji kehte hain coercive diplomacy," he said. "For it to work, the threat of war has to be so serious that even we start believing it." Not even a Harvard professor, or Kissinger himself, could have given you a better definition of being tough with strategic restraint.Follow the writer on Twitter @ShekharGuptaTo read more, get your copy of India Today here.Published By: AtMigration Published On: Sep 4, 2014--- ENDS ---
