By Swapan Dasgupta
The idea that the nation is
larger than the sum of its parts readily finds an echo in New Delhi, the
archetypal Imperial Capital carefully planned by Sir Edwin Lutyens to inspire
both awe and reverence. The present-day Republic, undergoing serious mid-life
convulsions, may not quite fit the bill as the deserving successor to the
mighty Raj, but its functionaries still retain all the mental trappings of an
imperial power, especially when it comes to dealing with the provinces.
It came as no surprise,
therefore, that India’s national embarrassment during Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh’s visit to Dhaka last week generated much tut-tutting. There was horror
over the subordination of something as pristine pure as ‘foreign policy’ to
parochial interests by a Chief Minister who was said to fancy herself as West
Bengal’s Joan of Arc. The grapevine suggested that Pranab Mukherjee had burnt a
fuse after the mild-mannered Trinamool Congress member of the Cabinet indicated
‘Didi’s’ misgivings over the proposed Teesta waters agreement. On TV, a member
of the Delhi commentariat pronounced sombrely that Mamata Banerjee should first
learn to behave before she acquired the privilege of being taken seriously in
the Imperial Capital. Among the retired members of the Indian Foreign Service,
there was broad consensus that Mamata’s shenanigans shouldn’t have been tolerated
and that a firm Prime Minister would simply have overruled all objections and
proceeded to sign the agreement in the ‘larger national interest’.
If the version being put out
by a beleaguered South Block and Prime Minister’s Office is to be believed, a
cynical Mamata double-crossed Manmohan and facilitated one of the biggest
diplomatic disasters in recent times. The reasons given for the Chief
Minister’s alleged duplicity vary according to the audience. It has been said that
Mamata is temperamentally prone to violent mood swings; that she wanted to take
it out on the Congress, and the Finance Minister in particular, for the
difficulties encountered in securing extraordinary financial accommodation;
that she feared a CPI(M) resurgence in North Bengal; that she couldn’t
countenance the idea of being a member of the supporting cast in the delegation
to Dhaka; and that she probably expected a Union Cabinet Minister to fall at
her feet or, as Jairam Ramesh did with the Land Acquisitions Bill, flatter her
into submission.
A common thread that runs
through these proffered explanations of Mamata’s awkwardness is that the Centre
and particularly the Ministry of External Affairs were innocent victims of one
woman’s volatility. The Centre says that Kolkata was always kept in the loop
and ‘informed’ at every step. It has been said that the Prime Minister spoke to
Mamata and secured her approval. Much has also been made of the trip by the
National Security Adviser (accompanied by the Water Resources Secretary) to Kolkata
after the TMC threw a spanner in the works at the meeting of the Cabinet
Committee on Political Affairs.
The Union Government’s
defence has been broadly digested in Delhi, particularly by the so-called
‘strategic affairs community’ that views any interaction with the NSA as the
high-point of any engagement. Yet, two issues are worth considering.
First, in the eyes of an
elected Chief Minister with an eye to mass politics, the NSA is just another
bureaucratic functionary. Shiv Shankar Menon may be an accomplished diplomat
who, if Delhi’s bush telegraph is any guide, is both de-facto External Affairs
Minister and Foreign Secretary. However, at the end of the day he is not a
political functionary and is not empowered to take political decisions. That he
enjoys the trust of the Prime Minister is undeniable. At the same time, his
record of negotiating delicate matters of political importance is poor. His
attempts to persuade the Opposition to support the original version of the
Civil Nuclear Liabilities Bill, for example, came a complete cropper. It
finally needed an empowered political veteran in the form of the Finance
Minister to negotiate a give-and-take arrangement with the Bharatiya Janata
Party. The final Act may not have been to the liking of the US State Department
but it did reflect the broadest national consensus on the subject.
In the past, whenever the issue
of river waters was negotiated with Bangladesh, successive governments at the
Centre had taken exceptional care to accommodate West Bengal’s concerns. Indira
Gandhi, for example, entrusted the responsibility of engaging with the then
Chief Minister Siddhartha Shankar Ray to Jagjivan Ram. During the United Front
rule, External Affairs Minister I.K. Gujral met Jyoti Basu on a number of
occasions and the Joint Secretary dealing with Bangladesh went on joint river
visits with the Chief Minister.
Compared to past exercises,
the approach of the MEA on this occasion appears remarkably casual. Whether
this has got to do with the absence of a functioning External Affairs Minister
or the presumption that an UPA ally could be taken for granted is something the
Delhi Establishment needs to agonise over.
Secondly, the Centre appears
to have been insufficiently mindful of the grim realities of a federal polity.
Since foreign policy and international treaties belongs exclusively to the
Centre’s domain, MEA officials are inadequately sensitive to the issue of wider
consultations within India. The scope of India’s public diplomacy doesn’t
extend to making the provinces feel a part of the foreign policy processes.
Whether the Prime Minister
could have ridden roughshod over the objections of the state and negotiated the
Teesta waters sharing with Bangladesh belongs to a grey area of the
Constitution. But regardless of its superior rights in law, it is reassuring
that the issue of conflicting rights was not tested. Perhaps this owed to the
importance of the TMC as the Congress’ largest coalition partner in the UPA.
Would the Centre have backed down had, say, the issue involved an agreement
with Pakistan over the Rann of Kutch where the Gujarat Government was in firm
disagreement? In the past, Rajiv Gandhi’s Government had not hesitated to
dismiss the DMK Government in Tamil Nadu for actions that went against the
grain of India’s Sri Lanka policy.
Arguably, there was no
national security involved in the river waters agreement with Bangladesh to
warrant precipitate action—although that itself makes the over-involvement of
the NSA somewhat inexplicable. However, that is still no justification for what
someone described as ‘MEA unilateralism’. The point to note is that the demand
for sharing the Teesta waters downstream did not come from West Bengal. It was
aimed at meeting a long-standing demand by Bangladesh for which it was willing
to concede transit rights to Chittagong for the North-eastern states. In short,
West Bengal was being asked to be accommodative for the sake of the larger
‘national interest’.
The Centre was acting in
India’s best interests. Yet, since the whole arrangement with Bangladesh was
premised on the principle of quid pro quo, Mamata was equally justified in
implicitly asking what West Bengal would gain from the arrangement. Moreover, since
the Teesta flows into North Bengal from Sikkim, it was only fair that the small
Himalayan state should also be brought into the calculation. One of the
shortcomings of the Ganga waters treaty of 1996 that Nitish Kumar has rightly
drawn attention to is that Bihar was not consulted.
The diplomatic fiasco in
Dhaka points to the complete unviability of any international agreement with
neighbours before there is a broad domestic agreement on the subject. Mamata
has been sufficiently vilified in the Imperial Capital but in the process she
has successfully driven home the overriding importance of federalism. There has
to be a mindset change: Delhi must reconcile to its new role as a service
centre for the states of the Union.
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