By Swapan Dasgupta
The day following a car bomb in the heart of
Lutyens’ Delhi seriously injured an Israeli diplomat, the Police Commissioner
of Delhi held a media briefing. Apart from the usual homilies about ‘pursuing
all leads’ and the force doing its utmost to bring the perpetrators to justice,
he issued a brief note about the “sticky bomb” that had made its explosive
debut in Delhi. According to a report in the Delhi edition of Times of India,
the note stated: “Sticky bombs are a type of explosives crafted from one Bomb
and 5 Gel. At point blank range, it can cause a total of 100 damage to mobs and
200 to the player.” The note apparently listed a series of ‘statistics’: Damage
100, Max Stack 50, Shoot Speed 5, Use Time 24, Sell 1.
The bewildered reporter did a spot of research on
the net and was aghast to discover that the note had been copy pasted from
something called Terraria Wiki, a popular site for players of the on-line game
Terraria.
That the police chief of India’s capital and the
most high security zone in the country could actually mistake gaming
instructions for the technical specifications of the sophisticated explosive
that was used in the city calls defies belief. It is bad enough that the police
and intelligence agencies were clueless as to which group or which foreign
agency could have targeted the Israeli diplomat. What compounded the offence
was the impression conveyed that the police in India are no better than a
rag-tag force in Ruritania, with its ace investigators resembling Thompson and
Thomson of Tintin fame. After this bizarre show of expertise it is doubtful
whether Israel or any other country whose diplomats are vulnerable to terrorist
attacks will feel any comfort from the Home Minister’s assurance that
everything possible is being done to prevent a recurrence and that the
authorities are on top of the terror threats.
Ever since a decade of impressive GDP growth
statistics has removed India from the list of struggling Third World nations
and cast it in the mould of an emerging superpower, there are Indians who have
convinced themselves that the transition has already taken place. In their bid
to talk India up and aggressively flaunt a resurgent nationalism, successive
governments have contrasted the northward growth curve of this country with the
southward direction of growth in the US and Europe. This has prompted the
conclusion that India is ready to play a greater role in global affairs and
even deserving of a permanent, veto-wielding membership of the UN Security
Council.
It is not merely the boo-boo of the Delhi police
chief that invites ridicule. At every stage of the way to greatness, India has
been exposing its utter inability to live up to its self-professed greatness. Instead,
it comes across as a nation enmeshed in ad-hocism and gripped by profound
uncertainty over its own role. Whereas Great Powers are said to be blessed with
nerves of steel, India is a bundle of fickleness and inconsistency.
Last month’s bloodless coup in the idyllic setting
of the Maldives was yet another demonstration of the vacuous hype that
surrounds Indian pretensions. For a start, India was relatively clueless of the
possibility of a coup after the elected President Mohamed Nasheed ordered the
arrest of a Judge who had ruled against intitating corruption proceeding
against the former president M.A. Gayoom who had ruled Maldives for three
decades. If the Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW) had indeed submitted an
essay on the coming together of Gayoom supporters and Islamist parties, it must
have been unread in both South Block and the offices of the National Security
Adviser.
Secondly, rather than take a principled stand
frowning on the removal of a democratically-elected Nasheed at gunpoint, India
rushed in with an endorsement of the new government of former Vice President
Mohammed Waheed Hassan. It is not that India should have recalled its High
Commissioner or done anything precipitate—like the military intervention in
1988 to foil a coup attempt against Gayoom by Tamil mercenaries from Sri
Lanka—but a signal of intense displeasure and concern would have done the
country’s image absolutely no harm. Instead, India wilfully left the field open
for the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and the multilateral
Commonwealth to step into the diplomatic void. With growing reports of Islamist
activity—symbolised by the destruction of the Buddhist artefacts in the
National Museum in Male—India is now ruing its diminished role in the islands
it hitherto regarded as falling within its sphere of influence.
The pusillanimity that marked the handling of the
Maldives crisis was not an isolated lapse. Last year, India won a two-year seat
on the UN Security Council, an event celebrated in South Block as a moment of
great significance and a portend of things to come. Yet, has India made a
distinct mark inside this select gathering? The answer, regrettably, is a big
No.
The biggest challenge that faced the Security
Council and, indeed, the UN in recent times was the Arab Spring and the
outpouring of democratic sentiment throughout a West Asia which had hitherto
been ruled by autocrats. In Egypt, the sentiment in South Block was quite
conclusively in favour of Hosni Mubarak. There was a fear, later manifested in
Libya and Syria, that known devils such as Colonel Gaddafi and President Bashar
al-Assad were preferable to unknown forces that any turmoil was calculated to
throw up. There was some merit in this cautiousness since democracy in hitherto
repressed states was likely to trigger a regressive strain of religiosity. At
the same time, there was a cost to disregarding the democratic impulses
altogether.
In global affairs, the world seems to be split in
two broad camps. First, there is the West that uses democracy selectively,
particularly to get its own back on ‘difficult’ regimes like that of Gaddafi in
Libya and the one ruled over by Assad in Syria. Then there is China which uses
the principle of national sovereignty to back some of the most loathsome
regimes. India has tried to straddle between these two approaches using the
legitimate yardstick of national interests. The most difficult balancing act
was in Sri Lanka where New Delhi had to balance between a resurgent Sinhala
nationalism and a brutal Tamil resistance that sought to exploit ethic
solidarities in Tamil Nadu. However, in the case of other difficult situations,
national interests have invariably meant economic and commercial interests.
There is nothing to get defensive about letting
money talk—both China and the West do it all the time. What necessitates a
measure of introspection is the extent to which strategic interests have taken
a backseat. Even in the matter of Somalian pirates, the British navy has been
more pro-active.
Is this a result of calculation or merely a function
of the innate inefficiency, indeed ineptitude, of the Indian state and the
disinclination of its political class to view foreign policy as anything more
than Pakistan? Wouldn’t it be more prudent for India to temporarily eschew
grandiose schemes such as permanent membership of the Security Council until a
time the country is better able to tackle the obligations that come with Great Power
status?
The Telegraph, February 17, 2012
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