The Hindu Business Line : Indian foreign policy -- Acting the Big Brother

India's strategy must be flexible enough to respond appropriately to individual challenges. But the overall framework must bring home to each country — including Pakistan — that while it is tempting to bait India in various petty ways, the entire region will be plunged into chaos if its biggest country disintegrates.

ONE OF the most important political lessons of the year that has ended is that like Russia and, indeed, the old Soviet Union, India must evolve an imaginative philosophy for its "Near Abroad". Few countries are surrounded by such turbulence or have suffered as much because its own aspirations do not match those of its neighbours.

For years Bhutan has been the strongest link in India's perimeter. But, even there, the Royal Government is now under pressure from illegal immigrants, local Nepalese terrorists and malcontents from our troubled North-East.

Conditions along the rest of the periphery threaten the stability of the entire region and, therefore, India's embryonic entente with the US and ability to play a larger political role.

Pakistan is driven by Indophobia and its own internal contradictions. The election of a United National Party Prime Minister in Colombo under a Sri Lanka Freedom Party President could add constitutional strains to existing ethnic confrontation. The arrest in Dhaka of a Bangladeshi writer who spent two weeks in Calcutta interviewing Hindu refugees is indicative both of Bangladesh's uneasy communal climate and the new government's uncertain equation with India. Nepal is waging an internal war. With the military campaign in Afghanistan coming to an end, Kabul is politically up for grabs.

The deafening silence to India's north is misleading. For apart from 450 nuclear warheads in Tibet, China's surveillance from the Cocos Island and submarines in the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean, make it an active regional player. It also casts a shadow on India's ties with South-East Asia, explaining why the Association of South-East Asian Nations dares not include India in the Asia-Europe dialogue.

But this tough and challenging neighbourhood still recognises India's geopolitical centrality. Otherwise, Sri Lanka's new Prime Minister, Mr Ranil Wickremesinghe, would not have come calling immediately after his election. Nor would so many leaders of the new Afghan government have sought New Delhi's goodwill.

India's authority is not easily ignored unless Indians themselves squander it.

One basis of interaction was described in 1985 by Sri Lanka's late president, J.R. Jayewardene, when he said in Dhaka that India being "the largest in every way, larger than all the rest combined" could "by deed and words create the confidence so necessary to make a beginning." P. N. Haksar, Indira Gandhi's adviser for many years, interpreted this to mean that "India, as a big brother, must be at all times be accommodating and tolerant towards the propensity for mischief-making of the younger brothers."

The Gujral Doctrine often seemed to be just that. Mr I. K. Gujral spoke of the need both to accord higher priority to South Asia and treat neighbours with indulgence. His rationale that the region's biggest power could not demand reciprocity from smaller and more vulnerable countries is an admirable thesis that could, if honestly implemented, lead to regional equilibrium. In practice, while India's neighbours grabbed what they could, India's irrational swings from generosity to rigidity wiped out goodwill.

This is one reason why the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation has made so little headway. But it was encouraging when SAARC decided in 1997 to allow three or more countries to enter into sub-regional arrangements without waiting for all. Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan, which took the lead in pushing through that innovation to thwart a spoiler's veto, should now cooperate with India to formalise a meaningful free trade association. It would also be in Sri Lanka's interest to demonstrate that constructive cooperation cannot be hostage to state terrorism or the politics of envy and insecurity.

Obviously, India's strategy must be flexible enough to respond appropriately to individual challenges. But the overall framework must bring home to each country — including Pakistan — that while it is tempting to bait India in various petty ways, the entire region will be plunged into chaos if its biggest country disintegrates. When China, for instance, encourages a South Asian country to be defiant, its objective is not to help that country but wound India through it. Those SAARC members that do not cooperate with India are unconsciously playing China's game and damaging their own interests.

This is what Indian diplomacy must din home to them. They must respect certain basic essentials of India's political and economic security. That is not a quid pro quo open to negotiation. India will have to be as firm as President George Bush was in declaring, "If you do business with terrorists — you will not do business with the US."

Any country that succours terrorists must bear the full brunt of trade and travel sanctions. In return, India must take full cognisance of the security needs of neighbours, whether it is water for Bangladesh, access for Nepal, or denial of asylum to enemies of the Sri Lankan state. No government is so unrealistic as to invite reprisal. India may find that its neighbours will not resist reason once they realise that India means business and that the region will live or fall with India.

Strong economic interaction would be a powerful ballast for political stability, which is precisely why Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence obstructs trade normalisation. It prefers extensive smuggling, which might rob the exchequer but does not have the same effect on public life. By delaying action on the 1997 initiative, SAARC is playing into the hands of those whose domestic power base depends on keeping alive hostility towards India.

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