Vijay Vikram

I have just recieved a startling piece of news. Barack Obama of Illinois has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize – that holy grail of liberal statecraft – for his incomparable services to the cause of humanity. Absurdly, I find myself in direct agreement with Pakistan’s Jammat-e-Islami on this matter: It is an embarrasing joke. With one fell swoop, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee has succesfully eroded more than a century of painfully-built global legitimacy. It is a comment on the politico-cultural bias unique to Scandinavians whose lives condition them for an exxagerated appreciation of good-intentions, international conferences and the language of world-peace. Perhaps, it’s an atonement for the invention of dynamite.

The political implications on Capitol Hill however, are infintely more fascinating. The well-intentioned award of the Nobel to Obama has put him in a rather tough position. It has elevated the romance of Obama and his world-historical stature to a ‘comedy confection’. Now more than ever, Obama will face renewed pressure to ‘do something’, to act and to be seen to act on the policy quagmires of the day.

Rahm Emmanuel would do better to think strategically and advise his boss to politely reject the prize. Sadly for Obama, the damage has been done. He has been unable to manage the utopian expectations arising from his charismatic run for President. Charisma has been replaced by satire. The Scandinavians may just have written Barack Obama’s political obituary.

Update: Ashok Malik writes on the topic in Tehelka

Analysing Indian Foreign Policy is not a worthwhile intellectual endeavour. To be fair, my intellectual engagement with the world began with an interest in India’s geopolitics. This is probably because I have a Schmittian conception of all that is political. Because of this adversarial, Machtpolitik-esque understanding of politics, international politics naturally elicited my intellectual curiosity because it was a playing field in which the friend/enemy antithesis was at its most explicit, at least in the abstract. Nations could define their friends and enemies with relative ease and lack of moral opprobrium owing to their status as the most legitimate grouping playing the game of pursuing power. Thus, the ideal-type of nation operating in the context of a less than idyllic politics dictated by the animal impulses of greed, status and pride would be one that would pursue its interests as defined by power. As Morgenthau said, his Realism is both prescriptive and descriptive. Of course, it exposes the international environment as is, but it also yearns for the national state to act in a certain way, ostensibly because this Nietzeschean behaviour serves the nation’s interests best but because it slots in with Morgenthau’s worldview as well. This is not an indictment of Morgenthau the theorist, merely a reflection of Morgenthau the human.

The ideal environment then, for a political animal in the mould of Morgenthau and Nietzsche is one in which tribes can merrily go about the business of quarrelling violently, vigorously to amass as much power as possible. A necessary prerequisite to this state of affairs of course, would be to know one’s friends from one’s enemies. Juxtaposed on international politics, successful survival and flourishing is premised on having a conception of one’s external environment.

The reason that indulging in enthusiastic analyses of Indian Foreign Policy is an intellectually vacuous and ultimately dishonest endeavour is that they premise themselves on the hypothesis that India and her decision makers conceive of an external environment in the first place and undertake the ritual exercise of evaluating friends and enemies. This is a lie.

Indian analysts of Indian foreign policy are invariably English speaking and true to their post-colonial milieu are half-baked Macaulites. They combine a dazzling lack of appreciation of power relations and the unitary role of the State with a wholesale importation of American national security nomenclature. India, or rather New Delhi has amassed a quaint collection of ‘Think Tanks’ complete with Research Fellows and foreign interns. The city also is also home to a National Security Council (NSC) headed by a National Security Advisor (NSA) aided by a National Security Advisory Board (NSAB) staffed by security experts with doctoral degrees from Jawaharlal Nehru University.

But, I digress. What I am trying to say is that India does not have a Foreign Policy. Hence, any analysis of Indian Foreign Policy is a dishonest exercise because there isn’t any policy to begin with. When I say ‘Policy’, I mean policy in the traditional sense – A course of action designed to achieve a certain objective. In my limited interactions with Indian Foreign Service (IFS) officials, I have found them blissfully ignorant of the external environment as an essentially hostile playground. They find the very notion of strategy esoteric. This is not surprising seeing as 80% of recent Foreign Service recruits did not elect the Indian diplomatic corps as their service of choice, preferring the plump Indian Administrative Service (IAS) instead where prospects of financial entrepreneurship are considerably rosier. Those who do end up in the IFS wangle their postings so as to find themselves in the United Kingdom or the United States as their progeny reach college-going age. As Beijing tests out a new maximalist strategy in Kashmir, it is not surprising that India’s venerable Ministry of External Affairs continues to spout meaningless homilie after meaningless homilie. Neville Chamberlain’s foreign policy has found a new home in South Block.

I can’t say that I ever fully understood Mr Kulkarni. I have always found his columns and other public utterances abstruse and rather dense, thereby finding it difficult to get a handle on his political philosophy. A rare exception to this general rule was Kulkarni’s open letter to Advani that argued for a recasting of RSS-BJP relations in the aftermath of the original Jinnah controversy. Essentially, Mr Kulkarni wanted to free up the party from micromanagement by Sangh interlopers – an admirable sentiment. His abstruseness apart, Mr Kulkarni emerges as a thinking man who represented a sober nationalism that attracted many to the party in the first place.

Kulkarni is not by any stretch a political figure of comparable national prominence to Jaswant Singh. His departure though is at least as disturbing because it represents the growing flight of intellectual capital away from the party. The cerebral right-wing talent the BJP managed to attract in the NDA years that made it the natural party of governance is being gradually weeded out. Arun Shourie, a modern day polymath is a virtual pariah, Yashwant Sinha has quit all party posts and the Jaswant Singh brouhaha is still playing out. It does seem that the party is turning to a certain atavism after the defeat. Swapan Dasgupta has argued that the once broad church of the Bharatiya Janata Party – accommodating strident Hindu assertion with centre-right nationalism – is turning into a sect with the former emerging as the overriding paradigm. Perhaps then, it is time for the urban Indian with his newfound cosmopolitanism to resurrect that ill-fated nexus of Parsi free thinkers, conventional nationalism and free enterprise – the Swatantra Party.

Update: One of Sudheendra Kulkarni’s more readable pieces here

It is no secret that the BJP high-command has avoided any attempt at genuine reflection on the reasons for defeat in the 2009 General Elections. In fact, the emerging consensus within India’s miniscule right-wing intelligentsia is that the BJP never quite recovered from the defeat in 2004 and continued on with the 2009 campaign on autopilot. Admittedly, the media strategy in 2009 was excellent: The clever subversion of the Congress’ triumphalist ‘Jai Ho’ with the sober ‘Bhay Ho’ jingle and the inclusion of young, IT-savvy talent for LK Advani’s personal image boosting initiative are cases in point. All this however, could not hide the rot at the base of the party. This defeat was a political defeat. It was not about image management. It was not about re-packaging Hindutva in more modern prose. The electorate rejected India’s version of a conservative party wholeheartedly.

Rajnath Singh and his ilk realise this. They realise that if the party sat down and did some actual chintan at the Chintan Baithak, their variety of conservatism would be declared an electoral liability in newly aspirational India. The resulting restructuring of the BJP would inevitably cut short the political careers of certain sections of the party. Like any political animal, this group’s primary impulse is to survive in the face of looming obscurity. It is in this context that the shock expulsion of Jaswant Singh must be viewed.

While Jaswant Singh’s sacking may not be a case of calculated news management as Vinod Mehta of Outlook suggested on a current affairs programme, it definitely hints at a totalitarian impulse aimed at homogenising the party and smothering legitimate intellectual expression.

As it happens, the period of history that this political controversy has thrown up is equally fascinating. Jaswant Singh has propounded a contrarian reading of Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s political philosophy. He is by no means the first to interpret Jinnah as a calm, secular politician. But, Mr Singh’s public role ensures that the book and the arguments contained therein receive an inordinate amount of media attention as compared to any other piece of scholarly work. The crux of his thesis, as I am given to understand is that history has been unfair to Jinnah. In a sense, Jinnah’s complicity in the Partition of India has been exaggerated and that of Nehru’s Congress has been underplayed – perhaps in order to make for a more comfortable nationalism for the Indian masses to subscribe to.

The pork-eating, cigar-smoking Jinnah clearly does not make for a very good poster boy for the Two Nation Theory and Pakistani nationalism. Jaswant Singh’s argument is that Jinnah’s mutation from secular nationalist to communal scaremonger was caused by his desire to carve out a space in Indian politics that he could call his own in the face of increasing Nehruvian hegemony. Jinnah then, crafted a constituency that evolved into Pakistan. He reserved his antipathy for Nehru and the Congress, not the Hindus. The idea of Pakistan, which germinated in the fecund brain of Cambridge student Choudhary Rahmat Ali in 1932 become a potent political weapon in the hands of Jinnah.

Perhaps it was a tad indiscreet for a practicing politician of national prominence to indulge in revisionist accounts of the founder of Pakistan whilst he remained a serving member of a political party. Winston Churchill for example, waited till his retirement from active public life before publishing his account of the Second World War. This abrupt expulsion however, smacks of an increasingly insecure leadership in the BJP that is keen to preserve the status quo and prolong its spell in power. The party is likely to lurch from one controversy to the other till the time a new generation of charismatic leadership is allowed to emerge. Jaswant Singh in the meantime has all the time in the world to write.