When the nation was looking for the BJP leadership's reaction to and reflections on Karnataka Governor H R Bhardwaj sanctioning the prosecution of party Chief Minister B S Yediyurappa, Nitin Gadkari was away in China, on a five-day goodwill visit at the invitation of the Communist Party of China. Leave the constitutionality and legality issues involving the Karnataka Governor's decision -- where healthy precedents had been set by the Supreme Court in cases relating to incumbent Chief Ministers A R Antulay (Maharashtra) and J Jaayalalithaa (Tamil Nadu) - at the instance of the Jan Sangh predecessor of the BJP and Janata Party president Subramanian Swamy, respectively - the fact remains that the People's Republic was in fact courting India's 'nationalist' Opposition, whose criticism of China has only been mounting since exiting power.
India is not the only country where China has been courting the political Opposition. Across the board in the Indian neighbourhood in particular and elsewhere too, Beijing seems to have taken off from where the US and the erstwhile Soviet Union had begun in establishing people-to-people contacts and creating constituencies. Of interest, though not concern to India should be the annual China visit of Sri Lanka's political Opposition, the 'capitalist' United National Party (UNP) in this case. Nepal's Maoist leaders have been visiting China at will - though it remains to be determined at whose 'will' - while Bangladesh Opposition Leader and former Prime Minister, Begum Khaleda Zia, too was in Beijing last year. The New Year now has Maldivian Speaker Abdullah Shahid heading a parliamentary delegation to China.
It does not mean that constant contacts with the polity of third nations would give China an edge in bilateral relations. Independent of when and how they come to power, political parties in most nations decide on foreign and security policy issues, based on what is good for their people. This is more so in the case of democracies, where people are ultimately the masters, and have an uncanny way of upsetting apple-carts built assiduously by external powers that have little understanding about the internal dynamics of the polity and society in the host nations. The history of competitive patronage extended by the US and the Soviet Union to nations in their traditional or not-so-traditional spheres of influence would show how they had gone woefully wrong in most cases. In a way, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the global communist league that Moscow had promoted owed it to such lack of understanding and acceptance of ground realities. The US experiences in Iran, the Philippines and even Pakistan to a certain extent, not to leave out all its excess and exit in other parts of the world, too are pointers.
Yet, if China is adopting a model that may have failed elsewhere, it should still be with reason. It is still possible that independent of its medium and long-term strategic policies for the Indian neighbourhood, adversarial or otherwise, establishing organisational and institutional contacts with the polity in democratic nations in the neighbourhood may help Beijing study and comprehend ground realities in ways they should be understood and accepted. Whether that would help Beijing in shaping or re-shaping its policies and programmes is a different thing, but if it served such a purpose, the beneficiary would be China. This is independent of the government-level contacts, funding and political-backing that China may extend to other nations, the first two at the national-level and the last one in the international arena. China's status as a P-5 member in the UN Security Council is a reality that India has to contend with, particularly when nations like Myanmar and Sri Lanka, continue to remain on the global radars, for right reasons or otherwise.
For right and justified reasons, neighbourhood diplomacy has remained the exclusive preserve of career diplomacy, particularly in the official context. Seldom has India named a non-career person to senior diplomatic positions in any of its missions in the immediate neighbourhood. Given the linguistic, cultural and political influences that come to bear on domestic politics in the two countries, New Delhi has done well to keep politicians and others from formal positions in missions abroad. The 'Tamil Nadu factor' in India's Sri Lanka policy is a good example. Likewise, the Punjab and/or Sindh influence, not to overlook the omnipresent 'Kashmir connection' to Pakistan, the Bihar-UP shared-border with Nepal and the cultural and societal affinity between West Bengal and Bangladesh are all well-documented. Even in the case of Myanmar, one constant irritant used to be the cover that some of the north-eastern insurgency groups used to take in that country.
Post-Cold War era has thrown up a globalised world, linked in turn by IT marvels that have made distances too small and differences, too big at times. Nations of the world are now beginning to pick up persons of Indian origin for diplomatic positing in India. The US is no more the exception. What it had begun some time ago is almost beginning to be the rule. It is not that all those expatriates understand India and Indians as they are believed by their respective Governments to have understood. The hope at least is that they would be able to build the kind of rapport that may influence policy-decisions back home than others in their place would be able to input. Already, it is proving counter-productive in some cases but that is not necessarily going to change the situation. Even in the case of a small neighbour like Sri Lanka, President Mahinda Rajapaksa, shaking off the beliefs from the past, has begun appointing Tamil-speaking officials as the Deputy High Commissioner at Chennai. It has helped managing matters in more than one way, as their continuing knowledge of Tamil Nadu affairs and constant interest in the State are valuable to the policy-planner back home.
India will need time to reach that stage, given the complexities of issues and the suspected susceptibility of people. Indian missions in the neighbourhood are doing good work in establishing and maintaining constant contact with the polity and society in the host-nations cutting across cultural and political linkages, but this may not be not be enough in the emerging scenario. Political leaders, academics and civil society organisations have often been known to fail in their assessment of the ground situation in their own nations, given the restrictions that a constant circulation of Indian diplomats in their places of posting officially entails. The constantly-changing political situation in New Delhi has also meant that there are new representatives of the people in decision-making positions at every turn. To take the Sri Lankan ethnic issue, for instance, barring those Tamil leaders that the LTTE had killed, most of the original team of negotiators with India are still around. They live in the past, unwilling to accept the ever-changing ground realities in India, where a new political leadership and also a new set of policy-makers have been entering scene, periodically. It is no different in the case of political masters and bureaucratic policy-makers in their own country, but such changes, in the absence of institutional mechanisms, to carry forward the collective work from the past, could be beneficial at times - but can also hamper understanding of the ground realities and appreciation of each other's position, otherwise.
India needs to create 'constituencies' in the neighbourhood that are not only sound but are also continuing. This is not to influence their decisions - as no one will be better-equipped than these individuals and groups, to know what is good for them in their domestic environment - but to create institutional mechanisms that will be able to constantly update its knowledge and understanding of the existing and emerging situations in the host nations. Needless to say, emerging India's inevitable pre-occupation with the larger world and bigger global players could entail a constant setback for its need for updating its understanding and policy options relating to neighbourhood nations. While a vast improvement is noticeable at the current juncture, sustained efforts of the kind have not always become possible whenever similar initiatives had been taken in the past.
Yet, unlike China, India is a democracy, and there is nothing equivalent to the monolithic, Government-centric CPC after the Congress Party lost its early clout in governance at all levels. New thinking should come New Delhi's way to do things that are right for the nation - and this could include open invitation and constant interactions with political leaders of all hues from the neighbourhood, where they could meet not only Government officials but also interact with political and societal leaders, not only as individuals but also in groups, visit Indian legislatures, courts and other institutions, and develop inter-personal relations and equations with individuals all across. It is an asset on which India should invest, the unacknowledged benefits of which would come to be felt, even if not actually used, only in the distant future.
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