Why can’t foreign policy be principled?

The Z Factor

Late last month, I had argued in an international publication that India should not ignore the genocide next door in Myanmar for the sake of appeasing that country’s brutal junta. Shortly afterwards, realists and hawks had scoffed at me for advocating a principled foreign policy.

To be honest, I hadn’t really made an entirely starry-eyed philosophical case. The horrors of the genocide apart, I had pointed out that the Myanmar junta was no friend to India because it was now using insurgent groups from India’s northeast states to fight its own local rebels. Public opinion within Myanmar had also turned against those who were supporting the junta, leaving India on shaky ground.

A few days ago, the foreign minister of the rebel National Unity Government, Zin Mar Aung, had told Deccan Herald the same thing. “The people of Myanmar will not forget where the Government of India stood in their trying times,” she said, referring to India’s fence-sitting posture.

But as criticism over my essay died down, I pondered over how the strategic community in India tends to work. Too often, I’ve found myself guilty of trying to fulfil my urge for human rights activism by providing ‘realist’ arguments that would satisfy the cynical hawks, who believe that foreign policy ought to be entirely selfish. But why shouldn’t morality itself be an implicit objective of foreign policy?

In the early days after India’s independence, Nehru had ridden on the euphoria of India’s idealistic freedom struggle to launch a principled foreign policy campaign. Even before independence, Gandhi had been vocal against racism in South Africa and Nehru against fascism in Europe, including on the Spanish Civil War and elsewhere. That fervour fed into the new republic’s foreign policy approach as well.

Nehru’s ‘non-alignment’ was not a policy of fence-sitting, but rather a distinct third way between the imperialism of the West and the tyrannical excesses of communism in the Soviet Union. Both were vocally criticised by Indian diplomats in different places, from Korea and Indochina to Congo and the Suez Canal.

In the Congo, India had led a UN peacekeeping effort to support the newly independent government against the violence of rebels backed by the West. When the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in 1956, India had been a fiery voice at the UN, fighting to secure Soviet withdrawal.

Nehru took to activism, not because he thought it was profitable, but because it was the right thing to do (although, as it turned out, doing the right thing often also wins goodwill and influence). His narrative was broadly accepted at the time by both politicians and the Indian public, either because they too had emerged from the same idealistic freedom movement or because they simply didn’t know world affairs any better.

But that has changed. Over time, the generation of the freedom movement died away — and with it, seemingly, its principles, too. India’s silence on global affairs have made it a largely irrelevant player, punching below its weight and absent in most discussions.

The funny thing is that the same people who scoff at a principled foreign policy also often hail the soft power and goodwill that they claim India enjoys. But what they forget is that the goodwill was largely built in the early years, when India had made conscious efforts to be a voice for peace and conflict resolution. You can’t have a foreign policy of lazy fence-sitting and abstention while millions are being shot to death or threatened by the spectre of war and yet aspire to be recognised as a Vishwaguru.

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