The newly elected UPA government announced, through the presidential address, an ambitious domestic agenda of action. But the external affairs agenda lacked new content. The treatment of foreign affairs was perfunctory even as the situation around us is becoming more challenging. The government intends to improve relations with all our neighbours, the major powers as well as Africa and Latin America. Our watchwords will be the pursuit of enlightened self-interest and maintaining the independence of our foreign policy. All this is unexceptionable, but platitudinous.
The message to Pakistan was conciliatory. We are willing to ''reshape'' our policy towards it if it sincerely confronts terrorism on its soil directed against us. The phraseology used suggests that we retain hope that Pakistan can address the issue of terrorism to our satisfaction. Why this will be so when Pakistan continues to evade responsibility for properly investigating the Mumbai massacre and punishing all those involved is not clear. The resumption of the India-Pakistan dialogue, which the Americans favour, has hinged on this action by Pakistan, but its establishment continues to deflect pressure with its devious tactics of partial action, double-dealing and exploitation of international anxieties about its internal situation, not to mention leveraging to its advantage US compulsions in Afghanistan.
What exactly reshaping our policy means if Pakistan acts against terror is unclear, but it implies our readiness to go beyond simply recommencing the suspended dialogue. Reshaping would suggest changing the contours of our policy perceptibly. How our policy could look different from the one pursued by the previous UPA government with its backchannel gains and out-of-the-box thinking is unclear. Frankly, it is Pakistan, not India, which has prevented the normalisation of bilateral relations by making it contingent on the resolution of the Kashmir issue. It is Pakistan, therefore, that needs to reshape its policy towards India, not vice versa.
Some confusion has surfaced early at the policymaking level on the issue of resumption of dialogue with Pakistan. At one level, the government may reason that as neither the spate of terrorist attacks on our cities culminating with the Mumbai mayhem nor the opposition's campaign that the UPA was weak on terror for vote-bank reasons had affected its electoral support, its handsome poll success gives it political cover to pick up the threads of dialogue with Pakistan. At another, having specified some minimum conditions before the dialogue could restart, it would fear inviting commotion in Parliament if, without an adequate Pakistani response, it ceded unilaterally.
