EDITORIAL: New clear deal

The big issue is India’s foreign policy

The Left is right. The Congress-Left battle is not simply over the nuclear deal. There are bigger issues involved. The big issue is India’s foreign policy. The Left wants and, to be fair to it, has been wanting for some time an ideological foreign policy.

No one else in India, at least no serious player at the national level, certainly not the Congress or the BJP, wants a foreign policy strait-jacketed by ideology in the sense of prioritising theories and dislikes over national interests. Therefore, and this is the crucial thing to understand as the Left and the Congress issue reactions to each other’s statements, at the fundamental level what the current crisis has brought to fore is what some observers, including this newspaper, had suspected about this ruling arrangement: the alliance was always artificial, both sides felt unnatural in it, and it could only run so long because the Left’s hard ball tactics were concentrated on economic policy.

This may sound strange because the PM, squarely in the Left’s target, is so much a part of India’s economic transformation. But economics as it has played out in politics recently offers room for manoeuvre that big foreign policy choices don’t. In part because of earlier reforms that released, to use the much-used Keynesian phrase, the animal spirits in India’s private sector, India’s growth could ramp up without radical additional reforms. Manmohan Singh and his handful of reformist ministers would have loved to initiate more reforms. Not being able to do so was frustrating. Listening to the Left’s jibes and threats wasn’t pleasant. But a lot can be tolerated when the economy grows above 9 per cent.

Barring Delhi and Mumbai airport ownership change and the SEZ bill, the UPA can claim no major reform. No one was expecting any more. What was widely expected was that any other reform proposal mooted would be shot down by the Left and the government would have carried on ruing economic policy paralysis but knowing political stability isn’t at great risk.Foreign policy now doesn’t offer these luxuries because redefining India’s role in the world requires action.

The nuclear deal was part of that action. The BJP, never mind what it says now, started it when a Democrat was in the White House and the Congress carried on with it with a Republican president. There’s bipartisan consensus in both countries on the broad and crucial aspects of India’s foreign policy programme. The Left doesn’t want any part of that programme.

Which is why talk about buying time and postponing this or that negotiation on the nuclear deal are ultimately red herrings. Tactical inaction can’t resolve the current dispute. The dynamics of the larger issue around the nuclear deal are very different from, say, those around the pension bill. The Congress has probably understood that.