Commentary/Mani Shankar Aiyar

Inder Gujral's astonishing foreign policy triumphs

It is astonishing that a government led by the most unprepossessing Prime Minister we have ever had should have notched up so many successes on the foreign policy front in so short a time. It only goes to show that the best training for high office in South Block is relentless lunching at the India International Centre.

So vivid have been Gujral's achievements that the expression 'The Gujral Doctrine' is now passing into conventional speak and bids fair to be as enduring as the Monroe Doctrine proved to be at a comparable stage of nation-building in the United States. The difference is that while the Monroe Doctrine sought to exclude all but Americans from the Americas, the Gujral Doctrine aims to including all South Asians within South Asia.

(And for those who might be wondering what an interestingly moulded film star has to do with our excessively respectable foreign minister, might I clarify that the Monroe Doctrine has nothing to do with Marilyn? As far as is known, the staid and dour US secretary of state who gave his name to the Doctrine in 1812 contributed little, even down the ages, to the engendering of the young lady who captured the adolescent fantasies of my generation close to a 150 years later.)

In four deliberate steps, Gujral has changed the atmosphere in South Asia. The first was the Mahakali Treaty with Nepal. It is a framework treaty on which we still have a long way to go before its promise is actually realised. But the really impressive breakthrough part of the agreement is that it has at all been concluded. Gujral could not, of course, have conjured the treaty out of thin air.

Various developments, such as the devaluation of the absolute authority of the king accompanied by a significant measure of democracy in Nepal, preceded by several years the advent of Gujral. But the credit goes to Gujral for seizing the opportunity that was staring us in the face ever since the street revolution of April 1990 restored democracy to the Nepali Rashtriya Panchayat (since renamed).

Next was the Ganga Waters Treaty with Bangladesh. Here too, he was fortunate in having Sheikh Hasina rather than Begum Khaleda Zia to deal with. But it stands to Gujral's credit that instead of availing of the ascension of Sheikh Hasina to the summit of power in Dhaka to sort out India's grievances with Bangladesh, he gave priority to settling Bangladesh's grievances with India.

If it was a master-stroke to have delinked questions of transit from the sharing of Ganga waters, it was a super master -stroke to have sent Jyoti Basu to pave the path to the convulsion of the treaty. For all that had stood between the treaty and its non-conclusion all these wasted 25 years has been West Bengal's reservations. In placing the crow of thorns on the West Bengal chief minister's head, instead of wearing it himself or sycophantically attempting to adjust it on Deve Gowda's, Gujral stooped to conquer.

True, it is polite of Jyoti Basu to take no part of the credit for the achievement. True too that the treaty is tantamount to no more than a sharing of shortages but the genius in concluding it lies less in showing ourselves to be knights in shining armour than in clearing the way for addressing ourselves to the more important problem that is common to India and Bangladesh -- the augmentation of Ganga waters.

By needlessly rubbing it into the Bangladeshis that augmentation all these squandered decades Gujral understood that sharing had to be put out of the way before augmentation could be addressed. He refused to go along with the paranoiac South Block view that if we let Bangladesh off the hook on sharing, they will show no interest in augmentation.

Gujral saw that while there was a conflict of interest on sharing, there is a complementary of interest in augmentation. He also saw that while sharing can be attained immediately, augmentation will take time. He, therefore, surrendered a short-term Indian interest in a larger share to the much more long-term Indian interest in the augmentation of Ganga waters.

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