Opinion A foreign policy for wimps

Now that the Government of India is showing some spine can it go one step further and state categorically that there will be no dialogue with Pakistan until it shows understanding of the gravity of the attack on Mumbai. It cannot be compared with any other act of terrorism because,as with 9/11,it crossed the boundaries of terrorism and became an act of war. If the Pakistan government cannot see this then there is no point in dialogue of any kind. There is nothing to talk about.

While the Home Minister was finally showing some spunk,the Minister of External Affairs was swanning around Delhi’s five star hotels. Now that he has been turfed out by orders of his High Command,can he please get down to some serious work? While he was lotus eating in the Maurya Hotel’s most expensive suite,Chinese troops crossed into Indian territory and made a mockery of national security by spending an afternoon painting Chinese graffiti on Indian stones. Can we not at least throw those wretched stones back across the border with India written on them? Can we not tell China that one more incursion into our territory will result in serious consequences? Chinese incursions into Indian territory have nearly doubled in the past two years but we continue to behave as if this was just routine cross-border fun.

Our friendly behaviour has not inspired any reciprocity from the Chinese. Quite the opposite has happened. The Chinese treat us with such open contempt that they dare to object publicly to the President of India visiting Arunachal Pradesh and make a noisy protest to the Asian Development Bank when it offers to loan us some money for a water project in Arunachal. Why do we allow China to get away with this kind of thing?

Why do we not,at the very least,raise our voice in the forums of the world to point out that China is a very,very bad country. Its main contribution to international affairs has been to support some of the worst regimes in the world. North Korea,Myanmar and Sudan to mention only three. The monsters who rule these countries would not be able to treat their people worse than animals if they did not have China’s loving support.

The United States and some other Western countries may have economic reasons why they do not dare talk too loudly against China but we have no such problem. China has never done us any favours or offered us its friendship except in those duplicitous ‘Hindi-Cheeni bhai,bhai’ days when it was plotting to invade India while making a fool of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. Its behaviour towards us has not improved since then either. Instead of friendship,China has gone out of its way to cause trouble for India. It helped Pakistan build its nuclear bomb with the intention of keeping India in check,it funds terrorist groups that work against India and most recently a Chinese ‘think tank’ produced a paper that suggested ways in which India could be broken up. We all know that the only people allowed to ‘think’ in China are those that have the permission of its communist rulers.

So now that the External Affairs Minister has been brought down from the lofty heights of the Maurya Hotel’s presidential suite,can he make a quick trip to the border that the Chinese graffiti artists crossed and make a formal protest. This should take the form of throwing those defiled stones onto the Chinese side. If the Chinese do not like this too bad for them.