Tragedies inevitably if unfortunately engender recycling of conventional wisdom. So, when news broke on Sunday late morning that Surayanarayan, the Indian telecom engineer, has been murdered by that group of murderous thugs, the Taliban, two questions were in the forefront. Why isn’t the government protecting Indians – 2,500 of them by MEA estimates – working in Afghanistan? Shouldn’t India’s involvement in these dangerous countries be reviewed?

Both are statist responses, from the Right and the Left. The Right wants the Indian state to flex its security muscles, to add a strong and obvious military dimension to its foreign policy. Put a division of the Indian army in Afghanistan – a strategic analyst had commented in these pages after the earlier incident of an Indian professional dying in the badlands outside Kabul. The Left wants the Indian state to rediscover its “moral code”.

Activist foreign policy in areas “sullied” by American “expansionism” is particularly amoral and, goes the argument, always carries the risk of making Indians as disliked as Americans. Left-leaning analysts presented a variation of this argument during the debate over India’s vote against a nuclear law-breaking Iran: Indians can come in the crosshairs of radical, violent Islam following the government’s “total agreement” with the US “agenda”.

These policy advocacies, like most that assume the primacy of government action, make no one better off. Sending out army divisions to protect Indian workers in hotspots raises so many political and pragmatic imponderables that, at this stage of India’s evolution as a nation-state, it is little more than a fantasy. Leftwing visions of a return to a non-aligned arcadia can be called, I suppose, a fond dream.

... contd.