ruling dispensation.

Absence of a political coherence at the top, however, has its consequences, as in the current government’s inability to take advantage of the extraordinary performance of the economy and the weakening of the BJP, the principal opposition party, and to pursue a forward looking national agenda.

The real costs of the UPA’s political dithering might, however, lie in the conduct of India’s foreign policy. For, the world does not wait for India to get its act together.

If diplomacy is about seizing the fleeting moments of opportunity to achieve long-term national goals, timing is everything. Inability to act at the right moment implies more than lost opportunities. It involves serious political and economic penalties. Changes in the international context and the shift in the global balance could often mean what is easily done at a particular juncture could become near impossible at another.

Nothing illustrates this better than India’s foreign policy challenges in the mid-1960s. The most important features of the international situation then were the movement towards a detente between the rival superpowers and the affirmation of Chinese power potential. The nuclear arena reflected the changes in the sharpest form. Seeking to manage their nuclear rivalry and define some broad rules of the game for their all-encompassing political competition in the Cold War, Washington and Moscow took the first step of nuclear arms control.

While India welcomed the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963 that ended the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons by the superpowers, Beijing rejected it and conducted its first nuclear test in October 1964. As China gate-crashed into the nuclear club just a few months after Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru passed away, India wroung its hands about exercising the nuclear option, postured about nuclear disarmament, and desperately sought an elusive ‘nuclear umbrella’ from the great powers. Meanwhile, the superpowers unveiled the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that froze the membership of the nuclear club as on January 1, 1967. China was in, India out.

Failure to test a nuclear weapon between October 1964 and January 1967 left India in a nuclear no man’s land and paid the price as a target of an expanding regime of nuclear sanctions in the following decades.

Forty years later India is on the verge of breaking out of that nuclear isolation. The UPA government boldly built on the NDA’s initiatives and signed a nuclear deal with the US in July 2005. Since then it has tied itself into knots and is now close to squandering a historic opportunity.

Failure to clinch the nuclear deal now could be as disastrous as the inability to move decisively on the nuclear front in the mid-1960s. For the nuclear regime is now being restructured, with the introduction of missile defences, a renewed worldwide interest in expanding civilian nuclear power generation, and a tightening of technology denial regime against some states. Once this new order gets frozen with India on the wrong side again, the nation will have to wait a few more decades for another opportunity to become a part of the nuclear system.

A second failure in the mid-1960s was the inability to recognise that China had begun to alter the international distribution of power. Although China was then in the middle of a self-destructive Cultural Revolution, its 1964 nuclear test had signalled the emergence of China as a great power.

Today China demonstrates daily its determination to convert the new-found economic strength into strategic leverage around the world and not the least in India’s neighbourhood.

The near sickening debate in New Delhi on the relationship with the US is matched by a total silence on what the rise of China might imply for India’s regional and international interests. The UPA government’s reluctance to fashion a timely and credible response to China’s rise could turn out to be hugely expensive for future Indian governments.

While the Congress governments four decades ago had to fight a war with China and two with Pakistan, the UPA government inherited an opportunity to resolve long-standing problems with both the neighbours. Two years later, we might well conclude that Congress leader Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh let the big moments slip away in finding answers to the Kashmir question with Pakistan and in resolving the boundary dispute with China.

Indira Gandhi of the 1960s must be exonerated from her foreign policy vacillations because she had to confront an extremely difficult internal situation that included famine and dependence on food imports. With the economy now on a roll and a world never so benign to India, from the UPA’s own analysis, there will be no excuses for Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh for persisting with a feckless foreign policy.

The writer is a professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore