At home in the world

A booming economy and a large military do not a great power make. It is the will of its political elite to measure up to external opportunities that separates an emerging great power from merely a large nation.

Deep and internal divisions, more than external threats, often set India back in the past. Nearly three years of domestic political contestation on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s nuclear deal with US President George W. Bush suggested that India was reverting to form — that its internal wrangling might convert a rare diplomatic triumph into an incredible political defeat.

In overcoming the ideological obduracy of the communists and the mendacious opportunism of the BJP, the Congress has demonstrated that India will no longer shortchange itself. That the Congress leadership took the most tortuous route to implementing the nuclear deal does not in any way diminish the consequences of the messy but successful resolution of the crisis on Tuesday night.

How India’s nuclear sausage was made is less important than the fact that it was assembled against great domestic political odds. And it was entirely appropriate that the man who has engineered a decisive transformation in India’s worldview was also the one who had launched the nation on the path of economic globalisation 17 years ago.

Unlike in the early ’90s when economic reforms were forced on a bankrupt India — the gravity of the crisis somehow making the task of kick-starting liberalisation easier — the redirection of the country’s foreign and nuclear policies was a deliberate choice for the Congress-led UPA government.

Heavens would not have fallen if the prime minister had kicked the nuclear can down the road. After all, no Indian government before had allowed the imperatives of a foreign policy initiative to overwhelm the instincts of political survival at home.

It is in demanding that the nation take a call right now on this issue and prevailing on the floor of the Lok Sabha that Manmohan Singh has transformed himself from a technocrat to a political leader with both courage and conviction.

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