IF 1991 gave Manmohan Singh a remarkable opportunity to globalise India’s economy, 2006 is his moment to globalise India’s strategy. There is, however, one crucial difference. The 1991 reform came out of crisis — remember the airlifting of India’s gold to be mortgaged overseas to prevent a default? That story, incidentally, was also broken by The Indian Express. Today’s strategic moment is the gift of a wonderful combination of virtuous developments. India’s stock and respect is at an unprecedented high worldwide. And it is not merely because of three consecutive years of 8 per cent economic growth. It is because India, today, is a unique stabilising, sobering factor in a world rapidly integrating economically, but polarising at the same time politically.

India is readily embracing economic globalisation, even driving it in some areas and certainly proving its sweeping benefits to even a very poor economy. At the same time, it is providing hope that there is a democratic, pluralistic antidote to the poisons threatening this world. The two most divisive forces in the world today are growing anti-Americanism in one part of the world and rising Islamophobia in the other. Both are definitely on the decline in India. While it is a routine practice for visiting dignitaries to praise India’s secularism, it would have sounded hollow today if the 2004 elections had not produced a change. That election drew away the venom of minorities’ anger after Gujarat. The people of India re-asserted its secular principle through entirely democratic means and changed their government. What is even more significant, this new government has maintained total stability in the direction of this nation’s economic and foreign policies.

Given the very religiously conservative nature of his own administration, you may scoff at George Bush repeatedly pointing out that India has 150 million Muslims and not one in Al-Qaeda. But the fact of India’s Muslims being such willing and influential participants in its democratic politics is a better advertisement for democracy in Islamic countries than any numbers of Marines or stealth bombers. Certainly, it is a better example than France when it comes to cross-religious integration and inclusion.

On deeper analysis, you can see how even the seeds of this foreign policy globalisation were sown around the same time as of economic reform, and I am not even talking of 1991. It is evident that even when Indira Gandhi returned to power in 1980, she had concluded that the era of running an isolationist economy and a non-aligned, but pro-Soviet inclined, foreign policy was ending. Nearly three years out of power had given her the time to reflect on how the world had changed. She was also perhaps the first to realise that if India had to make a shift in its economics, it had to evolve its foreign policy accordingly. You cannot convince your people to embrace Western-style economic reform while they continue to see the West as a permanently hostile force.

Not many give her the credit for it, but she took that first definitive step with her rather friendly meeting with Ronald Reagan (July 1982). While Jimmy Carter had visited India during Morarji Desai’s Janata interregnum, this was Mrs Gandhi’s first friendly meeting with an American, or a Western Bloc leader, ever. This helped Rajiv Gandhi also set aside the suspicion of the foreign hand and engage with Reagan more than once. It was during this phase that Casper Weinberger visited India in 1986, the first US Secretary of Defense to do so. Incidentally, Weinberger recently wrote glowingly of India and the need for the US to

embrace it in a column in Forbes magazine (February 13, 2006). It was also in Rajiv’s time that India began looking at some American weapons systems after two decades including, briefly, a 155-mm howitzer, and the Northrop F-20 Tigershark.

The two crucial years, 1988-89, when the Cold War ended dramatically, Soviet Union broke up and China morphed into a capitalist dictatorship coincided with total confusion in India under V P Singh and Chandra Shekhar. Both were in power too little and were too insecure to move very much on economics or foreign policy. But those who knew Rajiv Gandhi then will tell you that after a great deal of reflection and brain-storming, he had already made up his mind on economic reform as well as the opening up of foreign policy.

That historic opportunity was lost with his assassination. But P V Narasimha Rao had not missed the point either. He did not have the clout or charm of Rajiv, and certainly as an old socialist, he had more doubts. But he was blessed with great political instinct. That’s why the U-turn on economics as if the ground under his feet was moving, and the first tentative steps in a unipolar world, the upgrading of relations with Israel. It is a different matter that he was clever enough to do it on a day when Yasser Arafat was in New Delhi and who endorsed it promptly as being in “the Palestinians’ interest” at his press conference the same afternoon. But any faster movement on foreign policy was not possible because India still did not have the clout internationally to do so. Its economy did not have the fairy-tale halo of 2006, the separatist threat in Kashmir, Punjab and the Northeast, and then Ayodhya and the following communal riots had Indian policymakers on the defensive at global forums. All that looks so dramatically different now.