COMMENT

Crisis Management India’s Forte

K. Natwar Singh

I am not at liberty to disclose what transpired at General Colin Powell’s meeting with Sonia Gandhi on Tuesday 17, 2001. I will, however, put on record something I told the Secretary of State of the United State of America, Colin Powell. He has a presence. His manner is engaging, his smile genuine (the eyes smile with face) and his approach gentle, friendly and disarmingly frank. When he says that America is dedicated to justice and humanity, one believes him because the false, annoying, patronising tone is absent. He speaks like a soldier and thinks like a statesman in the making. One does not link political squalour and treachery with Colin Powell. He seems to be free from angularities and rough edges.

I believe that America’s difficulty should not be any country’s opportunity. The world needs to rid itself of the bin Ladens and Omars of this world. The sooner the better. The USA is unaccustomed to what happened on September 11, 2001 in New York and Washington. America is nervous but it has not lost its nerve, otherwise President Bush would not have flown to Shanghai to adorn Chinese band-gala coats.

What did I say to General Colin Powell. This is what I said. You might find our experience helpful. Crisis management is India’s forte. We are good at reconciling contradictions. This we learnt from Gandhi and Nehru. That is the only way democracy could survive in India.

Colin Powell, however, is not all powerful or supreme. He has to carry the Cheneys and Rumsfolds with him. The American gospel - you can run but you cannot hide, is simply not workable. Getting tough is fine, but flexibility and wisdom cannot be jettisoned for all time.

The international coalition created by the USA and the UK must now provide the United Nations a pivotal role. Unless this is done, the coalition against terrorism will run into serious problems. Under Article 43 and 44 of the United Nations Charter, the responsibility for maintaining international peace and security rests with the Security Council.

The US did get a unanimous resolution passed in the Security Council, but as of today, the UN is not playing even a marginal role in Afghanistan. In a post-Taliban Afghanistan, the UN must play a pivotal role. So should India, Iran and Russia. the United Nations special envoy, Lakhdar Brahini should be much more active. His recent statement that, "we will discuss with the Afghans, with their neighbours, with all interested parties on how to help the Afghans organise themselves".

Whatever arrangements are going to be made must be owned by the people of Afghanistan, otherwise it is not going to work. "Equally welcome is what Richard Armitage, the Deputy Secretary of State of the USA told C Raja Mohan of The Hindu. "My own view is that beyond the six plus two process, we have to reach out in a very pragmatic diplomatic way to others who have an interest in Afghanistan such as India. Japan too has an interest in Afghanistan, France for instance. There is room enough for all interested parties".

One must anticipate Pakistani intransigence. General Musharraf must not have a veto on India’s participation in talks on a post-Taliban Afghanistan. The Americans know India’s traditional interest in Aghanistan. The new Afghanistan must be democratic, non-aligned and have a broad-based government, which leaves no one out.

In my judgement too much importance is being given to ex-King Zahir Shah, who is now 87 and physically frail. I met him in Rome in 1988. I was largely disappointed. The King was then 73 and wished to play no role in reducing the misery of his people. Some other, acceptable instrumentality will have to be thought of. Pakistan may have turned 180 degrees about Zahir Shah, Pakistan will nevertheless make life very difficult for him. Now to Gandhiji and Pandit Nehru. The world needs Gandhiji’s non-violence and Nehru’s realistic idealism. Let me quote from Nobel Laureate Nandine Gordimer’s 1995 Nehru Memorial Lecture.

A young Indian lawyer who came to South Africa to defend South African Indians against discriminatory laws became Mahatma Gandhi, an original thinker on the nature of power, as distinct from power confined to the purely political Leftist conception as the tool for liberation, yet able to serve this tool as part of a high moral consciousness.

The original thinking is an important component of the intellectual advancement in an era of religious decline marked by crack-pot distortions of faith, and, finally, by savage fundamentalism. It was within his South African experience that Gandhi formulated a concept of power that he called Satyagraha, contracted from its linguistic combination, ‘satya’ -truth, ‘agraha’ -firmness, which he defined as the force which is born of Truth and Love or non-violence. It was a force he went on to develop in India and which was to bring India its freedom from British rule.

Of course, you know all this, it is your inspiring heritage to have produced both Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru as the height of humanistic achievement but I must place it yet once more on record in the context of our century, and also because Mohandas Gandhi’s philosophy that gained freedom for India because of part of the struggle that gained freedom for my own country, South Africa. Satyagraha postulates the conquest of the adversary by suffering in one’s own person.