Minhaz Merchant

New Delhi: The BJP’s victory in Gujarat has recast the country’s political topography. Several consequences will now flow from Narendra Modi’s win. The general election is certain to be pushed back to its mandatory scheduled date of April-May 2009. The Indo-US nuclear deal is all but dead and buried. It will be up to the next US administration and the next Indian government to revive it. Both will be preoccupied in the near future with the unfolding political situation in Pakistan following Benazir’s assassination.

The Left will meanwhile get precious time to recover from the odium of Nandigram. The BJP will re-experiment with soft Hindutva at the national level. How will the bruised Congress react? The dilemma for the Congress is this: if Sonia and Rahul Gandhi’s charisma failed so spectacularly in Gujarat, could it lose its effectiveness in the bigger test on the horizon nationwide? The Prime Minister has most of next year and a bit of 2009 to implement policies which could decide whether the UPA coalition is returned to office or the NDA coalition comes back into government after a gap of five years. Unfortunately, on broad strategic policy Manmohan Singh must bow to the superior wisdom residing in 10, Janpath.

And on implementation, he is often pulled in multiple different directions by the other 11 parties who make up the 12-party UPA coalition. And yet the new year affords the Prime Minister some leeway. With the general election looming in early-2009, the coalition allies will not be keen to show disunity. Manmohan Singh’s New Year resolution ought to centre around China and the US.

Indian strategy on China is not as robust as it should be. Beijing remains aggressive on its claims to Arunachal Pradesh. South Block tends to treat China with kids gloves. It need not. Big powers respect strength. India has enough ammunition through its own honourable stand on Tibet and the Dalai Lama as well as its growing economic clout to deal with China as an absolute equal.

With the nuclear deal on ice, India’s priority for 2008 should be to strengthen the rest of the Indo-US strategic partnership. According to the latest “downsized” figures for GDP issued a few days ago by the World Bank in its International Comparison Programme (ICP), India’s GDP in 2005 was $2.34 trillion. China’s GDP stood at $5.30 trillion and America’s at just over $12 trillion.

The long-term (20-year) GDP trend growth for the US is 2 per cent a year. For India it is 7 per cent a year. Extrapolating these figures, Indian GDP will overtake American GDP in just over 35 years. (Chinese GDP would have overtaken US GDP at their respective annual trend growths of 6.5 per cent and 2 per cent within the next 20 years). Armed with these near-certainties, the Prime Minister should recognise that the three most influential global powers in the next generation will be China, India and the US — strictly in that order.Washington is aware of this future pecking order more acutely than the relatively timid PMO in New Delhi. Hence its rush to build economic, military and geopolitical bridges with India.

Emerging great power status does not mean a shrill foreign policy — simply a firm, sensible one tethered to the national interest. The Ministry of External Affairs’ timorous reaction to the Malaysian ethnic Indian crisis and the Taslima Nasreen-Bangladesh issue reflects how defensively and timidly we still conduct our foreign affairs. If the Congress-led UPA government is voted back to office,Manmohan Singh is likely to get one more term as prime minister since Rahul Gandhi’s political grooming remains a work-in-progress. This is the prime minister’s last opportunity to give India a strategic foreign policy shorn not only of its old inferiority complex but also of the prickly arrogance that sometimes afflicts a great power-in-the-making.

Source : DNAIndia