September 20, 2005 ☼ Foreign Affairs
This is an archived blog post from The Acorn.
It is the Express’ turn to take Natwar Singh to task.
The foreign minister’s remarks are fraught with fairly dangerous implications. Is he suggesting foreign policy is no more than an extension of domestic politics? Should, then, the Government of India immediately junk its hard position on Nepal, embrace the king and welcome his autocracy, keeping in mind the “sensitivities†of India’s 800 million Hindus? Or bring its Catholics into Indo-Italian ties? Where will this end: with relations with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan being held hostage to a surmise of emotions among India’s Sunnis? India’s engagement with the world — as, indeed, any nation’s foreign policy — must flow from a cold assessment of its strategic interests, its gains and losses. To reduce it to presumed anguish among individual communities, as Natwar Singh has done in the case of Iran, is to upturn diplomacy, disregard India and, most of all, insult Indian Muslims.
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A nuclear-armed Iran, one country removed from a nuclear-armed Pakistan, is, after all, not a recipe for stability in India’s near neighbourhood. It won’t do any particular good to Shias, in India or elsewhere, to bring them into the picture. [IE]
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