Don't Go Abroad:

Oct 22/2013: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, these days, visits India occasionally! Such is his busy schedule, hopping from one country to another, that he can at best escape the heat building up in Delhi against him and the UPA II government, be it in the coal bloc allocations or the numerous other notorious scams that have tainted the Congress led government over the past many years. The pertinent point is, will his air-borne diplomacy do any good to the country or its one billion plus people.

Singh was barely back from a highly publicized visit to the US, the latest Washington appearance in a series, when in a new sojourn he was airborne towards the sultanate of Brunei for a series of dialogues with Asian, Asean and Apec leaders. A week hence, he was in Moscow, meeting Vladimir Putin and other Kremlin bigwigs for the umpteenth time for the tenth in a series of bilateral summits between India and Russia. He is set to take off from there to Beijing, for a fresh round of confabulations with the Chinese leadership. From what is known in public, none of these visits had produced any major diplomatic victory for India. There is little wonder. Singh, at 81, as PM, is already on political oxygen. With a general election approaching, the dice is cast heavily against the UPA and there is little scope for him to discuss matters with a long-term perspective. This is clear as sunlight. On the other hand, countries like the US, Russia or China have national policies that are not dependent on mere inpiduals getting in or out of office. India, unfortunately, does not enjoy the benefit of policy continuity. 

At best, or worst, Singh is queering the pitch for Indian diplomacy and his current indulgences are bound to put hurdles in the way of a new PM and government that would be in saddle a few months from now. A new government at Centre will have its own policy both in national and international matters. Chances are that they might be diametrically opposite to the course that Singh and the two governments that he, sadly for the country, has headed. This is not just limited to the economic front. Under the circumstances, there is hardly any justification for the PM to go on this diplomatic overdrive, at this juncture.

What cannot go unnoticed is the fact that Singh, with one of the longest years in office in this country, is a prop. He is not an elected representative all along, and chose to enter Parliament time and again via the Rajya Sabha. That too not from his home state of Punjab where, it seems, he is terribly disliked but from Assam. In other words, he does not even have the support of a constituency. Yet, from the strength he derives from being the nominee of the Gandhi family, he went about signing major agreements like the nuclear deal with the US. He did so in the face of strong protests from within the country. We are aware a deal was signed and nobody could go through the fine print, or what the detailed clauses entailed for the nation or how beneficial or harmful the deal was. These are classified information and a common citizen could not possibly get into the nitty gritty of such things. Yet, no grudges could be held against Singh because his nuclear agenda was amply clear.

However, in the present scenario, what exactly are Singh’s policies is not at all clear. There already are misgivings about the Pakistan policy that Singh and his government are following. There are strong feelings that by waving an olive branch at us now and then, the Pakistani establishment is not missing any opportunity to give gun-pricks to India. That the establishment there speaks in different voices is part of the game Islamabad is playing against New Delhi. But the response from New Delhi to the Pakistani scheming is mostly inaudible. 

Similarly, there are lots of misgivings about the trade and business relations that India is maintaining with a monster like China, which is killing India’s trade and business and occupying large tracts of Indian land at the same time. Low grade and cheap Chinese products are flooding the market and our small and medium industrial sectors have been put on the death bed as a result. Indian industrial productivity has largely come down in recent years majorly due to the Chinese interference. There is hardly anything that India exports to China in a bilateral trade scenario, wherein the only item of export from here is iron ore –a precious national wealth. The productive sector is hard-hit. Little wonder that Manmohan’s government is incapacitated and unable to react to this blatant threat. Even with a clear advantage on the trade front, China is still cocking a snook at this country in many more ways. It is ringing India by crafting what is perceived as unholy alliances with the nations in our neighbourhood. It is bent on pressing its unjustified maritime claims in the South China Sea and it is edging out India in bilateral and industrial deals in Central Asia as well. Its provocation is evident even in the visa processing wherein it is using the stapled visa system for Indians from certain

areas of the country, to mischievously press the point that these areas are not integral parts of India. This is happening not just with Jammu and Kashmir, but with Arunachal Pradesh too. The mystery is how Singh fails to gauge the mood of this nation and makes it a point to fly down to Beijing and have a fresh round of

discussions.

Singh was thought to have integrity to his character. Even that is in serious doubt now. His recent claim that he is now willing to work under Rahul Gandhi is a case in point. Sikhs are a warrior race but Singh has little of that strength in him, it seems. Because of this, jokes are doing the rounds that Singh isn’t a Sikh but a sick person. It may be mentioned here that any Head of State, such as our Prime Minister, needs an invitation to visit another country. Manmohan, by his repeated foreign visits, is burning up India’s goodwill which will certainly be a dampener for the head of the post-2014 government to effectively carry out a new aggressive foreign policy. In the country’s interest Manmohan must immediately stop all his visits abroad and refrain from damaging the future of India. They say, ‘Wahe Guru da Khalsa’, now we pray that Wahe Guru will put some sense in the head of this turbaned man.