Finally, A Principled Stand

IN MARCH, at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, while the US-sponsored resolution condemning Sri Lanka for human rights violations during the civil war between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the Sinhala-majority government was being debated, the Indian delegation found itself stymied.

In line with its usual practice of opposing, or abstaining from, censorious resolutions, India had decided not to participate in the debate, and then, presumably, to not sign the resolution. But after a senior member of the Sri Lankan delegation imprudently shared with the press India’s yet undisclosed position, his action set off intense political wrangling between the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government and its coalition partner, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, which has long been sympathetic to the cause of Sri Lankan Tamils. The compulsions of coalition politics, especially now when the UPA is at its weakest ever, resulted in a reversal of India’s stance at Geneva: it eventually voted in favour of the resolution on 22 March.

For a country that takes immense pride in its commitment to democracy and respect for human rights, this was a welcome change. India finally took a step manifesting the values that the country holds so dear.

India has in the past abstained from or voted against similar resolutions tabled against Zimbabwe, China, Belarus, Sudan, Iran, North Korea and Libya—all countries with a record of political suppression and human rights violations. As recently as last October, India had refused to vote for a draft resolution condemning the “grave and systematic human rights violations” by the Syrian army against ordinary Syrians. Only this February, after more than 5,000 people had died in the rebellion and the Arab League itself had begun condemning the Syria government’s heavy-handedness did India support a critical resolution.

India’s policymakers have long justified our policy of non-interference—and our consequent respect for the sovereignty of other nations—on grounds of our ‘scarred’ colonial history, even if our rationalisation has entailed silently condoning human rights violations. We have also argued that since the West wields the stick of human rights resolutions to selectively target its adversaries while protecting its allies, it befits our tradition of ‘non-alignment’ to not be a part of this manipulative game.

However, when one considers that India might have some skeletons of its own to hide—such as the human rights violations committed in Kashmir and in the battle against the ongoing Maoist rebellion—using the exalted stance of ‘non-alignment’ to justify our muted foreign policy seems disingenuous—especially because India has strategic investment in some countries we have protected, most notably Iran, where we have significant energy interests.

To be fair, ours is not the only country that portrays its foreign policy as emanating from a value-based ideology rather than Machiavellian self-interest. In fact, going by the ‘realist’ school of international relations, whose most ardent contemporary advocate is the University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer, countries mostly behave in a way that serves their own interests rather than of a principled ideology. The realist school, from Hans Morgenthau in the 1940s, then with Samuel Huntington from the 1960s-90s, and now with Mearsheimer at its vanguard, argues that the inherent anarchy of, and prevailing environment of fear in the international system leads states to set their foreign policy using the calculus of power gain and increasing their lebensraum in the international arena.

Naturally, the realists have invited the wrath of many policymakers and international organisations, because no government likes to be told that its policymaking is rooted in the rather lowly motive of serving its self-interest. Despite that, Mearsheimer and his intellectual fraternity have often successfully explained the behaviour of states. To an extent, realism explains India’s recent turnabout at the UNHRC, and its domestic fallout. The same power dynamics that operate between states of varying strengths can be replicated in the political environs inside a country; and this, in turn, can have an important bearing on external policy formulation.

Any government stands or falls on the politico-economic exigencies of a multitude of partners—business lobbies, civil rights groups, coalition partners—each of them trying to work policymaking to serve their own vested interests. The dynamics of balance of power are much the same at the internecine and the international levels.

The UPA government has been in crisis for a year and a half. For it, managing support from a coalition partner—its biggest one, at that—is as crucial as protecting the country’s international strategic interests.

Even if one were to play along with India’s narrative of noble non-engagement, one would still arrive at the realists’ analysis of a state’s behaviour. No sooner did India’s ‘principled’ ideological stance come in conflict with the compulsions of internal power-balancing than the government discarded it and articulated a new moral stand—that of its newfound commitment to international activism in the service of human rights, even at the expense of condemning the very neighbour that India had been praising for the past three years for bringing to an end the bloodiest conflict in the region’s modern history.

The irony is that while ‘realist’ concerns usually turn a state away from taking up rightful causes, in India’s case they flicked us in a direction that we should have taken long ago to pursue those long-held values that this nation so deeply subscribes to.

Anant Nath