NEW DELHI: Manmohan Singh believed India’s development priorities should shape its foreign policy and, in his own words, create a global environment conducive for India’s growth. It was with this in mind that he met President Bush in 2005 on the margins of the UNGA and asked him if the US could help India access clean energy in the face of many embargoes it had been facing since the 1998 nuclear tests. The rest, as they say, is history.
India and the US went on to finalise the civil nuclear deal 3 years later, paving the way for a waiver from the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) for India to carry out nuclear commerce without signing the NPT but, more importantly, for a seat at the global high table of diplomacy.
How he overcame stiff opposition from the Left parties and others, even risking his coalition government, is well documented. A man of conviction, Singh believed the deal with the US was in India’s interest and it helped that Sonia Gandhi probably felt the same and backed him. Singh knew not just how hard Bush had worked for the deal but also how keen he was on having strong ties with India. This was India’s chance, and he would not allow it to go abegging.
The spirit behind this landmark agreement, which brought India and the US together after years of mistrust, continues to act as a guiding framework for the bilateral relationship, even as it moves on to another potentially transformational stage with the recently launched Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology (iCET).
Apart from India’s development priorities, there were many other factors – or more specifically 5 principles – that coalesced into forming Singh’s foreign policy agenda. These included his firm belief in stable, long-term and mutually beneficial ties, greater integration into the world economy and a “shared destiny” of the Indian subcontinent that necessitated greater regional cooperation and connectivity. Lastly, according to Singh, foreign policy should not just be about interests, but also values dear to Indian people. “India’s experiment of pursuing economic development within the framework of a plural, secular and liberal democracy has inspired people around the world and should continue to do so,’’ said the former PM, addressing Indian ambassadors and high commissioners in 2013.
While the nuclear deal with the US stood out for the message it conveyed to the world about India’s arrival on the global stage, there were other significant foreign policy issues that Singh pursued with elan. Singh’s handling of China, his efforts to solidify relations with ASEAN in the form of the 2012 strategic partnership and efforts to ramp up India’s global trade and integration into the world economy to reduce poverty are also among the highlights of Singh’s external focus.
While PM Narendra Modi has been credited with transforming ties with the Gulf, it was Singh who launched India’s Look West Policy to boost ties with the region. In fact, many of the policies India has been pursuing currently, whether those related to ASEAN or even Quad, remain rooted in initiatives undertaken under Singh. According to former Australian PM Kevin Ruud, it was the joint response to the 2004 Tsunami by the US, Australia, Japan and Indian under Singh that was at the heart of former Japanese PM Shinzo Abe’s efforts to launch Quad.
He remains the only PM in recent decades to have come anywhere close to resolving the Kashmir issue. As a Wikileaks cable revealed in 2011, Singh confirmed to a visiting US delegation 2 years earlier that he and then Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf had agreed through back-channel talks to a “non-territorial solution” to the dispute.
As Musharraf had said earlier, this was a 4-point peace plan that included free trade and movement across LoC, demilitarisation, maximum autonomy and joint management of the area. Singh himself did not elaborate about the contents of the so-called peace formula but told the US delegation that India and Pakistan had made great progress on the issue till early 2007, or when Musharraf started to run into trouble domestically. The Pakistan government that followed dismissed the peace plan as a personal initiative of the former president.
A “non-territorial” solution would have been a difficult sell as Singh learnt right at the beginning of his second term when his party virtually left him to face opposition’s attacks for agreeing to include a reference to” threats in Baluchistan ” in the joint statement issued from Egyptian resort town Sharm-el-Sheikh However, there was no mistaking his intent for a rapprochement.
While Singh was often accused by the opposition of being soft on Pakistan, the former PM never travelled to the country during his 10 years in office, even if he might have been tempted to visit his native place in Pakistan Punjab.
Singh acknowledged growing Chinese assertiveness, saying he himself was at a loss to understand this behaviour, but maintained engagement with Beijing was the right strategy to follow for both India and the US. Contrary to what some may believe now, he was not naïve in dealing with China. This is evident from his back-to-back visits to Arunachal Pradesh in 2008 and 2009 despite an angry response from Beijing. He used the visit in 2008 to announce a major package to address critical infrastructure and connectivity needs of the state that included projects for highways, an airport and helicopter services.
Singh also had his own way of dealing with Chinese border transgressions, most of which during his time were resolved successfully. Like in one instance in 2013, in the middle of a standoff in eastern Ladakh, Singh chose to extend at the eleventh hour his bilateral visit to Japan by a day even without fixing up engagements for that extra day. The purport of the decision would not have been lost on Beijing at a time of escalating tensions with Japan over the Senkaku/ Diaoyu islands.