Eye on the big picture

On December 31, 2011, India completes half its two-year term on the United Nations Security Council. India has served on the council before but the current term is particularly crucial as it is seen as a test for its proposed permanent-member candidacy.
Negotiations related to UN reform are at a key stage. There is a possibility that a new tier of permanent members will be created in an expanded Security Council.India, Brazil, Japan, Germany and an African country - there is more than one contender from that continent - could make it to the Security Council without the veto that the existing five full-time members have. This will give India what some diplomats call a "business-class rather than first-class seat".
Nothing is written in stone, but by the time India ends its current term - in December 2012 - it will have a good idea of the likelihood and timetable of its possible ascension. Much will depend on how India's performance in the 2011-12 biennium is assessed. Can and has India put its stamp on the big issues of the world?
In the past 12 months, the Arab spring was the number one phenomenon gripping the international system. The series of revolts (or revolutions) in North Africa and West Asia began when the long-standing Tunisian president fled his country in January. Soon his counterparts in Egypt and Libya were overthrown. In Libya, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was killed following a civil war in which western countries provided military support to the rebels.
The Arab spring fever then spread to West Asia, including Yemen and Bahrain. The current theatre is Syria, where the Assad family, in power for 40 years now, faces its strongest challenge.
Debates and discussions relating to the Arab spring, to events in Cairo, to European interventions affecting Tripoli and to the unrest in Damascus, have engrossed the Security Council. India's reaction has been disappointing. The long and the short of it is that it has said nothing. This is not really the fault of just individual representatives; there is a larger, systemic problem in New Delhi. Those who shape Indian foreign policy are extraordinarily risk-averse, status quoist and conservative to the point of being unrealistic.
It is nobody's case that India should have joined British and French military operations in Libya. New Delhi's primary concern was getting its citizens out of the conflict-hit country, and safeguarding its diaspora in the Gulf states, as well as its oil imports, against any potential impact. At some stage, however, this legitimate narrow-focus aspiration led to it missing the big picture. There is a very small gap between a careful, cautious and calibrated approach, and simply ending up on the wrong side of history on the human rights question.
The recent joint statement following talks in Moscow between the Russian president and the Indian prime minister is a case in point. "In the context of the situation in the Middle East and North Africa", the statement spoke of "searching the way to overcome crises in the region in compliance with law, exclusively through peaceful means, avoiding violence and outside intervention, through broad, inclusive national dialogue on democratic reforms, taking into account the legitimate rights and aspirations of the peoples of the region".
It also said the "fundamental transformation taking place" in the region "should not be used as a pretext to delay resolution of lasting conflicts", and devoted a long paragraph to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
This statement is typical of India's ostrich-headed outlook. It begins with an anodyne call for peace that simply does not acknowledge an autocrat in Syria is killing his own people.
Even-handedness in such a situation is a false construct. Second, the rights of Palestinians are important and need to be addressed, but the "fundamental transformation" in the Middle East in 2011 had nothing to do with the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It comprised autonomous uprisings in specific domestic settings.
India persists in being in denial. Its strategic elites are convinced the Arab spring will result in an "Islamist winter" and fundamentalist regimes will take over everywhere. Egypt, where two religion-based parties did well in recent elections, is held up as justification for this alarmism. Yet, the fact is the Arab spring successor administrations are a reality and one has to deal with them; pretending otherwise or hoping for a reversal of events will not help.
Second, there is a difference between a Taliban-style regime that is a sanctuary and exporter of terrorism and religious parties, even fundamentalist parties, that have gained state power. Economic concerns at home, the presence of other groups and entities - which have also recently escaped from the clutches of a deposed strongman - and new spaces for external-world influences should present the Arab spring as an opportunity, not as a threat.
It is nobody's case that India must mimic the West's position. Even so, as a society with much goodwill in the Middle East, where it is respected for its democracy and soft power and seen as an exemplar of a non-western modernity, India needs to be a presence in the region's new discourse. Right now, it is an absence; and a country seeking permanent tenancy at the Security Council cannot afford such an absence.
—Ashok Malik
The writer is a political commentator.