In the end, timidity won over bold innovative thinking. After weeks of agonising procrastination, the Vajpayee government threw in the towel, preferring status quoist safety rather than showing the courage of a path-breaking initiative to break free from the residual remnants of Cold War shibboleths.
The decision not to send Indian troops to Iraq to help that nation find its feet again is a great blow to good sense and pragmatism in the conduct of our foreign policy. The prime minister lacked the guts to give a new thrust to India's foreign policy.
Shrinking away from controversy having become a crucial factor in the policy-making process, he earlier allowed the Cold War warriors of the Congress Party led by K Natwar Singh to hijack Parliament into passing a resolution against the US-led armed action in Iraq. This when it had become plain to the dimmest wit that Saddam Hussein's cardboard regime was about to crumble into dust.
Now the same Singh was not only fashioning Congress foreign policy, led by the clueless Sonia Gandhi, but what was worse, thanks to the high decibel level noises he was prone to make, he was also dictating Vajpayee's foreign policy.
To send or not to send troops to Iraq was undoubtedly a tough decision. It was one of those decisions which would have made or unmade leaders. To put it bluntly, how the Vajpayee government clinched the issue would have marked the men out from mere boys.
Unfortunately, the meek surrender to the forces of conformity, to the play-safe lobby, has once again proved that Vajpayee can be relied upon to tread the beaten path, that he too continues to live mentally in the Nehruvian era of instinctive distrust of the West in general and the US in particular.
But it was wrong to see the dispatch of troops to Iraq merely through the prism of the US presence in that beleaguered country. The decision could have been sold to Indians, and to much of the Muslim world, as this country's way of helping Iraq in its hour of need.
Quite clearly, the Iraqis would rather have Indian troops bringing some sanity to their lawless cities and small towns rather than 'conquering' US soldiers. The government missed a great opportunity to reach out to the Iraqi people by not sending troops to do duty in that country.
The fear that our troops might be targeted by the remnants of Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist supporters was genuine but it ought not have frightened us into saying a straight no. Instead, we should have reached out to ordinary Iraqis, informing them that our troops came as friends, not as an adjunct to any occupational force.
There were other compelling reasons for sending our troops. The foremost being that the US wanted us to come and rescue it from the quagmire in which it finds itself at this stage in Iraq. Helping the world's sole superpower would have furthered our long-term interests -- strategic, geo-political and even economic. Just when we were in a position to win the gratitude of the US, we were found wanting, unable to free ourselves from the deleterious legacy of the Cold War.
Whether the dispatch of our troops resulted in Indian companies getting lucrative contracts for rebuilding Iraq was not as important nationally as the fact that the decision would have won us the goodwill of Washington and quite a few West Asian monarchies which though immensely grateful to the US for having removed Saddam did not want to be seen, at least overtly, in the company of Uncle Sam in that hapless country.
The nay-sayers put the UN on a high pedestal, arguing that without that body's blue flag they would not countenance the idea of Indian troops in Iraq. The same Natwar Singh and Co would do well to remember that led by Nehru we paid scant respect to the same UN's resolutions on Kashmir.
We have argued around the UN resolutions in order not to honour them in Kashmir. That is a plain truth. So that settles the specious nonsense about the UN not being there in Iraq. As for the reluctance to have Indian troops work under the overall control of the US commander in Iraq, it might be instructive to recall that the Indian Peace Keeping Force in Sri Lanka, sent when Singh was a member of the Rajiv Gandhi government, was directly under the control of Sri Lankan authorities.
Moreover, no UN resolution was in place when India dispatched its troops to what was then East Pakistan and helped create a new nation. Again, much is being made out of the likely adverse impact on the domestic public opinion in case we had decided to respond positively to the US request.
Here again the thinking is mostly flawed, for by and large the articulate middle-class could not be bothered one way or the other if we said yes to the Americans. As for Indian Muslims, well the truth is that whether or not the BJP-led coalition sent troops, they are unlikely to support it in the coming elections.
In that case, why compromise your national interest if the constituency you seek to pander is bound to stay hostile to you? The short point is that cowardice as a major ingredient in foreign policy formation can jeopardise short and long-term national interests. We may have just done that by meekly surrendering to the professional critics of the US and saying no to our troops to Iraq.
Virendra Kapoor is a former editor of The Free Press Journal, Mumbai