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April      Last updated: April 29,  5:00 p.m.

Growing support for India’s candidature

From Our Correspondent

Belying the cynics who had claimed that India’s nuclear experiments (Pokaran-II) have isolated the country and have spoilt its chances of becoming a Parmanent Member of the UN Security Council, India is getting wholehearted support from countries that count.

France has made full use of the chance of President K.R. Narayanan’s visit to that country when French President, Shri Jacques Chirac categorically announced that he is a "natural candidate", so has the UK followed suit through Shri Robin Cook, Britain’s visiting foreign secretary. Earlier, the US ambassador in India, Shri Richard Celeste, had said his country is prepared to give "serious consideration" to India’s membership. All this is so different from what the situation was in mid-1998.

If France’s latest stance is its wont to show that its foreign policy is uninfluenced by what the Americans may say or do, the same is not true of the UK which tends to hear whispers from across the Atlantic.

How can this metamorphis be explained? Though no definite interpretations are possible, some indicators do exist. First, even if the West was unhappy about Pokaran II, it appears to have decided to bury the hatchet and treat the matter as a closed chapter. What cannot be undone could best be forgotten. Second, the West has become more aware than earlier, especially after Kargil, about India’s maturity and growing status as a major country in the Asian continent. Related to this visualisation is India’s high poential as an economic power as a balancing factor to China, in military and economic terms.

The West seems to have been impressed by India’s democratic achievements. Indian democracy is not a recent happenstance, but what may have drawn renewed interest to it is the orderly fashion in which three elections were held in three years between 1996 and 1999 as the country sought stable governance. The flamboyant and yet smooth exercise in popular choice is in remarkable contrast to China’s continued totalitarianism and Pakistan’s fall into military rule.

At a time when West Asia and Pakistan retain their feudal and authoritarian structures, Sri Lanka is messed up in an endless civil war, Myanmar is secluded away from the world and the ASEAN countries are virtual one-party states, the pulsating democracy in India stand out in splendour. India’s sustained campaign for democratisation and reform of the UN and its powerful policy-making body, the 15-member Security Council, has started yielding results as New Delhi had hoped for. This is clear in the growing support for a permanent seat for India on an expanded Council.