External affairs minister Salman Khurshid was categorical: “India”, he said, “was not an open house for asylum-seekers since we have a very careful and objective asylum policy...”. The minister was responding to queries on whether Edward Snowden, America’s NSA whistleblower who leaked top-secret data that showed the US had been snooping on friends and foes alike — and trying to brazen it out by justifying it as necessary for national security — had sought asylum in India.
New Delhi didn’t say no to Taslima Nasreen, the controversial Bangladeshi author, when she first sought refuge in Kolkata. Governments through the years have permitted Sri Lankan Tamil dissenters to take refuge in India. Equally, no debate on asylum can ignore our handy China card, even if we refuse to play it: the Dalai Lama. Delhi hasn’t backed down an inch in the face of Beijing’s continuing ire at our playing host not just to the Tibetans’ supreme spiritual leader but also hundreds and thousands of his followers who flee Chinese repression in Tibet by secretly crossing borders.
But far worse than the Snowden asylum affair, when the nation’s foreign minister says he has no problem with his government and embassies being spied on — “computer study and computer analyses”, as Mr Khurshid described it — can mean one of many things, none good for a nation, particularly one with pretensions to superpowerdom. In fact, our cavalier dismissal of Mr Snowden’s plea for a safe haven and our helpless acceptance of US spying is of a piece with the needlessly weak-kneed response, close to grovelling, bordering on servility, that Mr Khurshid has displayed thus far in his baffling bid to paper over Washington’s blatant dirty tricks. In Mr Khurshid’s words, “it’s not actually snooping!”
Even a much closer set of American allies, the major European countries, have been searing in their condemnation of Washington’s alarming breach of trust that violates the Vienna Convention, which is considered the cornerstone of international diplomacy.
Perhaps realising the folly, even if a little late in the day, the government now says American snooping is “disconcerting” and wants an explanation. Really? Is that all this is — “disconcerting”? Is this government, which clearly aspires to be a close ally of the United States, the main axle in its so-called pivot to Asia, signalling that it will take almost any insult and injury lying down so as not to jeopardise its relations with Washington? Even if that were the case, and indeed the US ushers us into its inner circle of allies, what kind of a relationship will it be? Or is there some other explanation for all this?