A new foreign minister

Khurshid is grounded in the liberal school of Nehruvian politics, egalitarianism is the touchstone of public life.

India’s Muslim foreign minister? It was only a matter of hours before foreign news outlets began to describe Salman Khurshid, who was named to the job recently, in this manner. Even The Express Tribune could not help remarking that Khurshid was India’s first “Muslim” foreign minister in 16 years.

I suppose the temptation to identify someone — especially someone who occupies a top political position — by his religious identity, is too high. After all, some years ago, hordes of foreigners used to marvel at the fact that India had a Sikh prime minister, a Roman Catholic head of the country’s largest party and a Muslim president — at the time, APJ Abdul Kalam. Oh, what a panoply of identities, they said!

But just look at the facts. Sonia Gandhi became the Congress party chief only because she married into the Nehru-Gandhi family and more or less inherited the job, although it is another matter that she has grown into it with considerable elan. Her religion was irrelevant. Similarly, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has never won an election in his life and was named to the position by Sonia in 2004, primarily because he was nobody’s man and could rise above party factionalism, and also because he was a man of integrity. The fact that Singh wears a turban did not influence her decision.

Admittedly, both Kalam and Pratibha Patil were chosen to become president for other reasons than plain politics — Patil, because she was a woman and the Congress party would be seen to be gender-friendly, and Kalam because it would look good on India’s CV if the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party government had a ‘Muslim missile scientist’ at the top.

The story goes that Mulayam Singh Yadav, an old-world politician from the north Indian cow belt who only speaks Hindi — also known by his sobriquet ‘Maulana Mulayam’ because of his staunch defence of the Muslim argument — once called Kalam to his office, when the latter was scientific adviser and he was the defence minister and began to talk to him in Hindi. Kalam was suitably mystified and had to tell his boss that while he was a Muslim, he was really the son of a poor fisherman and boat-owner from Rameshwaram in Tamil Nadu and he spoke no Hindi at all, just Tamil and English. Mulayam is said to have beaten a hasty retreat!

As for Khurshid, who comes from an old Congress family, the fact is that he is firmly grounded in the liberal school of Nehruvian politics, where egalitarianism is the touchstone of public life. He will restore to the Foreign Office a political sense that India wants to reach out, especially with its neighbourhood. In recent months, Khurshid has often said that he wants all South Asian countries to be a lot more integrated, that travelling to each other’s countries should not be as problematic as it is today, that the subcontinent must restore to itself the right to be far more cohesive, and that political differences cannot be allowed to come in the way of enhanced civilian discourse.

Is this a pipe dream? Will the Indian bureaucracy allow the loosening of frontiers to take place? Can India’s neighbouring states reassure it that they will not allow any India-directed terrorism from their soil thereby, taking away the Indian bureaucracy’s single largest excuse for disallowing greater contact?

The stain of Khurshid’s alleged corruption — as claimed by an Indian TV channel recently, whom Khurshid is promising to sue for crores of rupees for tarnishing his reputation — aside, he offers an alternative discourse that is courteous and puts people at the centre of the argument.

The Congress party has 18 months before elections are held in mid-2014. The latest cabinet reshuffle is an exercise in seeking to convince India that the party is still wedded to the idea of justice and public service. From now on, only the most creative ideas and their implementation will matter. Otherwise, as the Congress party well knows, it will fall by the wayside. And Khurshid, Prime Minister Singh and Sonia Gandhi with it, irrespective of what their religious affinities are.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 10^th, 2012.