In launching what is clearly a not-so-gentle attack — the Left appears to be the primary target — against “communalising India’s foreign policy”, Sonia Gandhi has chosen to end the Congress’s loud silences. This has been long overdue. For far too long the reluctance of the Congress to defend the diplomatic achievements of the Manmohan Singh government gave a free run to the Communist allies in defining the national discourse on external relations and put the prime minister in an unenviable position. Even as Manmohan Singh sought to end India’s long-standing nuclear isolation and repositioned India’s relations with the United States in national interest, the Communist allies accused the government of discarding India’s independent foreign policy.

Given the dismal foreign policy record of the Indian Communists, who consistently misread all great international issues since the 1940s, they had little credibility with those familiar with the history of Indian foreign policy. The political chutzpah of the CPM and CPI, which had never resisted the temptation to subordinate India’s national interests in the name of ‘communist internationalism’, to preach the virtues of an independent foreign policy to the Congress, which ran the country for five of the last six decades, only underlined the contempt of the Left for the grand old party. By finally putting across a strong political defence of the Indo-US nuclear deal as well as the larger relationship with America, Sonia Gandhi has revealed the party now has the self-confidence to challenge the noisy Left on foreign policy.

The decision by the communist parties to tap into the Muslim resentment against the Bush Administration and pit it against the potential national gains from a new relationship with the United States is probably one of the most dangerous manoeuvres in India’s recent political history. That this move was aimed at undercutting the Congress’s attempts to woo the Muslim minority made it that much more difficult for the government to pursue what was right for the nation as a whole. Reaffirming the conviction that the minorities are no less patriotic than the majority, Sonia Gandhi insisted that religion cannot and should not be a “matrix for national interest in a country as linguistically and religiously pluralist as India”. We could not agree more.