While history is being made-unmade, if you believe contrarian faddists-in the Middle East, sections of the Indian political class have stuck resolutely to the worm's eye-view of tectonic shifts. It is easy to dismiss the communist fringe and its fellow travellers-from former novelists to former film directors-going overboard in demonising the US and attributing wondrous qualities to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Less understandable is why the ruling NDA itself has become a Tower of Babel. This past week, the Samata Party, among the NDA's largest constituents, criticised its own Government's "pro-American" stand. Shambhu Srivastava, the party's general secretary, asked the Government to "organise humanitarian relief" for Iraq, adding for good measure that "India cannot give the US the right to spread chaos". While less extreme in his demands, Defence Minister George Fernandes too spoke out against "American unilateralism" and said he considered talk of contracts for rebuilding Iraq "sickening". As a fellow internationalist socialist of the 1970s vintage, Fernandes no doubt finds Saddam a kindred spirit. It may not have struck him that much of Iraqi rebuilding has been necessitated by Baa'thist, rather than American, destruction. The larger point is: does contemporary India share the affinity of Fernandes and the Samata for pink-tinted glasses? Should foreign policy perennially be held hostage to domestic compulsions and dinosaur ideologies?

If the Samata, indeed any NDA affiliate, has misgivings about India's approach to the Iraq war, it has every right to argue its case before the prime minister or foreign minister. To reduce a far-reaching imperative-one way or the other, Gulf War II will reshape the world-to a shouting match serves nobody's purpose. It only betrays an overstated idea of how much India counts. India cannot stop the conflict, cannot influence its outcome. What it can do is make a realistic appraisal of where its interests lie and how they can be safeguarded. Not that there should be any debate about this, but then Indian diplomacy is not quite the embodiment of enlightened self-interest. India must also prepare for a variety of contingencies, given that war at the best of times does not keep to pre-determined schedules. What is not on is cussed grandstanding. America's intervention in the Middle East is not a Bihari caste war, only larger.