We are not being invited to keep the peace. We are being invited to consolidate an occupation. There are ample forces available to the invading forces to stabilise what they have destabilised. But they want us in for two reasons. First, they wish to minimise their losses. Should our soldiers die in their cause? Second, they want to co-opt us ex-post facto in the outrage they have committed. Should we jettison the national consensus expressed in Parliament’s unanimous resolution? Moreover, should we do so at the behest of not our national volition but those whom but a few weeks ago we “ninda-ed” — the Hindi compromise for what we either deplored or condemned but certainly did not approve or endorse? If unanimous resolutions of Parliament can be set aside so casually, what of another unanimous Parliament resolution, the one which talks of the vacation of territory acquired by aggression in Jammu and Kashmir?

We opposed the war in Korea. When that war reached military stalemate, the belligerents found they could not sustain their armistice without resolving the repatriation of prisoners of war. India then chaired the commission which supervised the repatriation. Our troops went abroad in the blue berets of the UN to facilitate the armistice. Our action has helped sustain that armistice for half a century. There was consistency between the role of our armed forces and our larger political goals.

We were not even invited to the Geneva conference on Indo-China in 1954. V.K. Krishna Menon went anyway. He emerged on the margins of the official meetings as the chief intermediary between the belligerents. So signal was his contribution to the decolonisation of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia that India was the most trusted to chair the commission set up to supervise and control the implementation of the accords. Indian troops assisted the commission in its work. It was not a UN exercise but so long as the commission served a purpose, it served our purpose.

We opposed the 1956 UK-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt. When the US — for once on the side of the gods — forced a disengagement, our troops went to Gaza to keep the peace. It is in the self-same Gaza strip that the beginnings of the Palestine state were eventually — 36 years on — established. Our troops served the larger political goals we were pursuing.

We sent our troops to the former Belgian Congo to keep the Belgians “former”. My first diplomatic assignment began in Brussels the week Belgian TV showed Gurkha soldiers in UN blue berets mowing down — albeit by mistake — frightened whites escaping the brutal internecine bloodbath in Katanga. It was not a particularly brilliant moment for “peacekeeping”. It was, however, an illuminating precedent for what we are being invited to undertake in Iraq.

For the Kurdish region, where we are being cajoled and threatened to station our troops, is the most bitterly contested region of Iraq. It is there that Iraq will disintegrate or survive. The contest is not only between the indigenous Kurds and the non-Kurdish rulers of Iraq (be they yesterday’s Sunnis or tomorrow’s Shias), it is an insurgency which spills across borders into Turkey, Syria and Iran, with none of whom have we any quarrel, as we have no quarrel with Kurd, Sunni or Shia. Can our soldiers “stabilise” this incandescent region while keeping their powder dry? Will our jawans be armed with guns or lathis? Should we get our troops caught up in someone else’s war, someone else’s insurgency? For make no mistake about it: our troops are not being invited to holiday in northern Iraq. There is a larger goal. It is emphatically not our goal. It is the goal of those who invaded Iraq and are now occupying it.

That occupation is a reality. We are being invited to endorse that reality, consolidate that reality. We could — if there were no other reality. But there is — the reality of a resistance which is taking a toll of an average of one American life a day. That resistance might be the terminal death rattle of regime change. Or it might just be the beginning of a long and painful attempt to win back the Iraqi nation for the Iraqi people. The “stabilisation” of Iraq is aimed at throttling the Resistance — whether it is a last gasp or a new beginning. Our jawans are being invited to apply their fingers to the gullet.

There are two kinds of lobbies at work urging us to “get real”. The first is of those dripping at the mouth at the prospect of “lucrative contracts”. The contracts are being doled out by the occupying forces as blood money calibrated to the contribution made to the consolidation of their occupation. Should the Indian army be reduced to a mercenary force collecting and enforcing such supari contracts?

The second lobby is the more serious. It is the comprador political class, the true inheritors of the realist school of the Rai Bahadurs and Khan Bahadurs who kept the Union Jack flying. The Brits were much more the Indian reality then than the US is in Iraq today. “Realism” and “national interest” determined then — as we are being urged to now do — that if you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. The rewards were immense. Not only did the princes who entered into subsidiary alliances with William Bentinck and his successors ensure they were on the winning side through the entire era of imperial rule, the wealth they garnered and the influence they secured fostered their advancement even after regime change brought India to Independence. It is the descendants of the Rani of Jhansi who are not in Parliament.

What the Americans are inviting us to do is follow the example of the princelings who, like Atal Bihari Vajpayee at St Petersburg, were invited to the royal box at the Ascot races to bow before their imperial majesties in return for the baubles they wore with such pride on their puffed out chests. Non-alignment was Independence. Subsidiary alliances are stabilisation. We are asked to choose between the Delhi Durbar and homespun khadi.