It is rare for a foreign policy issue to divide the polity. Politicians, anyway, have too many domestic concerns on their plates for them to be bothered about the arcane world of international relations.

 The few who do follow closely the conduct of foreign affairs generally tend to be accommodative of the official viewpoint.

 As for ordinary people, well, being engrossed in everyday bread-and-butter struggles, they neither have the inclination nor the intellectual wherewithal to appreciate the subtle and nuanced world of diplomacy.

 So, the Nehruvian consensus on foreign policy – named for the first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru – was, thus, a given in the national polity.

 However, that consensus was in jeopardy this past fortnight as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government undertook questionable diplomatic initiatives.

 These have had the effect of uniting the entire opposition, from the Communists to the rightists, and pushed even the ruling Congress Party on to the defensive.

 In particular, three decisions were most controversial. 

The first pertained to the resolution adopted by the G-8 nations in L’Aquila, Italy, concerning the supply of nuclear enrichment and reprocessing technologies to this country.

 Leaders of the most developed nations undertook to link these supplies to India to it signing the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

 India believed that the controversial nuclear agreement it had signed with the United States last year, and the subsequent clearances it had received from the International Atomic Energy Association and the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers’ Group, entitled it to enrichment and reprocessing technologies.

 The G-8 resolution, adopted while a full-fledged Indian delegation led by the Prime Minister was in attendance in L’Aquila, caused embarrassment to the ruling UPA government.

 Admittedly, the official position was that the above resolution would in no way effect the implementation of the Indo-US nuclear deal.

 The exclusive news report first appeared in the usually authoritative newspaper, The Hindu. Despite official denials, the paper argued that the G-8 resolution would hurt Indian interests.

 A bigger misstep soon followed. Attending the 15th summit meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in the resort town of Sharm-el-Sheikh in Egypt, Prime Minister Manmohan met his Pakistani counterpart, Yousuf Raza Gilani.

 The joint statement issued after the meeting has become a great headache for the UPA government. For, it most gratuitously referred to Balochistan, a disturbed part of Pakistan.

 Islamabad has all along blamed India for its troubles in Balochistan, a tribal region bordering Afghanistan and Iran.

 Its mention in the Indo-Pak joint statement immediately drew angry reactions from strategic experts and opposition politicians, while Congress leaders were rendered speechless.