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.

The opposition fears were proven correct when a day later the Pakistani media quoted official sources as saying that Gilani had given Manmohan a dossier on the Indian role in fomenting trouble in Balochistan, a charge denied by the Indian government.

Manmohan defended the reference to Balochistan, arguing that since India had no role to play in the troubles of Pakistan in its largest province, it was not afraid of mentioning it in the joint statement.

However, the Opposition was not convinced by the official explanation. Indeed, it quoted media reports from Islamabad which said that the Pakistan government was to furnish a detailed dossier listing the role of Indian undercover agents in fomenting trouble in Balochistan.

Aside from Balochistan, the opposition blamed Manmohan for wilting under US pressure on the eve of the five-day visit of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to New Delhi earlier last week.

Manmohan had asserted all along that India would not resume the composite dialogue with Pakistan unless the latter took concrete steps against terrorists and dismantled terrorist-training camps on its soil.

In Sharm-el-Sheikh not only did India de-link terror from the resumption of a composite dialogue but, what was more, it undertook to discuss all outstanding issues between the two countries.

Critics said all obviously meant that Pakistan would rake up the status of Kashmir in the resumed talks.

After a debate in both Houses of Parliament on the joint statement, which saw a rare show of unity on the opposition benches, an embarrassed government reluctantly acknowledged its mistake, though it chose to blame "drafting mistakes" rather than its own weak-kneed approach for the faux pas.

Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon, in an unusual decision, was fielded by the government to offer the explanation in an interaction with the MPs while parliament was still in session.

But more trouble was in store for the beleaguered Prime Minister and Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna.

Clinton, in her first visit as Secretary of State, received saturation media coverage.

But, substantively, the five-day visit was notable for the End-User Monitoring Agreement between the two countries.

Under it, the United States can inspect on-site all dual use equipment sourced from it by the Indian armed forces.

So far, the end-use monitoring was item-to-item; now it would be systematised and blanket.

The agreement saw the Opposition cutting across party lines to pillory the government for what it called the "surrender of India’s sovereignty."

Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, Arun Jaitley, accused the Government of "out-sourcing" its foreign policy to the United States.

Even strategic affairs experts were critical of the agreement, arguing that it gave the Americans undue leverage.

The government is now banking on the controversy dying down with the passage of time.

Nonetheless, the ruckus in parliament ought to have come as a big jolt to it.

Even parties supporting the government from outside, such as Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party and Laloo Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal, were most vocal in their criticism.

Further, the Communists and the BJP, the opposite ideological poles, spoke in one voice to criticise the foreign policy bungles.