NEW DELHI, April 18: Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh expressed the fear on Tuesday that unresolved border disputes like the ones India has with most of its neighbours could invite foreign intervention and asked his diplomats to pay more attention to negotiated settlements.

“A few large nations in the world live in situations of such complexity as we do,” Dr Singh said at a function to release former foreign secretary Jagat Mehta’s new book.

Dr Singh said he was impressed by the book ‘Negotiating for India: Resolving Problems Through Diplomacy’ whose author was foreign secretary when then foreign minister Atal Behari Vajpayee made his ground-breaking visit to Pakistan in 1978.

“I share Jagat’s faith in the resolution of problems through negotiation and diplomacy. We often have to take recourse to negotiation and diplomacy in most situations of conflict or dispute,” Dr Singh said.

He recalled that former British prime minister Winston Churchill believed that “jaw, jaw is better than war, war”.

“Our own experience has shown that it is possible to resolve some of the most intractable problems through negotiations. This is amply illustrated in Jagat’s book,” Dr Singh said.

The prime minister said he would explore the possibility of making declassified files available to scholars to beef up the fund of knowledge on diplomacy.

“I am aware that serious scholarship in India on government policy is hampered by a lack of access to official documents…I do hope that we do not have to depend only on memory and personal notes for a record of policy making. I think the time has come for us to have at least a 50-year rule, if not a 30-year rule, that allows scholars and researchers free access to declassified official papers.”

This will make it possible for Indian policy-makers to draw appropriate lessons from the past and make effective decisions for the future.

“The history of the modern world tells us that no real human problems are ever resolved or settled by war. History also tells us that there are no serious problems facing humanity that can not be resolved through dialogue,” Dr Singh added.

“The essence of diplomacy was always plurality of sovereignties and compromise in conflict resolution,” Mr Mehta says in the book. “India’s civilisational personality, with its old salad bowl of faiths and tradition of tolerance, and its more recent pioneering role in decolonisation should have given the country a natural advantage in diplomacy in the contemporary world.

“Gandhiji’s aversion to violence and placing premium on peaceful dialogue approximated to the method of negotiated persuasion. … But, if we are honest, we would recognize that in six decades of independence, India has not optimized its international standing. We showed poor comprehension and inconsistent adherence to the diplomatic method.”

According to Dr Singh there is “there is food for thought in these words.” A large part of the book is devoted to diplomacy in India’s neighbourhood. “Our links with our neighbours are civilisational, cultural, economic and social. Yet, the obvious imbalance of size poses considerable challenges to diplomacy. Jagat has discussed some of these in great detail, and has suggested sensitive and thoughtful ways of dealing with these complex issues.”

Dr Singh said there are no answers that lie beyond human ingenuity and diplomacy.