NEW DELHI, 17 March — It is hardly a state secret that Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee considers foreign travel one of the redeeming features of his job. It is not simply the joys of exotic locales that are the preferred destinations of VIPs; Vajpayee also enjoys the pleasures of shaping international relations.

The hangover of those 19 dizzying months a quarter of a century ago when he was foreign minister in the Morarji Desai government of 1977 has not quite gone. He learned the subtle flavors of foreign policy initiatives then. As Vajpayee reminded his distinguished visitor of the month, Hamid Karzai, he went to Kabul more often as foreign minister than anywhere else; and Kabul was not, even before the Taleban dispensation, Bali.

And so when the prime minister cancels an important foreign tour scheduled for the first week of April without attributing any reason, we must sit up and take notice. The cancellation of the tour to Australia was understandable; the violence in Godhra and the subsequent carnage in Gujarat would have forced the prime minister to return without landing if it had happened when he was in mid-air.

But there is no reason proffered whatsoever for the premeditated abortion of a visit to Cambodia and Singapore with a substantive foreign policy objective; to take India one step closer to full membership of ASEAN. The last time Vajpayee canceled a foreign trip was in the early days of his prime ministership, when he scrubbed a visit to Cairo without explanation. A short while later India changed the climate of the world by announcing that it had become a nuclear power. There cannot be anything quite as dramatic this time, but the market is open for intelligent guesses.

The options are not that numerous. Ayodhya. Kashmir. Pakistan. Nothing.

Solution seems too brazenly optimistic a word to use in the context of any of the three great problems of our time. But each of them has a far greater impact on the life of ordinary Indians than the formal transformation of our country into a nuclear power.

At some level of our subconscious we have stopped believing that there can ever be a solution to the Ayodhya confrontation. The record of fudge, prevarication, lies and deceit is not encouraging. But through the drama of last week, most of it artificial, one vital point was established.

The prime minister took a line that had often been drawn in sand and stood firmly on it. He made courts, institutions of law and justice, the non-negotiable heart of any decision pertaining to 15 March. He did this at the cost of severely upsetting the constituency that had brought his party to power.

He used an opportunity provided, paradoxically, by the religious leaders and hard-liners when they picked 15 March as their cut-off point for temple construction.

The prime minister neatly placed the courts in between the government and the demand, and then placed the full weight of authority behind the decision of the court. If P.V. Narasimha had done exactly the same thing, the events of Dec. 6, 1992 would never have taken place.

The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) official position remains that it would prefer a settlement by negotiation, but that is an euphemism for nothing since everyone knows that an out-of-court settlement is impossible as there will never be agreement between the antagonists. The temple builders are also apprehensive that a court judgment might never give them the kind of victory they fervently await, if there is any judgment at all: The wait so far has been long enough.

The courts came into the picture in this dispute from the very beginning. But if there is empty space today where the Babri Mosque once stood, it is because successive governments placed themselves above the courts, and betrayed principle under pressure.

There is much hot air being spouted about puja and a shilanyas, quite forgetting that the first shilanyas was permitted by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, Home Minister Buta Singh, adviser-in-chief on all matters of compromise, R.K. Dhawan and Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh Narayan Dutt Tewari in the middle of the general election from which the Congress has never quite recovered, the one in 1989.

Buta Singh is a learned leader of the Congress party in Parliament, headed for one of the key positions in Parliament; Dhawan is honorable member of the party’s working committee and of course Tewari is now chief minister of Uttaranchal, placed there by his leader Sonia Gandhi.

If Mahant Ramchandra Paramhans was shocked to the point of threatening suicide, whether he meant it or not, who can blame him? The whole experience of the temple movement is that governments have surrendered under pressure. The religious leaders and activists were convinced that the authorities, now consisting of their own people, might pay lip service to the “secularists” but would permit ground conditions to reach a point where it would be impossible to stop temple construction. After all, this is what Narasimha Rao did.

Rao deliberately and consciously allowed a situation to arise in which the mosque was destroyed, sleeping while that happened; then he turned around and pleaded helplessness and pretended to be as injured as the next man.

The next man, at that time, was Ghulam Nabi Azad, and the man next to him Salman Khurshid, both now ranking members of Sonia’s “secular” brigade. The shoulders of Azad and Salman were essential for Rao’s crocodile tears. He had to weep before Muslims, you see. In return a grateful Rao gave them better jobs in his next reshuffle. Careful man, Rao. He always rewarded sycophants quickly, before they could take their sycophancy elsewhere. The only prime minister who stuck to principle on this tempestuous issue was V.P. Singh. It cost him his chair. He paid the price without demur.

The least that the leaders of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the mahants were expecting was the shuffle-and-disappear treatment that they got from Narasimha Rao and his secular Cabinet colleagues like Home Minister S.B. Chavan, last seen in public sitting beside Sonia in front of Mahatma Gandhi’s portrait in defense of secularism.

What utter fraud is going on! Congress governments have been far more generous to the first vital stages of this movement than the Vajpayee government proved to be on March 15.

L.K. Advani led the movement for the destruction of the mosque as BJP leader; he stood at Ayodhya and watched, doubtless with satisfaction, when the mosque came down. And yet when he was home minister of India on March 15 he did not run to his bedroom and forget to take telephone calls, as Rao and Chavan did on Dec. 6. I am absolutely certain that Advani does not agree in his heart with the decision to stand by the court decision for March 15 but as home minister, he ordered what forces were required to move to Ayodhya and prevent the law from being violated.

A government is elected to protect the law, not go to sleep as Rao and Chavan did; or to wheedle and lie as Ghulam Nabi Azad did after the event. Is it any wonder that there was a sense of genuine bewilderment and hurt on the face of Mahant Paramhans when he was not allowed by the authorities to cross what might be called Vajpayee’s “Ram Rekha?” Some of the less polite Hindutva leaders accused the Vajpayee government of being worse than the Congress, and they were quite right too.

Will Vajpayee have the courage to keep the law above the authority of the government, or will he succumb before the backlash that must inevitably follow in his own ranks? It would require more conviction than I have to make a prediction. I can only hope he does. There has been criticism, and justified criticism, of his compromise in sending an officer on his staff as a sop to Mahant Paramhans. It was his first sign of weakness but not one that made any fundamental difference. A second sign of weakness could make that difference.

The Vajpayee formula is to make the courts proactive in this dispute. By waiting for the Supreme Court to decide what would happen on March 15, he reestablished the court’s credibility. This is critical. If the court is not believed to be impartial, then its judgment will not be respected; and if it is not respected then it will not find the support so necessary to carry the decision through, whatever it may be.

Vajpayee also began the difficult process of lifting the problem out of the grasp of those who have made the temple movement their single priority. This was particularly difficult for him since the temple movement had been handed over to the religious leaders and organizations like the VHP by the BJP itself. Advani gave life to a dormant demand in the last few years of the 1980s and watched, certainly with pleasure, as governments squirmed and shifted and wormed past their own positions in order to pick up leaves shed by the Advani storm.

After the frenzied demolition of the Babri Mosque in 1992 the BJP changed its strategy. It handed the flag of temple construction to the children it had spawned during the Advani movement, and using Vajpayee as its next mascot gradually created space between the party and its past. That space was reserved for the allies that the BJP knew it needed. The allies were slow in coming. One reason why George Fernandes is a favorite of the BJP is because he was the earliest of the big birds (sparrows flock around, chirp and are useful for sound bites, but they don’t have body weight).

But once Sonia took over the Congress, she made the decision for the parties floating in between the Congress and the BJP — they went over to Vajpayee.

The next stage of the game will be crucial. For Vajpayee there is really no turning back; if he steps away from the commitment he has shown to the law of the land, on this central and emotive issue, then his own credibility will crumble and his government will unravel. What he has done is only the beginning. It makes sense now to persuade the courts to deliver a judgment, if necessary by continuous hearing.

It is up to the government to defend that decision, whatever it is. There is no middle path. Maybe I got that wrong; maybe there is a middle path, but that middle path is slippery with the blood of innocents. Too many politicians and prime ministers have washed their hands with that blood. It is far better, Mr. Vajpayee, to leave than to live with blood on your hands.

There is of course that last option before you as you sit in India in early April: To do nothing. In truth, that option is over. Something has already happened. There is no space for nothing.