Page 2 of 2 China leaves the US and India
trailing By M K Bhadrakumar
Iranian President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad's strategic defiance of Washington
would prove to be vacuous once the formidable
American juggernaut got cracking down in earnest.
The Indian security community lives in
absolute thrall of Israel's capability to stretch
its long arm and squash Iran. It was only logical
to wait for the morning after Ahmadinejad to do
any serious business with Iran. Meanwhile, Delhi
assumed that calibrating its Iran policy in terms
of US-Israeli thinking was simply the right
thing to do.
Thus,
almost across-the-board cooperation with Iran got
mothballed. No one talked anymore about the
"north-south transportation corridor" that the
previous government in Delhi initiated as a means
of gaining access to Afghanistan and the Central
Asian region (and Russia). The strategic dialogue
with Iran on regional security issues lost
traction, even though the ascendancy of forces of
religious militancy and the Taliban's resurgence
demanded it.
The gas pipeline project from
Iran via Pakistan to India languished while Delhi
seized one pretext or the other for keeping it on
the backburner. The 25-year mega LNG deal, which
the previous government in Delhi negotiated, has
become moribund. The latest banking restrictions
imposed by Delhi will discourage even normal trade
and investment.
Delhi toes US-Israel
line Without doubt, the imperatives of the
on-going negotiations over the civil nuclear
cooperation agreement with the US left Delhi with
hardly any leeway to withstand the combined
American and Israeli pressure to curtail India's
cooperation with Iran.
But that is only
part of the story. On the broader issues of
regional security in the Middle East and the
Persian Gulf, Delhi also seemed to have moved with
planning within the broad framework of India's
rapidly expanding strategic partnership with the
US.
Actually, Delhi's estimation wasn't
altogether as illogical as it might seem today. It
was an approach that fitted with the present
Indian government's priorities of harmonizing
India's regional policies with the US's global
strategies. The thinking ran as follows: the core
agenda of the Bush administration's Middle East
policy lies in ensuring Israel's regional
dominance, and the influence of the
neo-conservatives on the Bush administration's
foreign policy being what it is and given the
challenge Iran poses to Israel's regional
dominance, the Bush administration cannot be
expected to sit back and allow Tehran to
consolidate the strategic influence it gained
during the period since the invasion of Iraq in
2003.
Besides, there was also a quid
pro quo. American Congressmen known for their
strong links with Israel stood up and constantly
began reminding Delhi over the past couple of
years that there is nothing like a free lunch.
India has enjoyed excellent chemistry with the
Jewish lobby and neo-conservative circles in the
US in recent years, and they have enormous
goodwill towards Delhi and time and again
demonstrated their capacity to influence the US
Congress, media and the White House over issues
affecting Indian interests. (The Israeli lobby in
Washington gave a big helping hand canvassing
support for the nuclear deal on the Capitol Hill.)
Delhi began feeling the heat when middle-level
American politicians wantonly began mocking the
Indian foreign minister and even addressing the
Indian prime minister asking for explanations over
Delhi's delay in signing the nuclear cooperation
deal.
Furthermore, Indian thinking took
into account Washington's sustained efforts in the
recent period to bring together the pro-West Arab
regimes and Israel in a grouping arrayed against
Iran, Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in
Palestine. Delhi concluded that Iran's regional
isolation was a foregone conclusion. The
underlying assumption, of course, was that the
conservative pro-West Arab regimes were in no mood
to cohabit with the radical leadership in Tehran
and were instead on practically alliance terms
with Israel already.
Delhi needs course
correction In the recent period,
therefore, India put a deliberate distance between
it and what it saw as the
Iran-Syria-Hezbollah-Hamas lineup. But that didn't
stop Delhi from voicing support for a two-state
solution to the Palestinian problem. The rhetoric
remains important for its resonance in Indian
domestic politics, considering that India has a
huge Muslim electorate which keenly follows
developments in the Islamic world. The rhetoric is
carefully crafted insofar as it sounds
passionately supportive of the Palestinian cause
and lends itself to free interpretation while it
can cause no annoyance to Israel.
Indian
diplomacy has a lot of catching up to do. In the
short term, Delhi will have to pay a price for
overlooking the geopolitical reality that Iran is
the only really viable regional power in the
Middle East and the Persian Gulf. Delhi's best
hope is that true to their innate pragmatism,
Iranians will let bygones be bygones. The pressure
will begin to mount once full-fledged US
engagement of Iran commences. Ahmadinejad has
said, "It [NIE] is a positive step, a step forward
… If they [Bush administration] take one or two
more such steps, the issues will be totally
changed and ... the way will be paved for the
resolution of regional and bilateral issues."
Second, Delhi has no choice but to revisit
its blind faith in the US capacity to influence
the countries of the Persian Gulf region. The
Indian delegation at last Sunday's regional
security conference in Manama, Bahrain, saw first
hand the derisive reaction by senior Arab
officials to the speech by US Secretary of Defense
Robert Gates. The Indian officials realized that
contrary to what Delhi imagined, the Gulf Arab
regimes have a complex attitude toward Iran.
When Gates maintained that Israel is a
benign power while Iran is subverting its
neighbors, Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin
Jassem al-Thani retorted, "We can't really compare
Iran with Israel. Iran is our neighbor, and we
shouldn't really look at it as an enemy. I think
Israel through 50 years has taken land, kicking
out the Palestinians, and it interferes under the
cover of security." He called on the US to hold
direct talks with Iran. Other Arab officials
referred to the US's "double standards".
Again, Delhi would have noted that Iran
was invited to a Gulf Cooperation Council summit
for the first time in Doha on December 2. And it
transpired on Tuesday that for the first time
ever, Saudi King Abdullah has extended an
invitation to the Iranian president to make the
hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. Equally, there are
indications that the Saudis are disappointed with
the Annapolis meeting in the US on November 27 to
discuss a solution to the Palestinian problem.
Saudi-owned al-Hayat newspaper published
from London reported on Sunday that a revival of
the Saudi-sponsored Mecca Agreement of February
(involving Hamas and Fatah) could be in the works.
Hamas' website also reported that Hamas chief
Khaled Mishaal, who is based in Damascus, traveled
to Riyadh "to discuss means of restoring
Palestinian national dialogue". Even thoughtful
Israelis like the former spy chief Efraim Halevy
feel it's time to negotiate with Hamas' leaders -
"the same men his former agency and his nation
have targeted for assassination" (to quote The
Wall Street Journal).
Clearly, Delhi's
simplistic, one-dimensional view of the Persian
Gulf lineup, imbued with the vision of the US
neo-conservatives - that pro-West Arab regimes
plus the US and Israel are fighting an epochal war
with Iran - is untenable. The underlying flaws in
India's Middle East policy, however, are difficult
to jettison as long as the policy remains
dovetailed to the US regional agenda. The specter
of a Chinese arc of encirclement in the Persian
Gulf may just be the stimulus needed for Delhi to
seriously introspect where and how its policy
floundered in figuring out the Persian puzzle.
M K Bhadrakumar served as a
career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for
over 29 years, with postings including India's
ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-1998) and to Turkey
(1998-2001).
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