Hawks over India
By Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI - British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, on his third visit to India this year amid tensions on the sub-continent, is believed to have finally cleared the way for a 15-year-old proposal worth US$3 billion to sell India a fleet of Hawk trainer jets.

Straw, whose previous two missions were aimed at defusing tensions over Kashmir, emphasized on Friday that "security concerns" alone did not define Indian-UK relations and that there was history, people, culture and trade to consider as well. But he was cryptic about what passed between him and India's new foreign minister, Yashwant Sinha, and other leaders.

Earlier, he met Brajesh Mishra, regarded as India's most powerful bureaucrat, but exactly what transpired was not made known. Straw later busied himself with business engagements, including one organized by the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII), the country's leading business chamber.

At the CII, Straw announced that he was delighted by "India and the United Kingdom working more closely on science and technology issues", signifying a new thaw towards this country, which for decades has been cutting its own path in high technology areas thanks to western embargoes after India first tested a nuclear device in 1973.

The two countries have committed some US$4.5 million to foster new joint research links over the next three years in "blue skies" research in natural science, mathematics and engineering. This was as part of the New Delhi Declaration signed by the two countries in January during a visit of British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

But, so far, the new bonhomie between the two countries has not helped along the arms deal, under which India is to buy 66 Hawk trainer jets manufactured by British Aerospace (BAe). The matter has been bedeviled, among other things, by sanctions imposed by the United States after India carried through another round of nuclear tests in May 1998. However, the sanctions on defense supplies to India - and to Pakistan, which carried out tit-for-tat tests in May 1998 - were lifted when Washington needed strategic support form the South Asian countries in its war against terror in Afghanistan following September 11.

India's defense establishment has been wary of buying British equipment like the Hawk, which sources critical components from US manufacturers. British Sea King anti-submarine helicopters operated by the Indian navy had to be grounded because American supplies were tardy. Moreover, this happened at a critical time, when India had deployed half its warships close to the Pakistani coastline during the now de-escalating standoff between the South Asian neighbors.

Defense officials consider it significant that Straw's latest visit was preceded by the sudden clearance for US-made spares for the Indian navy's Sea Kings, which were built by the British Westland company.

During his last visit to India in May at the height of nuclear-edged tensions between Indian and Pakistan, Straw made it clear that there was no move to stop the sale of the Hawks to India, signifying British eagerness to conclude the deal.

He also pledged steady supplies of spares for other British-built assets operated by the Indian armed forces, including Sea King helicopters, Jaguar deep penetration strike aircraft (which India manufactures under license) and Sea Harrier jump-jets operated from aircraft carriers.

Best of all from the point of view of Indian leaders, Straw said that "the United Kingdom stands four square behind India in its fight against terrorism".

He went on to say that the UN Security Council's definition of terrorism covered "cross-border terrorism and the branding of terrorists as freedom fighters", indicating that the West was no longer prepared to accept Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf's insistence that those engaged in violent separatism in Kashmir were indigenous freedom fighters.

Since then both the US and Britain have been leaning hard on Musharraf while concluding deals with India, a country which has traditionally sourced its defense requirements from Russia and the Soviet Union, for a variety of hardware, including ground sensors to detect movement along the Line of Control (LoC) that runs through divided Kashmir.

The Hawk arms deal faces opposition in Britain, where a recent parliamentary report said there was a clear risk the weapons could be used "aggressively against another country", and questioned what, besides the Kashmir stand-off, could be considered serious enough to prevent an arms deal "short of all-out war".

On Friday, the British Foreign Office defended Straw's decision to allow 148 arms export licenses for India and 18 for Pakistan, describing the sub-continent's defense needs as "legitimate".

Opposition has also come from Asia, where the activist group Campaign Against the Arms Trade put the price of one Hawk trainer, in reality a fighter-bomber, at roughly the amount needed to provide 1.5 million people with potable water for life. This is a goal that India has yet to achieve for the majority of its one billion people.

The Hawk's customers have included the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia, and it saw action during operations to suppress the East Timorese independence movement. They were also sold to President Robert Mugabe in the mid-1980s and saw action during Zimbabwe's involvement in the Congo.

In India, the Hawk appears to have beaten several competitors, including the Russian MIG-AT, in spite of a design that dates back to 70s. If the deal goes through, New Delhi may have given an extended life to an item already slated to go out of production.

Perhaps encouraged by India's need to win over Western powers in its 55-year-old dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir, British Aeronautics has unilaterally hiked the price of the Hawk by about $20 million per aircraft.

Pressed to comment on Musharraf's recent statement that there was no agreement to permanently stop cross-border infiltration into Kashmir, Straw said it was obvious that one of the keys to the resolution of the Kashmir problem was an end to infiltration to which "all parties were committed".

Straw said he did not want to "carry messages" between Indian and Pakistan and that his visits to the two countries were essentially for "consultations" on a situation in which "tensions were down but remained difficult".

On landing in New Delhi late last Thursday for his two-day visit, Straw had praise for the "restraint shown by India" for yet another massacre carried out by suspected jihadi militants in Kashmir last weekend, which left 28 Hindus, mostly migrant laborers, dead.

India's response to the weekend massacre was muted compared to its reaction to a May attack that resulted in the deaths of 34 people, mostly wives and children of soldiers. That attack led to the nuclear-armed neighbours coming to within a whisker of engaging in open warfare.

(Inter Press Service)