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India's startling change of axis
By Sultan Shahin
NEW DELHI -
Having preempted the efforts of the United States for
peace in South Asia by its own offer of normalization of
relations with Pakistan, India has renewed its bid for
an axis with Washington and Israel to counter Pakistan,
which Delhi describes as the hub of Islamic
fundamentalism and international terrorism. The
terminology being officially used for this proposed axis
is rather innocuous - democratic alliance against
terrorism.
While Washington's response is not
known, this has created a storm in Indian politics
itself, forcing the main opposition Congress party,
which ruled India for its first 45 years of
independence, to deplore the Hindu fundamentalist
Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP)-led coalition government for
its "obsession with Israel" even at the cost of national
interests.
India's national security
adviser Brajesh Mishra outlined the proposal for
a US-Israel-India axis against Islamic fundamentalism
in Washington last Thursday. Mishra is perhaps the
most trusted aide of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee
and served for several years as the head of the BJP's
foreign affairs cell before the party came to power five
years ago.
In an address to a meeting of the
American Jewish Committee, Mishra argued that democratic
countries that are the prime targets of international
terrorism should form a "viable alliance" and develop
multilateral mechanisms to counter the menace. He
identified India, the US and Israel as countries fitting
that description. "Such an alliance would have the
political will and moral authority to take bold
decisions in extreme cases of terrorist provocation. It
would not get bogged down in definitional and causal
arguments about terrorism," he maintained.
Speaking after a meeting with his American
counterpart Condoleezza Rice, Mishra hit out at the
Pakistani bid to characterize Kashmiri militants as
freedom fighters. The talk that terrorism can be
eradicated only by addressing its root causes is
"nonsense" he said amid applause. He said that
preventive measures like blocking financial supplies,
disrupting networks, sharing intelligence and
simplifying extradition procedures can be effective only
through international cooperation "based on trust and
shared values".
At his meeting with Rice, Mishra
is understood to have rebutted the claim of Pakistan
President General Pervez Musharraf that "nothing is
happening across the Line of Control" that divides the
Indian and Pakistani-administered areas of Kashmir. He
acquainted her with an Indian perspective on the
continuing incidents of terrorist violence in Jammu and
Kashmir (J&K). His meeting with Rice came within
hours of Musharraf making the assertion to Deputy
Secretary of State Richard Armitage in Islamabad.
Mishra gave Rice an update on the peace moves
made by India. He also touched on some of the
outstanding bilateral issues. He sought early US action
on the "trinity" of issues: high-technology commerce,
civilian nuclear energy cooperation and collaboration in
space. India believes that early action on these issues
could take the India-US relationship to a qualitatively
new level of partnership. He pointed out in his address
to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on
Wednesday that he hoped the decks will be cleared for
the flow of dual-use technologies between the countries
since India has consistently followed responsible
policies.
While the US has not come up with any
response yet, Indian opposition parties have attacked
the ruling coalition for its "strange and perverse"
obsession with Israel. The most vocal among these has
been the Congress. It attacked the BJP-led government on
Saturday. "Obsession with Israel on the part of the
coalition government is strange and perverse ... when
Israel is facing international isolation. It shows the
intellectual insolvency of the government," party
spokesman S Jaipal Reddy said.
Reddy said that
Mishra's statement was "not inadvertent" as Deputy Prime
Minister Lal Krishna Advani had also put forward a
similar formulation after September 11, 2001. Noting
that strategic partnership with Israel was
"qualitatively different" from that between India and
the US, he said that Mishra would not have pleaded for
such an alliance without prior clearance from the prime
minister. The Congress warned that a strategic
partnership with Israel could upset the consensus built
around India's "time-tested" foreign policy.
Reddy said that such a tie-up "defies
intelligence", given the ideological dissonance between
India and Israel. "There are fundamental [ideological]
dissimilarities between India and Israel. The problem
faced by Israel is qualitatively different from India.
We've held the view that Palestinians have been denied
their due. There has to be a minimum ideological
similarity for a strategic partnership," Reddy said.
The BJP-led government has indeed shown a great
keenness in trying to convince the US for such a
strategic alliance since it came to power. It has not
let any opportunity go to repeat its interest in such an
axis. Whether it was the issue of national missile
defense (NMD) mooted by President George W Bush or the
terrorist strikes of September 11, India was the first
to offer its total support and cooperation, even without
being asked for it.
The reasons are not
difficult to see. The ideologues of Hindutva (the
philosophy of Hindu domination of the sub-continent),
had lost no time in justifying their support for NMD on
ideological grounds. One such ideologue, Sandhya Jain,
for instance, explained this in her column in the daily
Pioneer by pointing out that threatened as they both are
from Muslim fundamentalism, India and the US are
civilizational allies.
She gave voice to India's
high hopes from a strategic alliance with the US and
Israel and the NMD regime: "A defensive umbrella in
which a tracking satellite can find and neutralize enemy
missiles in mid-air is no small protection for a country
physically surrounded by civilizationally hostile
forces. The opposition assertion that this would reduce
India to a US satellite is jejune, and merits contempt.
India would no more be a satellite than France or
Germany was under NATO. But she would be allied to the
most powerful country of the free world, a country that
is fiercely loyal towards its friends, as witnessed by
its abiding relationship with Israel."
Similarly, September 11 found India in the same
mood as Britain after Pearl Harbor. British columnist
William Rees-Mogg recalled that his country's reaction
to Pearl Harbor was one of "horror, but also a huge
sense of relief that the USA was now involved in World
War II". India, too, hoped that the US would now be
involved in the war against terrorism that India has
been fighting for the past two decades, first in the
state of Punjab and then in J&K, not to speak of the
seven states in its Northeast and the Maoist insurgency
in the eastern state of Bihar and the western state of
Andhra Pradesh.
The Japanese action at Pearl Harbor
had, in the words of Rees-Mogg, "started a new process
of history; before it was complete, that process led to
the destruction of the Japanese empire, the dropping of
the first nuclear bombs, the occupation of Japan and
eventually to American support for the post-war
institutions of NATO, the UN and international
peacekeeping". India, too, hoped that the US treating
the latest attacks as a declaration of war by the
terrorist groups would herald a new historical process
that would lead to a new strategic axis of India-US and
Israel fighting against Islamic fundamentalism.
Calling for the redoubling of efforts to defeat
the "great threat" of terrorism, Vajpayee wrote to Bush
assuring him of India's full cooperation in
investigations into the terrorist strikes. Condemning
the events in the strongest terms, Vajpayee said, "The
people of India and my government share the sense of
outrage with the American people. We stand ready to
cooperate with you in the investigations into this crime
and to strengthen our partnership in leading
international efforts to ensure that terrorism never
succeeds again."
The prime minister brought in
the civilizatonal angle as well. He observed that this
dark hour was a stark reminder of the power and reach of
the terrorists to destroy innocent lives and challenge
the civilized order in this world. "It sends a strong
message to democracies to redouble our efforts to defeat
this great threat to our people, our values and our way
of life."
US behavior since September 11 has,
however, belied Indian hopes of a strategic
US-Israel-India axis fighting Pakistan. The US instead
made Pakistan a front-line ally in its fight against the
Taliban menace in Afghanistan. Bush and other US
officials have often praised India's bug-bear,
Musharraf, as a stalwart ally and helped him bring
Pakistan back on the path of economic prosperity.
Most observers of the Indian political scene
believed that events since September 11 had put cold
water on Indian hopes of a civilizational axis -
Hindu-Jewish-Christian versus Islam and Confucianism.
Vajpayee's hand-of-friendship speech directed at
Pakistan from the capital of the state of Jammu and
Kashmir last month was also seen as an indication that
India now understood the need for coming to terms with
its nuclear-armed neighbor Pakistan. This is why
Vajpayee government's renewal of this bid for a
civilizational axis has surprised many.
But it
shouldn't really surprise anyone. There are deep
ideological factors impelling Hindu fundamentalist
leaders to hope against hope that a civilizational clash
will take place, and that they would be on the winning
side of it.
The clash of civilization theory is
attributed to Samuel Huntington. But few people know, as
a Hindutva ideologue Devendra Swaroop Aggarwal pointed
out recently, that it had actually been put forward by
well-known Hindutva icon Bipin Chandra Pal almost a
century ago. Pal had the insight to even foresee that,
even though India was at that time engaged in fighting
for its independence from the Christian British, in this
impending clash Hindus would be on the side of the
Judeo-Christian civilization and Islam would be
supported by the Confucian Chinese civilization.
This may also be one reason why Hindu
fundamentalists never participated in the freedom
struggle, and have supported the West throughout the
period since independence in 1947 at a time that India
was struggling with its foreign policy of non-alignment
in a bid to remain neutral between the West and the
Soviet Union.
The opportunities offered by
September 11 were too good to be missed. India under the
BJP may be unable to believe that it has missed them and
that nothing can be done to revive those hopes. Before
having to join Pakistan in a serious effort to find a
peace formula, therefore, it may have felt like making a
last-ditch effort.
There is also speculation
that the Vajpayee government could not have renewed its
offer of a civilizatonal axis without some encouragement
from Israel and the US. As for Israel, there can be no
doubt that it would love India to be a part of such an
axis, and thus be further isolated from the Islamic
world.
The evolving situation, particularly the
US response, will thus be watched with keen interest.
Whether or not the proposed peace talks between India
and Pakistan move forward will largely depend on the US
response to the Indian proposal for a strategic axis.
The last time that India and Pakistan come close to
blowing each other up in a nuclear holocaust, the US
used determined and coercive diplomacy in the form of
travel advisories against its citizens visiting India to
bring the two to their senses.
It seems doubtful
that the US will join hands with India to destroy
Pakistan or even tame it, as Advani demanded on Sunday,
particularly as it already virtually owns that country.
It is possible that Indian leaders with their
single-point agenda of fighting a civilizational battle
with Islam are unable to understand the complex games
that the US plays.
Visiting US Deputy Secretary
of State Richard Armitage has in fact left no one in
doubt that India is expected to engage in dialogue with
Pakistan, while the US is not going to be the one to
ensure that the Pakistani leadership lives up to its
commitment made in June last year to end cross-border
infiltration permanently.
Armitage told Indian
leaders on Sunday that he was not in the business of
giving assurances. This amounts to the US washing its
hands of the assurances given last year. India officials
are also expressing resentment over reported remarks by
some US officials that the Kashmir issue should be
resolved first to bring an end to cross-border
infiltration.
As Pakistani journalist Najam
Sethi pointed out, sanity may indeed be located outside
South Asia.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd.
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