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India sticks with Iran, for
now
By Sultan Shahin
NEW
DELHI - Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's recent
visit to India and Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari
Vajpayee's present trip to Turkey have brought to light
the complicated balancing act India is forced to play in
its foreign policy. Israel, Turkey and, more important,
the United States are all unhappy with India's close
strategic ties with the Islamic fundamentalist regime in
Iran. But if India has to continue to pursue its policy
of encirclement of Pakistan, it needs to maintain close
ties with Iran, Afghanistan and other Central Asian
countries bordering Pakistan.
New Delhi has,
therefore, made it clear to the Israeli leader, who
raised the issue of Iran, that its ties with Tehran are
non-negotiable. India could accommodate Israeli concerns
on some issues, but not on its ties with Iran. India has
not initiated anti-Israeli resolutions in the United
Nations on the question of Palestine for several years,
as it used to do during the Cold War era; Israeli
leaders have noted this fact with satisfaction. But
India could not completely abandon Palestinian leader
Yasser Arafat or support Israel's stated desire to
eliminate him, even by killing him.
Similarly,
India agreed not to pass Israeli defense technology on
to Iran. Sharon was assured of this at the highest
level. But India could not give up its strategic ties
with that country, he was also told. This was in
response to Sharon demanding from India what he called
"reciprocity". He insisted that this must constitute the
basis of Indo-Israeli ties. In return for the Phalcon
radar system and sensitive intelligence reports on
terrorism, for instance, Israel asked India to disavow
anti-Israel resolutions in the UN and other multilateral
bodies. More significant, it also asked India to be
mindful of Israel's security concerns before developing
even closer ties to Iran.
If Israel, with its
superior military prowess, known nuclear capability and
unquestioning support of the sole superpower is so wary
of growing India-Iran ties, then the latter has even
more reason to be wary of growing India-Israel ties.
Since 1981, when Israel destroyed an Iraqi nuclear
reactor at Osirak, Iran, possibly with its own
nuclear-weapon ambitions in mind, has been particularly
fearful of a similar Israeli attack on its reactors.
Israel has signed a treaty with Turkey that allows it to
take advantage of its air bases. It has also developed
relations with Azerbaijan. This has given Israel the
possibility of coming closer to the Iranian borders,
heightening security concerns in Tehran with regard to
its northern and northwestern borders.
No wonder
Iran is making all-out efforts to improve its
air-defense capability against air raids by the Israeli
air force. But after it had started breathing somewhat
easily after testing its Shahab-3 missiles in July 2000,
as these missiles can threaten Israel directly, it now
finds itself surrounded by the chief Israeli patron, the
United States, on both sides. In its perception, the
predatory US imperialism on the rampage in the region
represents an even greater danger than the Israeli
presence.
Iran is thus bound to feel more
concerned than ever. The difference in US attitude and
behavior toward North Korea, suspected to have already
developed a few nuclear weapons, and Iraq, which was
known to have no nuclear capability, and perhaps also
known to US and British intelligence to have no other
weapons of mass destruction, could not have escaped the
notice of the ruling clerics in Tehran. In this
situation the development of an India-Israeli-US nexus
cannot but heighten their worries. But apparently India
has told them that its relationship with Israel and the
United States, too, is equally non-negotiable.
India's close strategic ties with Iran worry
other friends of India as well, as does its developing
relationship with Israel. Saudi Arabia, for instance, is
a Sunni Wahhabi fundamentalist country that spawned
al-Qaeda. Though a US ally, it is no friend of Israel.
It could not possibly be pleased with India coming
closer to a Shi'ite fundamentalist country like Iran,
which considers the Sunni Wahhabi Taliban to be Islamic
deviants. During the Vajpayee visit to Iran a couple of
years ago, Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, in fact,
made an entirely unsolicited reference to growing
"terrorism, violence, rebellion and narcotics
trafficking" in the then Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, and
added that he was "deeply regretful that such crimes are
committed in the name of Islam".
He also
condemned the destruction of the Buddha statues at
Bamiyan in Afghanistan and regretted the misuse of Islam
by the Taliban forces. This could not have been music to
Saudi ears, but India managed to maintain its close
relations with both countries.
Similarly,
despite its closeness with Iran, forged first by the
then prime minister Indira Gandhi with the Shah of Iran,
Reza Shah Pahlavi, in the 1970s, and renewed with the
fundamentalist regime by then prime minister Narasimha
Rao in early 1990s, India continued to maintain close
ties with Iraq under Saddam Hussein. A secular
dictatorship, Iraq was the only Muslim country to
support India unhesitatingly on the question of Kashmir
or in its war against Pakistan in 1971 for the struggle
that resulted in the creation of Bangladesh.
India is, of course, not the only country that
has to walk a tightrope in maintaining friends with
widely divergent and sometimes entirely contradictory or
even hostile perspectives. Many countries, or perhaps
all countries, do so at one time or other, in one case
or another. This has particularly been the case since
the end of Cold War. But India is faced with unique
problems in maintaining its relations with Iran because
this relationship does not only expose inconsistencies
in its foreign policy, but also contradictions in its
domestic political dynamics.
India's coalition
government is led by the Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP). The BJP's mentor, the Rashtriya
Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), and sister organizations such
as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP or World Hindu Forum)
and Shiv Sena (Shivaji's Army) etc that constitute the
extended family of Hindu fundamentalists called the
Sangh Parivar abide by the Hindutva philosophy of
"cultural nationalism", which looks at the world Muslim
community as one nation.
Hindutva's cultural
nationalism predates Samuel Huntington's "clash of
civilizations" theory by almost a century. The idea of a
Muslim monolith is so deeply ingrained that even if they
try to do so, Hindutva ideologues confess that they are
unable to distinguish an Indian Muslim from a Pakistani
or that of any other nationality. Then the term used for
Muslims by top Hindutva politicians is invariably jihadi
or terrorist. This is essential if an irrational fear of
Muslims has to be instilled in the largely secular Hindu
majority nurtured for millennia on the eclectic and
large-hearted Hindu philosophy that never closed its
doors on new ideas or religions.
Secularism is
the foundation of the Indian constitution and its
democratic system, but one can almost daily watch on
television Hindutva leaders railing against the
so-called secularists and reiterating their vow to root
out secularism from the country. But this Hindutva
vision of a terrorist Muslim monolith oppressing the
world, including India, runs into a direct clash with
India's mature conduct of its foreign policy aims based
on its perception of its national interest and
requirements of realpolitik. The BJP's Hindutva
ideology, for instance, would demand that it go the
whole hog with Israel and the United States in
destroying Iran, the second destination, after Iraq, in
President George W Bush's war against his "axis of
evil".
A nuclear-powered Islamic fundamentalist
country that supports terrorist organizations in
Lebanon, Palestine and Pakistan would be a greater
danger to the world and should obviously be stopped
before it acquires nuclear weapons. A Muslim Turkey run
by an Islamic party - in all but name - might help
Israel and the US encircle and destroy Iran, or at least
its nuclear reactors when the time comes, which may be
sooner rather than later. Yet an India run by Hindutva
ideologues is maintaining ever-growing close strategic
ties with that country and considers its relations
non-negotiable. And this at a time when even the
majority of Iranian people want to get rid of Islamic
fundamentalists and go back to secular democratic
governance denied to them by the greatest proponent of
democracy in the world, the United States, which
overthrew the democratically elected Mossadeq government
in 1953 and installed a king.
A Hindutva-run
India has also no problem in maintaining close relations
with Saudi Arabia, another fountain of Islamic
fundamentalism. This, of course, is demanded by India's
national interests, as perceived by nearly all political
parties. India's Iran policy, too, has bipartisan
support. In fact most of the initiatives of Indian
foreign policy as it exists today were embarked on by
the secular Congress party now in opposition and by and
large followed by socialist and communist parties that
had influence in the central government before the BJP
came to power.
This is deeply embarrassing for
the Hindutva politicians. But they cannot run a foreign
policy as dictated by the situation India finds itself
in today if they treat the Muslim ummah (world
Muslim community) as one terrorist monolith. They were
pleasantly surprised last year when, after the
large-scale massacres of Muslims in Gujarat, in which
the BJP state government was directly implicated, the
only countries that did not criticize India were Muslim.
While the Christian West spoke up and denounced the
government in no uncertain terms, asking it to provide
justice to the thousands of victims and rehabilitate the
millions of uprooted, the world Muslim community
remained silent.
As pre-election communal
cleansing of minorities constitutes an essential part of
election strategies of ruling parties - the main
opposition Congress party, too, thought so while it
ruled, but seems to disagree now - and as the BJP moves
inexorably in this direction in the election year ahead,
it can only count on the support of Muslim countries and
Israel: the rest of the world will denounce another
communal conflagration in equally severe terms if the
number of killed again starts going beyond a thousand,
the benchmark the West seems to follow in such
situations.
The BJP still recalls with gratitude
the response of the Muslim world, particularly Iran, to
the demolition of the 16th-century Babri mosque in
December 1992, a joint Congress-BJP operation conducted
by a Congress-run central government and a
BJP-controlled Uttar Pradesh (UP) state government.
While the country was still nursing the wounds inflicted
by the demolition and the widespread massacres that had
followed, the then Iranian president Rafsanjani visited
UP's capital city Lucknow and declared that he had full
faith in India's secularism and the ability of its
constitutional system to safeguard its Muslims.
It goes to the credit of Hindutva leaders that
they did not allow their ideological proclivities to
cloud their vision and have pursued a foreign policy
that by and large has near-unanimous support from the
entire political spectrum. Despite Pakistani pretensions
of leading the Muslim world, India has maintained and
further developed close ties with almost all Muslim
countries, while remaining firm on its stance on Kashmir
and Pakistan. This is no mean achievement and the credit
should go to Vajpayee, who succeeded in doing this in a
very difficult situation. He obviously learned well the
lessons of his first stint as minister in 1977-79 when
he handled the external affairs portfolio with great
aplomb.
But this complicated and fascinating
balancing act that is the conduct of Indian foreign
policy is soon going to get even more complex. That Iran
is seeking to build nuclear weapons is not proved yet,
but apparently UN inspectors suspect it. They have found
hidden reserves of enriched uranium at Iran's
gas-centrifuge project at Natanz, being ostensibly
developed as a civilian nuclear power plant. Since the
declared intent for Natanz' single-centrifuge "test
stands" was to optimize centrifuge designs, which
normally involves the enrichment of trace amounts of
uranium, the question is naturally being asked: where
did the extra radioactive material come from? The
Iranian explanation that the damning uranium probably
found its way to the site "inadvertently" from an
overseas supplier has only swung the needle of suspicion
still more its way.
Iran knows, as does the
world, that its survival as an independent country
depends on how fast it develops nuclear weapons. Right
now may be the best time. The United States is stuck in
quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, on both sides of its
borders, unable to move to invade and occupy, as Iran
justly fears. Even if Iran agrees to all of the nuclear
watchdogs' conditions - by October 31 - it would still
not stop the country from trashing the Non-Proliferation
Treaty at some point and going ahead with its
weapon-building project, if it indeed has one. So, to
take the worst-case scenario, or the best case,
depending on which side of the fence you are, Iran could
have a nuclear weapon or two ready within a year.
It is inconceivable that Israel would allow this
to happen. It may not have much time left to engage in
an Osirak-like attack against Iranian nuclear reactors.
But will Iran use its Shahab-3 missiles then to rain
mayhem and destruction on Israel? And will the United
States then wait for further proof of Iranian "evil" to
march next door from its sanctuaries in Iraq and
Afghanistan? India must be ready with its response to
such not very unlikely scenarios.
(Copyright
2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved.
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