India through the Rice
prism By Siddharth Srivastava
NEW DELHI
- India has reason to be happy over the appointment of the
two people who will ostensibly command US foreign and
strategic relations with the rest of the world in
the second administration of President George W Bush. The next
secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, as well as the next
national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, have played key
roles in a paradigm shift in US policy toward India,
incorporating long-standing demands as well as removing
India's grouses in US policy toward India.
Rice, whose nomination
follows Colin Powell's announcement on Monday of his
resignation, is considered the original architect of an
expanded relationship with India and in giving it high priority and
a fresh focus in the Bush administration. The
Indian Foreign Ministry was never comfortable working with
Powell, who despite being the lone moderate voice
and other achievements, was not a Bush confidant and did not
share the president's larger vision of India. On the other
hand, unlike with his boss in the US, Powell enjoyed
a personal rapport with Pakistani President
General Pervez Musharraf, referred to here as "general-to-general
speak", that India was never comfortable with. Rice had
to face several roadblocks by State Department mandarins
(under Powell) who tried to dilute the agreements as
well as expand the benchmarks for further cooperation.
She will be their boss now.
A September 2000
interview with The International Economy sums up Rice's
views on foreign policy vis-a-vis India. She said: "We
need to encourage new centers of stability, new centers
of prosperity. Let me give you an example: India. This
is a country that we have generally treated as if it is
simply a nuclear problem and a problem concerning
Kashmir, and that's all we ever talk about with India.
But this is an emerging knowledge economy that has a
real place in the new international economy."
As the
main foreign-policy adviser to candidate Bush in the presidential
campaign of 2000, Rice argued in an article published
in Foreign Affairs that the United States "should pay closer
attention to India's role in the regional balance".
She went on: "There is a strong tendency conceptually
[in the US] to connect India with Pakistan
and to think only of Kashmir or the nuclear competition
between the two states. But India is an element in
China's calculation, and it should be in America's, too.
India is not a great power yet, but it has the potential
to emerge as one."
In fact Rice, Robert
Blackwill (US ambassador to India during 2001-03) and
Hadley have been considered as the three-person team
working to implement Bush's India policy, often meeting
resistance from Powell, who relied a bit too closely on
State Department bureaucracy. Hadley and Blackwill were
co-authors of the new India policy requested by Bush in
1999. It was Hadley who flew into New Delhi in September
2003 and who was kept well shrouded from the media to
present the framework of what is now known as the Next
Steps in Strategic Partnership (NSSP) that defines a
future course of action between the two countries.
Rice and Hadley continued with the process of
Bush's commitment to end the nuclear dispute with India
that had led to the US imposing sanctions on the supply
of dual-use technologies for peaceful purposes. This was
despite US frustration with India's refusal to send
troops to Iraq in the first half of 2003. Through the
NSSP, Rice and Hadley have helped renew civilian nuclear
and space cooperation with India and liberalize
high-technology transfers.
Rice and Hadley have
also lent a sympathetic ear to India's concerns on
terrorism in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir and
kept up the pressure on Pakistan to stop cross-border
infiltration, the one barometer that India uses to judge
its neighbor's commitment to take on terror networks.
Together with Blackwill, they made the US declare for
the first time that the elections in Indian Jammu and
Kashmir in 2002 were free and fair. India, on the other
hand, has always been skeptical about Powell's fondness
for Musharraf, and though Rice has interacted with the
general it is unlikely that he is going to be a
recipient of similar mollycoddling.
According
to foreign-policy expert C Raja Mohan: "It is Rice's
recognition of India's prospect as a global power and
her determination to discard the South Asian prism [that
brackets India and Pakistan] that helped shape the
paradigm shift in US policy towards India under the Bush
administration. Rice's unconventional view of India
prevailed despite the fact that the US needed Pakistan
to pursue its objectives in Afghanistan after September
11, 2001. She took a sustained interest in ending the
nuclear differences with India that had hobbled
bilateral relations for decades. In the controversial
National Security Strategy document unveiled by the Bush
administration in September 2002, the White House for
the first time put India in the section of global powers
rather than in the traditional chapters reviewing US
regional policy."
Apart from her views, Rice has
also over the years assiduously developed direct
contacts with her Indian counterparts - Brajesh Mishra,
who commanded India's foreign policy under previous
prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and now J N Dixit,
the national security adviser under new Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh. Whenever Rice could not fulfill a
promise to visit India, she sent her deputy Hadley. This
enabled the bureaucracies of the two countries, steeped
in Cold War rhetoric, to iron out differences as well as
get a real feel of each other. This link was first
promoted by Blackwill and sustained when he moved to the
White House.
In an interview, Sumit Ganguly,
head of India studies at the University of Indiana,
Bloomington, lauded Rice's appointment. "Whatever my disagreements
with the Bush administration, one has to grant
that they have given a certain importance to India.
Most definitely her coming to [the State Department]
would make a difference. I suspect even more
attention would have been paid to India were it not for
[September 11], which once again raised the status of
Pakistan. I am not so sure that the Pakistani front will
be the same. I think she will be fairly clear-eyed and
somewhat more tough-minded with Musharraf, unlike
Powell, who was quite taken in by the starched uniform
and clipped accent of the general."
An Indian delegation led by
Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran was to leave for Washington on
Wednesday night. While the agenda will be high-technology talks, Saran
and his team will meet with Hadley and other senior officials
to get a first-hand appreciation of the
prospects for Indo-US relations over the next four years,
under the new dispensation. They should be smiling
all the way.
Siddharth Srivastava is a
New Delhi-based journalist.
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