Clinton delivers unwanted tidings to New Delhi By M K Bhadrakumar
United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton landed in the western Indian
city of Mumbai on Friday for the Barack Obama administration's first high-level
political consultation with India since assuming office in January.
Clinton had no pressing engagements in Mumbai, but she took time to reach out
to Delhi on Sunday. She underscored that the Obama administration looks forward
to a broad-based relationship with India that goes beyond the highly
militarized "strategic partnership" that the George W Bush administration
sought and Delhi got used to.
Obama seeks a "greening" of the US-India partnership, whereas
Indian strategists are schooled in the eight-year cherished belief that the
future of the US-India partnership lay in the two countries striding
"shoulder-to-shoulder" in terms of a shared "vision".
From the Indian end, the "vision" meant that the US recognized India's primacy
as the number one military power in the Indian Ocean region and built it up as
an Asian counterweight to China. The "vision" had a dream run during the Bush
era. India has held something like 50 military exercises with the US during the
past five-year period.
But Obama's priorities lie elsewhere. The America he inherited has different
priorities. The world, too, has changed following the global downturn. Clinton
is on a formidable diplomatic mission as the harbinger of startling tidings to
Delhi. Rhetoric has been completely lacking in her repertoire.
Her irrepressible predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, would have seized the moment,
with her schoolgirlish enthusiasm and brilliant smile, to insist that her
messianic mission was aimed at making India a world-class power. Indians
anxiously scoured the weekend papers and sorely missed the Ricean turns of
phrase.
Clinton was not lacking in charm - or enthusiasm - as she walked around
rain-swept Mumbai observing the wonderful work done by social activists who
championed the emancipation of downtrodden Indian women, or as she held the
hands of movie stars who double as educationists, and as she laughed and talked
with the captains of Indian industry who have made India's economic growth
happen. In a manner of speaking, it is symbolic that Clinton chose Mumbai for
her first halt - a city that insolently mocks Delhi for its pretentious airs.
The US-India relationship is a bit like a marriage where one partner simply
needs some space. For the US, the centrality of Pakistan in its regional
policies in Central Asia and the Persian Gulf in the coming period is a
compelling reality. Therefore, Clinton chose to give an interview to the
Pakistani media (even ahead of any Indian media interaction) so that Islamabad
did not need to fear the outcome of her India visit. Clinton said:
Well,
I think if you go back and look at the history between the United States and
Pakistan, we were not always as sensitive or understanding of the needs of the
Pakistani people. We were not always constant in our support and our friendship
for Pakistan ... So it's been, I would argue, a relationship that hasn't been
as constant and as effective as we would want it to be ... I mean, we are just
human beings; we know that. But we want to be as honest in admitting them as
possible, learning from them, and then trying to move forward ... Our goal is
to be there as a constant friend and a country that Pakistan ... can rely on to
build up more trust and understanding between us, and to be of assistance when
asked by Pakistan.
Yet, she proceeded to India first. The
Indians are intrigued. They were hoping to present Clinton with a list of
convincing reasons why the US and India should collaborate as partners in
pressuring Pakistan to amend its record of breeding international terrorism and
proliferating nuclear technology. But Clinton made it clear that Washington is
pretty pleased with Pakistan's performance in the "war on terror" and that the
Pakistani nuclear inventory was securely fastened, no matter Islamabad's past
behavior - and that's all that mattered today.
Indians will be wrong to take this amiss. The heart of the matter is that the
US cannot allow any third party to interrupt the crucially important business
of its close collaboration with Islamabad to stabilize Afghanistan through
dialogue with the Taliban. As the spokesman of the Pakistani military recently
told CNN in an interview, it is the Pakistani intelligence that can bring
hardcore Taliban leaders Mullah Omar and Jalaluddin Haqqani to the negotiating
table with the US.
Furthermore, as the great game accelerates in Central Asia and if the situation
around Iran assumes criticality, Pakistan is becoming a key partner. Pakistan's
brusque integration into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is
self-evident. Indians, unfortunately, missed the plot. Up until last year,
strategists in Delhi even fancied notions of an Indian military deployment in
Afghanistan.
The Indians' deeply entrenched suspicion about Chinese intentions corrode their
judgment and prevent them from connecting the dots that separate the Hindu Kush
and the Pamirs and the Silk Road. They fail to comprehend the great game. Over
the weekend, a prominent Indian commentator showed incredible naivety to argue
New Delhi should use its influence with northern Afghan tribes - Tajiks,
Uzbeks, Hazaras - to muddy Uyghur ethnic tension in Xinjiang.
What perturbs Indian strategists, haunted by the specter of Kashmir, is how
Pakistan might take advantage of the US. Clinton came dangerously close when
the Pakistani interviewer probed her. "I think that the disputes between India
and Pakistan, which are historical and long-standing, should be looked at with
fresh eyes ... The United States stands ready to support the steps ... but it's
not just the government, but the people ... Well, it [Kashmir]
certainly should be on the agenda of discussion between India and Pakistan."
(Emphasis added.)
On balance, however, India's testiness as it awaited Clinton was of its own
making. Its regional policy is touching a low point today and its regional
influence in Central Asia is almost negligible. The top items on Clinton's
agenda are to secure an investment protection agreement and an end-use
monitoring deal with Delhi that accords with US legislation making sure sales
of military equipment are used for the purpose stated.
Meanwhile, the US signed a technology safeguards agreement that is a requisite
first step (pending negotiation of a commercial space launch agreement) towards
allowing India to launch US satellites or third-country satellites that have US
equipment on board. The US has a similar agreement with China.
The irony is that New Delhi has done all it could in recent years to harmonize
its regional policies with those of the US. Its response to the new cold war
has been to keep a calibrated distance from its traditional ally, Russia. Its
response to the US-Iran standoff over Tehran's nuclear program has been to
atrophy India's close and friendly ties with Iran. Its response to the US's
containment strategy toward China has been to identify with the strange idea of
a quadripartite alliance with the US, Japan and Australia.
In comparison, Pakistan zeroed in on the potentials of US intervention in
Afghanistan and the implications of the great game in Central Asia for the US's
geo-strategy - especially the role of Islamist elements. An extremely rewarding
relationship has followed since 2001, as naturally as daybreak. For a while,
Pakistan got worked up that George W Bush might be tilting toward India when he
signed a nuclear deal for the civilian use of nuclear power. But as Clinton's
visit shows, the nuclear deal has become controversial.
The Obama administration is determined to bring the nuclear deal within an
overall architecture of global nuclear non-proliferation. As a first step, the
US got its Group of Eight partners at the recent summit meeting in Italy to
accept that countries such as India that reject the nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty (NPT), ought to be denied all ENR (enrichment and reprocessing)
technology.
Where Delhi estimated that the nuclear deal amounted to a tacit US acceptance
of its nuclear-weapon status, the opposite seems to be happening - a tightening
of screws. While India hoped that the massive business opportunities in the
Indian nuclear market would prompt avaricious Americans to jettison their
non-proliferation agenda, Washington will have it both ways - lucrative
business as well as a reinvigorated NPT regime. Clinton sought fresh Indian
reassurances to import US nuclear reactors worth billions of dollars in the
near term. The Indians sound self-righteous by claiming the US is rolling back
the nuclear deal. Actually, the Bush administration was transparent that the US
hoped to bring India into the nuclear non-proliferation regime. But Indian
discourses almost uniformly pillory Obama as the villain of peace.
Where does the US-India relationship go from here? The unveiling during
Clinton's visit of a new strategic dialogue architecture intended to take
US-India relations to a higher level of "3.0" - to use Clinton's phrase -
covering non-proliferation, security, education and health and development -
underscores the Obama administration's commitment to the partnership with
India. Indeed, Washington has little reason to be apprehensive about the
prospects of the US-India relationship.
New Delhi has few options and less inclination to shift from its US-centric
foreign policy. India's political class, especially the ruling Congress party's
"GenNext", is largely "pro-US". The main opposition Hindu nationalist party,
the Bharatiya Janata Party, and its affiliates too are "pro-US". The left
parties, which clamored for an "independent foreign policy", are yet to recover
from their huge defeat in the recent parliamentary poll. The Indian corporate
media and the middle class root for "Amrika".
En route to Delhi, Clinton thoughtfully interacted with Indian corporate czars
in Mumbai who keenly await the end-user deal to break into weapons production
in collaboration with the US military-industrial complex. No doubt, Washington
knows a thing or two about how India's political economy works.
Last but not least, the US can always count on the umbilical cords of social
kinship that tie Delhi elites to the Indian diaspora in North America. Thus,
the saga of the US-Indian relationship remains seamless. Differences over
climate change or the Doha round are transient. Obama should know the US is
irreplaceable as 21st-century India's number one strategic partner.
Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign
Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka,
Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.
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