|
Krishna’s foreign policy priority |
 |
The re-established UPA has a new team in South Block with S.M. Krishna as the new External Affairs Minister. He will be starting his innings with a handicap that he has had no exposure to international diplomacy before being assigned the job. However, his lack of experience will be more than made up by the Minister of State assigned to him, Shashi Tharoor, former UN Assistant Secretary General, who returned home and jumped into the political arena after losing out to the US-backed Ban Ki-moon for the top post at the world body.
Krishna is settling down in his South Block office at a time when India’s relations with the US are not as intimate and friendly as they were during the Bush Administration. Though Obama has not shown any undue hostility towards this country and in his message of congratulations described Dr Manmohan Singh as a very wise man, his Pakistan compulsions have made him lean towards Islamabad more than towards this country. As against Obama, the former Bush Administration had shown an inclination to make India a strategic partner – politically and militarily. But, Obama, ever since his election campaign began two years ago, has not been warm towards India – be it on outsourcing or the much-touted US-India nuclear deal. He has now bowed to pressure from Islamabad to drop a demand for Pakistan to prevent terrorist attacks on India if it wants to qualify for a $1.5 billion annual aid for the next five years as part of the so-called PEACE Act. Reference to India has now been changed to “neighbouring countries”.
And, with the NPT review conference approaching fast, pressure is going to be felt by India to sign the treaty, more so after the second nuclear blast by another NPT non-signatory, North Korea. Every successive US administration since Bill Clinton has treated India as a strategically important partner in South Asia and the Bush Administration took it upon itself to informally hoist India as a strategically important partner in the region. President Bush went out of the way to have the US-India nuclear deal passed and get New Delhi NSG waiver for nuclear commerce. But, Obama sees a greater opportunity in engaging with China which he sees as a potential threat to US hegemony, and Pakistan, which under the new AfPak policy is seen as a crucial ally for ending Taliban terrorism in Afghanistan. The only role that Washington sees for India in the current dispensation is to be a passive regional player, especially to maintain peace with Pakistan so that free from its security worries on the Indian border, the Pakistan military could focus more on fighting Pakistan Taliban terrorism.
The rise of Pakistan Taliban has made President Obama turn his full attention to Pakistan rather than India which is rather being advised to reopen the composite dialogue with Islamabad so that it could pay more attention to fighting terrorism on its north-western border with Afghanistan. During the intervening period between the announcement of Lok Sabha elections and their results, at least three Indian neighbours passed through political crises: Sri Lanka fought its final war with the LTTE which had its reverberations in southern India with the major political parties putting pressure on the Manmohan Singh Government to make President Rajapaksa call off the offensive. In the north, Nepal Prime Minister Prachanda’s tiff with President Ram Baran Yadav over the dismissal of the Army chief, Gen Katawal, saw the Maoist leader packing up his bags but not before accusing India of conspiring with other political parties, the President and other stakeholders to topple him. And, in Pakistan, the offensive against the Taliban in Swat, just 100 kilometres from Islamabad, and as many as three major terrorist strikes in Lahore, just 40 kilometres from the Wagah border with India, has caused concern to New Delhi. The concern for security rose all the more after unconfirmed reports said that many Taliban militants had infiltrated into Jammu and Kashmir who would be more difficult to combat than the traditional infiltrators of LeT and JeM.
While New Delhi now has to ensure that the defeat of the LTTE does not go into the heads of the Sinhala leaders and they are made to offer a package of devolution of powers to the Tamils based on the 13th amendment and the Indo-Sri Lanka agreement of 1987 and Provincial Council elections are held in the liberated Northern Province. As for Pakistan, New Delhi will have to resist pressure from both Islamabad and Washington to resume the dialogue process despite Pakistan not taking credible action to stop export of terrorism from its soil.
As Krishna said in his first interaction with the press after being sworn in, Pakistan would pose him the first challenge to deal with. Although he has repeated the well-known UPA stand that Pakistan will have to rein in the terrorists and dismantle the terror infrastructure, with the situation in Pakistan described by President Obama as “very fragile” and fears of Pakistan being on the way to become a failed State, the international community wants India not to contribute to its more rapid failure. This translates into telling India to leave the Mumbai attacks behind and resume the composite dialogue. The new External Affairs Minister will therefore, have to take a call on these questions. He will have to assess whether the people are ready to forget Mumbai and forgive Pakistan. Two things which would go in favour of toning down the opposition to resuming the talks are: one, Pakistan has not exploited the Indian delay in handing over of evidence on the Mumbai attacks to justify derailing the Mumbai investigation and freeing the five top LeT operatives including its chief, Hafeez Sayeed; second, the ongoing military offensive against the terrorists in Swat and Buner has turned into a genuine attack rather than the phony wars which Pakistan used to wage earlier to get US economic and military aid. New Delhi must remember that the perpetrators of Mumbai did not want Pakistan to be at peace with India and by continuing to stall the resumption of the composite dialogue, New Delhi will only be furthering the terrorists’ game plan.
|
