New Delhi, 26 September 2004
We
have several times espoused that benign and good strategic relations
between two nations foster trade and India can gain much from the
USA, now that military to military relations between us are strong,
and business prospects along with outsourcing to India are looking
up. Bush is likely to be re-elected and he needs friends. Lets take
the gamble. India can be the friend he needs and our honest and
genuine PM Manmohan Singh, by his recent visit and discussions in
New York with Bush and Musharraf, has opened the path for India.
His
approach should be supported and if Musharraf needs India to move
the LOC a few miles East, as TIME magazine reported, to resolve the
Kashmir dispute in the years ahead, then the Indian Army should
certainly look at the idea seriously. We reiterate yet again that
the Government should encourage one to one contacts between
Generals, Admirals and Air Marshals of the two sides to gague
whether the Pakistanis are serious.
Musharraf
needs to save face if he is to remain in power. Unlike in India, it
is the nine Corps Commanders of Pakistan who run Pakistan –– not
the Government or the bureaucracy. There has to be thinking out of
the box. PM Manmohan Singh saved India when the chips were down with
$1 billion in reserves in 1991. He should be allowed to do it again,
this time in diplomacy.
It
was Montek Ahluwalia in Singapore in 1991, who after visiting
Bangkok with Dr Manmohan Singh, made the famous telegram to PM
Narasimha Rao that the Paris Club had given $3 billion in aid and if
India liberalised then India would be out of the woods. This is
certainly the case today.
India
is economically robust, but it needs to attend to power and literacy
in the villages to see that India supplies fruits and vegetables to
the world, and the 200 million below the poverty line can gain the
benefits.
Helmut
Kohl as Chancellor of Germany did not do much for Germany but one
day he paid Russia's Gorbachov $9 billion, made Russian troops leave
East Germany and brought down the Berlin Wall overnight. It was a
revolutionary approach.
We
need the same kind of revolutionary action in India. The
International border will have to come into being in the early part
of this Century –– along the LOC or somewhere along the LOC, and
that process can be speeded up. Then the huge Indian Army can be
transformed into two sections –– national security and homeland
security –– a dream we had alluded to some time back.
However,
Home Minister Advani made the para military forces the platform of
expansion at the cost of the Army and has confused the nation. The
unfounded inherent fear of an Army takeover is a phobia, which still
haunts our politicians despite the extreme loyalty of our armed
forces –– as if to say that the paramilitary forces if made
larger and strong enough cannot do the same thing!
We
need to create a very professional 400,000 rapid action Army with
firepower, technology and mobility and a 400,000 strong anti
insurgency Army who have no need to learn war fighting. Then Defence
spending can be streamlined.
Pakistan
realises that with the passing of time its position is getting
weaker and if Musharraf does not deliver with some face saving
formula, a rabid leader in Pakistan whom we will never be able to
trust, will be back to try and stall India's progress. It is in this
context that we highlight the article below.
The
Best Is Yet To Come ––
How
Manmohan Singh Charmed George W. Bush
By
K.P. NAYAR
The
Telegraph, September 23, 2004
Only
Manmohan Singh could have done it in a United Progressive Alliance
government, which has no shortage of Cold Warriors. He charmed
George W. Bush. During the brief media interaction at the breakfast,
which the American president hosted for the Indian prime minister on
Tuesday, Bush deferentially addressed Singh twice in one minute as
“Sir”. According to those who can vouch for the conversation at
the breakfast meeting, Bush did so more than once after the media
had withdrawn from the presidential suite at the Waldorf Astoria
Hotel in New York. Bush used to treat Atal Bihari Vajpayee with
similar respect, repeatedly calling him “Sir”. But according to
White House insiders, such treatment of foreign leaders has been
rare.
Bush
is either black or white: he has no shades of grey. He either likes
people or dislikes them. His sourness has put off Canada’s former
prime minister, Jean Chretien, and the French president, Jacques
Chirac. By Bush’s own admission, Malaysia’s former prime
minister, Mahathir Mohamed, has been at the receiving end of his
disdain. The British prime minister, Tony Blair, and Russia’s
Vladimir Putin are of his generation, and he likes both men. So
Blair is “Tony” and Putin is “Vladimir”. Bush is also fond
of giving nicknames to people –– his defence secretary, Donald
Rumsfeld, is “Rumstud” in private moments of levity, and Putin
is “Puty-put”.
It
was not expected that Bush would be so deferential to Singh. To
start with, their meeting was preceded by four sceptical months in
Washington when, somehow, an impression gained ground that the UPA
government would no longer consider ties with the US as the most
important relationship for the country in the way that the NDA
government used to look at bilateral engagement with Washington.
When
S. Jaishankar, South Block’s primary interlocutor with the United
States of America, arrived in Washington last month, shortly after
being appointed to the job, this scepticism prompted officials of
the Bush administration to plainly tell him exactly where India
stood in the American scheme of things, especially on the number-one
issue in their bilateral relations –– the next steps in
strategic partnership.
Among
those in this US administration who fervently believe that
Washington and New Delhi have much in common, some have gone out on
a limb to advance the cause of deeper engagements between the two
countries. In the process, they made enemies of their own peers —
in particular, many powerful men and women in the US for whom
nuclear non-proliferation and the spread of other weapons of mass
destruction are nothing short of an obsession.
It
is these friends of India — Ken Juster, the under-secretary for
commerce, to name one — who went about the near-impossible task of
modifying America’s export control regulations to facilitate the
export of high technology and dual civilian-military items to India.
They were responsible for the one American action which will be
cited for years to argue that Singh’s meeting with Bush has been a
success –– the US decision to take Indian Space Research
Organization off the entity list of organizations that dangerously
promote weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems. So
Jaishankar went back to New Delhi with the message that India had to
take it or leave it. The message was so stark also because of the US
presidential elections. If John Kerry became president, his first
priority was certainly not going to be the NSSP. He may well be
sceptical of the initiative exactly in the same way as the UPA
government was seen in Washington.
Even
if Bush wins a second term in November, officials like Juster may
not remain in their present jobs. They may be rewarded by Bush for
their work in his first term, with different, if better, jobs. The
national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, who has repeatedly
intervened in India’s favour, may not remain in the White House
and may join the cabinet instead. And if Kerry is elected, no one
among these friends of India will even be in the new administration.
By
the time the foreign secretary, Shyam Saran, concluded two days of
marathon talks with key players in Washington last week, confidence
had been restored within the Bush administration that contradictions
built into the UPA’s composition would not, after all, come in the
way of strengthening the Indo–US equation under this coalition’s
watch in New Delhi. All the same, there was anxiety on both sides
about how the first meeting between Bush and Singh would actually
turn out. Last week, as a prelude to the summit, protocol officials
in the White House ensured that Ronen Sen, the new Indian ambassador
to the US, presented his credentials to Bush in time for this
meeting. The exchange between Bush and Sen at the credentials
ceremony did not help in setting at rest this anxiety, according to
American sources. While no one doubts Sen’s intellectual strength
or his diplomatic skills, it was clear during the presentation of
credentials that Sen lacked the social graces of his immediate
predecessor, Lalit Mansingh, and the earthy charm of Naresh Chandra,
Mansingh’s predecessor.
The
conversation between Sen and Bush was matter-of-fact. To some it
even appeared that things did not augur well for Tuesday’s
breakfast. But when Bush and Singh actually met, everything changed.
Singh began his meeting with Bush with the words, “Under your
distinguished leadership, our two countries’ relations have grown
in diverse ways, but I do believe that the best is yet to come.”
It
was a clincher. Acutely deficient in qualities that have made
history’s great leaders, Bush is a sucker for praise, and is also
acutely conscious of his pedigree in American politics. In 2001,
three months after becoming president, another Singh — the then
external affairs minister, Jaswant — swept Bush off the grounds of
the White House Rose Garden when he told the president that his
father had taken the early steps to change America’s relations
with India for the better, and that the son of George Herbert Walker
Bush now had the historic opportunity to take his father’s
initiative forward.
And
this White House did just that. By the time L.K. Advani, then the
Union home minister, met Bush, the president had grown so
comfortable with the idea that India is a friend that he compared
himself to Advani. “I am known as the Toxic Texan. I speak my
mind. I am told you are like me,” Bush said to Advani at their
first meeting.
It
is important, therefore, that there was good chemistry between Bush
and Singh at their first meeting on Tuesday. The rest will fall in
place. Bush is not given to deep dissection of policies or global
affairs. His impressions are formed by what he is told by trusted
aides like Condoleezza Rice, or in the case of India, big
fund-raisers like Florida’s Indian-American multi-millionaire
doctor and family friend, Zach Zachariah — a Bush “Ranger”,
the term used for those who have raised at least $200,000 for the
president’s re-election effort.
For
Bush, Singh’s reputation came ahead of Singh. The prime minister
represented everything Bush touts: liberal economics, faith in
democracy, a willingness to work with the West, but most of all, a
lack of intellectual arrogance or self-righteousness. There are few
others in the UPA cabinet who could have charmed Bush. Most others,
including the external affairs minister, Natwar Singh, who
accompanied the prime minister to the breakfast summit, have an
ideological baggage that would have stuck out like a sore thumb with
Bush. Someone like the finance minister, P. Chidambaram, would show
complexes that would have immediately put Bush off. (Perhaps, the
only exception would have been Pranab Mukherjee.) But what matters
now is that Singh has ensured that should Bush be re-elected in
November, the best in Indo-US relations is “yet to come”.
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