Responding to the U.S. request to send troops to occupied, post-war Iraq, India’s army is going full steam ahead with preparations for possible deployment. Meanwhile, Indian policymakers are grasping for justifications that the mobilization would be under a UN umbrella and would serve the national interest, neither of which is plausible.
In the wake of the Iraq War, growing tensions with Iran, and a possible confrontation with North Korea, it would be easy to miss the formation of yet another Washington think tank. But the freshly minted U.S.-India Institute for Strategic Policy is an organization to watch and one that may help reveal the next target of American power: containing China.
Close on the heels of Indian National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra’s call for an India-U.S.-Israel strategic alliance, comes the confirmation that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will be visiting India in the next few weeks. Some observers in New Delhi consider Mishra’s call, made at the annual dinner of the American Jewish Committee, as a curtain raiser for the Sharon visit. What they seem to ignore is that the India-U.S.-Israel strategic alliance has moved beyond last call to center stage and that the plan for Sharon’s visit is some 15 months old.
India’s political leaders’ responses to the U.S.-led war in Iraq are notable for what they say about the country’s willingness to sacrifice traditional concerns regarding nonalignment and international law for the opportunity to raise its profile and power on the world stage. They have, in all but words, chosen to side with empire.
The Bush administration has enlisted India in its campaign against the newly formed International Criminal Court. On December 26th representatives of both governments signed an agreement, which provides that neither country will surrender persons of the other country to any international tribunal without the other country’s express consent. Of all the sixteen countries that have signed such bilateral agreements with the U.S.–most of them under pressure or threat–India is by far the most significant.
Resolution 1441 is more an alternative “legal” road to war rather than an alternative to war itself. Extrapolating from Saddam Hussein’s previous behavior, the Security Council resolution will lead to war as surely as a position of unilateral U.S. belligerence. The Iraqi ruler will need an unprecedented political and psychological makeover to eat the copious and indigestible helpings of humble pie that the UN resolution prescribes being shoveled down his maw.
As tensions between India and Pakistan began building late last year, high-level delegations from the United States and Britain flew in and out of New Delhi and Karachi lobbying for peace. That’s not all they were lobbying for. With the scent of blood in the air, the arms jackals have poured into South Asia, sometimes in the suits of leading government officials.
There isn’t a time when an educated Indian doesn’t search for answers from “America–the dream land” for the problems that crop up time and again back home. Whether it is hunger, sustainable agriculture, kick-starting industrial growth, food habits, music, or of course the successful model of economic growth, India must follow the Americans. No wonder, the intelligentsia, the economists, and the scientists are always desperate for opportunities to travel and return with a bag full of answers to our multitude of problems.
India is playing a highly risky game of brinkmanship in Kashmir. Its recent deployment of forces along the line of control (LoC), the de facto border between India and Pakistan in Kashmir, and the extremely provocative rhetoric from Delhi have brought the region closer to a nuclear war than ever before.
Almost 40 years ago, the late Pakistani leader Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who was then serving as Pakistan’s foreign minister, famously declared “even if Pakistanis have to eat grass we will make the bomb.” India and Pakistan have since fought two conventional wars and now have nuclear weapons poised to complete the short five-minute arc to the other’s national capital.