New Delhi
26 December 2007
India ended the year the way it began -- adrift.
In November, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh returned from a 28-hour-long official visit
to Russia without concluding an agreement on cooperation in the construction of four
additional nuclear power plants at Kudankulam, a memorandum of intent for which was
adopted during Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to India in January. India didn't
want to antagonise the United States (US) at a time when the proposed India-US civil
nuclear cooperation agreement is in the works.
Minister of External Affairs Pranab Mukherjee travelled to Iran in February in the hope of
keeping Indo-Iranian relations on an even keel but another year lapsed without India
making any progress on the Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) gas pipeline project. India didn't
want to antagonise the US by engaging Iran when US President George W Bush
predicted that World War III is likely if Iran gains nuclear weapons. (It's another matter
that the December 3 publication of US National Intelligence Estimate's assessment of
Iran's nuclear programme repudiated Washington's claims.) New Delhi dispatched
Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon to Tehran earlier this month but it did not say
whether it will take steps to ensure that the IPI gas pipeline project becomes a reality. In
sharp contrast, Pakistan recently announced that a contract for a pipeline project to
transfer Iranian gas to Pakistan is ready. So much for India's, and Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh's, quest for energy security.
India has consistently stayed away from the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO)
and 2007 was no different because, again, India didn't want to antagonise the US by
taking interest in an "anti-NATO" (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) grouping. "All that I
was interested in was to see that if the Indian Prime Minister goes to such meetings, he
should not sit on the side table in the coffee lounge and not be involved in an active
manner," Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told Parliament, to fend off the criticism that
he did not attend SCO meetings. The Prime Minister conveniently forgot his annual
sojourns to the Group of Eight (G-8) Summit where by his own admission India was
neither one of the "active participants in the G-8 process" nor was its point of view
reflected in the G-8 communiqué, which, incidentally, was issued before the meeting of
the G-8 Heads of State with the leaders of India and four other Outreach countries. It
didn't bother New Delhi that the nascent quadrilateral (India, US, Japan and Australia)
initiative and the naval exercises with the navies of the US, Australia, Japan and
Singapore are manifestly aimed at furthering the West's agenda of containing China.
New Delhi's myopia extended to its disinterest in ascertaining the impact of it all on its
unresolved border dispute with China. India sought to make amends towards the end of
the year by participating in joint military exercises with China, ahead of the Prime
Minister's visit to Beijing in January 2008.
New Delhi's obsession with the proposed India-US nuclear deal, at the expense of other
foreign policy matters of a bilateral, regional or international nature, did not pay desired
dividends in 2007 and it led India into a situation where it had to choose between old
friends and new allies. A grudging acknowledgment of that came earlier this month when
Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon said in New Delhi that the strategic shape of the
world offers an opportunity for India to engage with all major powers. "We see the
evolving situation as one in which there is an opportunity for India. Today the
international situation has made possible the rapid development of our relationships
with each of the major powers," he said in his inaugural address on foreign policy
dialogue with the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. "The result
is a de-hyphenation of relationships with each other, of each major power engaging with
all the others, in a situation that might perhaps be described as 'general un-alignment',"
he added.
Even on the nuclear deal, India missed the small print and big picture. The year began
with a section of the scientific fraternity voicing its reservations about the Henry J Hyde
US-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act of 2006 and its implications. The
scientists contended that the Hyde Act will be binding on India but the government
insisted it is not. However, National Security Adviser MK Narayanan reinforced the fears
of the scientific community when he told a news conference that the Hyde Act is a
domestic law and the US Administration will be bound by it. "We have seen to (it) that no
law is broken," Mr Narayanan told reporters after he and his negotiating team returned
from Washington with an agreed text of the 123 Agreement. The four Left parties, which
shore up the UPA Government, maintained through the year that their opposition to the
text and context of the nuclear deal remained.
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