The balance of power

Aditya Sinha
First Published : 27 Mar 2010 12:10:00 AM IST
Last Updated : 27 Mar 2010 12:25:12 AM IST

Indians are a moody lot, and it is obvious in the hilarious things written with regard to two Americans who in their youth visited Pakistan: David Coleman Headley and Barack Obama. If you watched the ebb and flow of the Headley headlines, you would have noticed how they changed from anger (what! He's going to get away with just a life sentence?) to suspicion (Headley was a double agent!) to resignation (an interview of Headley for his role in 26/11 was the best we could hope for) to optimism (We will interrogate him! Yes we can!). All of this was misplaced. The continuing talk of Headley being an American double agent is just plain silly. If he were, he wouldn't have gotten caught. Plain and simple, he did not want the death sentence; so he cut a deal with the prosecution and pleaded guilty. American judges may be politically partisan, but they are stubbornly independent of the executive branch of government.

Frankly, whether we interrogate Headley face-to-face or via video, or even if we dispatch an ultra-patriotic TV news anchor, the result will be the same: we will neither strengthen our investigation of 26/11 nor strengthen our dossier that keeps going to Pakistan (and directly into Interior Minister A Rehman Malik's dustbin) nor implicate Headley. It is likely that Headley will laugh in our faces. There is nothing extra that he can be threatened with. No doubt this will be adduced as further proof that he's a double agent, though it seems unlikely that the Americans would throw their agents into jail for life: just ask Rabindra Singh, former joint secretary of India's spy agency, RAW, who is enjoying the good life somewhere in the land of milk and honey.

You'd also think US President Barack Obama favours Pakistan over India, given that he wants US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan to begin in 2011, and that he has given Pakistan tacit approval for influencing the political future of Afghanistan so that Pakistan will keep up the pressure against jihadis in its tribal areas (and so that American unmanned drones can keep searching for al Qaeda the border badlands). Actually, Obama favours no one, not in the sense that he is neutral, but in the sense of being so preoccupied with his domestic agenda he has no time for significant foreign policy engagement. It is bad news for India that he enacted the most sweeping social reform legislation America has seen in 45 years with the passage of his healthcare reform bill. Though it is now law (that will not be rolled back for generations to come), healthcare reform still has many stages to go. Many details have to be ironed out as it begins to be administered; several judicial battles are at hand; and Obama has to go out and sell it to voters to ensure they understand why the reform is good for them (so that they don’t vote against his party this winter). This means he will be very busy.

If Obama is very busy, he has no time for West Asia (which is why Israel is thumbing its nose at everyone and constructing in East Jerusalem); he has no time for Europe; and he certainly has no time for us. So India-US relations return to their default position, run by the Pentagon (which loves the Pakistani army, and whose funding and manpower dwarfs that of the State Department). The default policy is simply this: while America covets India's growing middle-class’s purchasing power, it does not want the rise of India’s national power to go unchecked. America considers a balance of power in South Asia necessary and vital to its strategic interests. The hyphenation never really went away.

The US did begin a strategic dialogue that included a nuclear deal and many of our experts believe it was intended to keep China in check. This is funny considering how many miles ahead of us China has reached, but makes sense since no monarch ever chooses or cultivates a partner, only a vassal. If India is a vassal that has the potential of becoming powerful decades from now, then the US, which plans deep into the future, will ensure that India never quite realises its potential.

This means two things: no matter what happens, Pakistan will exist for the forseeable future, even if it appears to be a failed state; it is unlikely to break up. It will muddle along, and it may even produce lots of terrorists, but what do the Americans care? They've got enough homeland security in place so that even if they don't look as fortress-like as Israel they have still managed to prevent any major terrorism attacks since 9/11 (while India suffers one attack after another, including 26/11). Pakistan's leaders are canny enough to exactly know the equation, so that they throw tantrums about getting recognition as a nuclear state (knowing that after the exposure of A Q Khan's nuclear black market, no one will ever trust it with nuclear fuel for weaponry), and the Americans indulge them with a smile, the way parents smile at an infant who makes unreasonable demands. India's leaders, on the other hand, find themselves in a relationship of dependency, where America dictates the terms: for example, the Nuclear Liability Bill, which will allow America to sell us ruinously expensive nuclear power plants but lets them off the hook in case their plants cause a Chernobyl-type disaster. We give America what it wants, and are happy with the leftovers they fling from the high table.

So what do we do? Some suggest we return to high troop levels in Kashmir in order to force Pakistan to divert its troops from the Afghan border and thereby put pressure on America; the idea is that if America wants more forces to fight jihadis in Waziristan, it will have to stop giving sops to Pakistan. That's not realpolitik, that's just dumb. To increase troops in Kashmir is to worsen the plight of our own citizens; it does not take us in the direction of finding a political solution to a long-standing problem. We have to sort out Kashmir ourselves because it is clear the US and Pakistan will never do so.

Better than tiring our troops out, we should assert our independence in foreign policy. Perhaps we should move creatively on strengthening bonds with China and Iran, or with China and Russia. They will never give us Headley, even if we give them access to 26/11 accused Kasab; heck, they won’t even give us unlimited visas, as we give their students. But we can give them pause for thought, that ours need not be a relationship of dependency, and that we too can play the game of balance of power.

editorchief@expressbuzz.com

About The Author;

Aditya Sinha is the Editor-in-Chief of ‘The New Indian Express’ and is based in Chennai