Days of dialogue

Officials in the Ministry of External Affairs are unusually realistic about the need to manage differences in the relationship, especially in the context of a unipolar world. Nevertheless they are not unwilling to show, when the time is right, that the bride may be coy but she sure has teeth.Washington’s mantra of the mid-1990s, that of pushing India to “cap, roll back and eliminate”its nuclear capability, may not be part of the foreground in the Raghunath-Pickering discussions, but it is a message that will persist in the shadow of the talks.

Similarly, the US will in all likelihood completely play down their role in the resolution of the Kashmir dispute, but the stress on reviving the Indo-Pakistan dialogue will remain.

“When the president’s envoy Bill Richardson came here last month, we were told that we’ve been very good boys, we’ve exercised (nuclear-missile) restraint for so many years, we didn’t do anything when Pakistan test-fired the `Ghauri,’ so would we please continue this in the future,” one source said.

But as Raghunath asked his American interlocutors recently, what did the much-vaunted term “strategic dialogue” mean in the first place for India?In his favourite, public, rambling style, the foreign secretary told the media here : “Dialogue is like speaking prose…(but) what is it that we need to do to get the best out of this dialogue…we will discuss issues,there may be some problems…the whole purpose is to have a process that is flexible.”

Washington’s interest in India — or at least, South Asia — has not been as obvious, on the other hand, in many decades. The fact of winning the Cold War has spurred America’s desire of being the world’s chief problem-solver. Clinton has now turned his mind to the Indian sub-continent : sending a special envoy, Bill Richardson, to negotiate between sworn enemies in Afghanistan, the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, to bring the 20-year-old war to an end in that country, is a brightly-coloured feather in his cap.Apart from the nuclear question, the Americans primarily want India to continue with its economic reform : open up hitherto closed areas like insurance, basic telecom and the enormous energy sector so that American businessmen can make money. From Russia to Central Asia to Latin America, the principle of boosting the balance sheets of US companies under the guise of open competition — thereby fulfilling theprimary purpose of gaining overweening strategic and political control in that region, seems to have dominated US foreign policy.

As the bilateral dialogue, then, unfolds, an astonishing congruence of views on giving high priority to energy security seems to have taken place. Washington accepts that India’s 900 million-plus population, and therefore as the largest consumer in the region, will give New Delhi enormous leverage in the direction in which energy resources, like oil and natural gas, will be channelised.

India’s perennial state of being strapped for cash as well as its huge energy needs will, in turn, give Washington the necessary control over “how, which and when” the states of the sub-continent — Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Pakistan and Afghanistan — can come together to put together a network of high-profit pipelines to be run by US companies. In Nepal, there’s Enron, in Bangladesh a host of US gas companies, in Afghanistan there’s Unocal…perhaps Washington’s interest in stopping theAfghan war does not only stem from humanitarian purposes — including the need to stop trafficking in drugs — but seeks to enable Unocal to reactivate its old project to lay pipelines through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Arabian Sea.

India’s interest in extending the exploitation of energy resources to include nuclear energy, has, however, not received as favourable a response in Washington yet. The old line continues : accept safeguards before any help is possible in either the transfer of technology in nuclear cooperation or sign the NPT. Its a line any government in New Delhi will only buy at its peril.

Foreign office sources here point out that for any “strategic dialogue” to succeed, it has to be government-led. “Indian students didn’t stop going to US universities after the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise sailed into the Bay of Bengal in 1971,” one source said, adding, “but the relationship, effectively, went into cold freeze.” Ten years after the end of the Cold War, the defreezing isabout to begin.

Raghunath will also go over familiar territory and hope to crack some American stereotypes : how as the largest democracy, India must be represented as a permanent member in an expanded Security Council, how Washington must lift some of its export controls on high-technology, how the nation’s strategic environment is being vitiated due to Chinese help in Pakistan’s nuclear and missile programme…

On top of the US list is Clinton’s visit to South Asia — India, Pakistan and Bangladesh — in November, and how New Delhi mustn’t do anything that will in any way muddy the waters before.

Both parties have in principle agreed about the tie-up. The question is, how far should the US demands be accepted? And how should the whole affair be packaged and presented to the public?