The Meeting That Wasn’t

Except that Iraq, unfortunately, laid waste to the best laid plans. Armitage was caught up in the domestic politics of bombing Saddam Hussein and called to cancel. Another casualty of the Iraq crisis, meanwhile, has been the cancellation of the Foreign Office dialogue between India and the US. Now both sides are once again, looking for a time and place to take up where they left off in New York.

Strategic Crystal Bowl

Defence minister George Fernandes’ statement to the innocuous-sounding All India Primary Teachers Federation on the weekend, that PM Vajpayee should attend the SAARC summit in Islamabad, was clearly a political signal. Similar words by the MEA’s Minister of State Digvijay Singh last week were waved away by the foreign policy establishment, who pointed out that the PM couldn’t very well pay a visit to the ‘‘den of terrorism’’ until Islamabad redoubled its commitment to end cross-border infiltration. But Fernandes, who pretty much forced the issue of the army deescalation from the international boundary last week at the Cabinet Committee on Security, may now be signalling acquiescence with the PM’s line on such matters—especially after opposing him on the issue of the oil companies disinvestment.

In the aftermath of the Kashmir/Pakistan elections, Fernandes’ remarks seem especially significant, especially since the ‘‘Pakistan question’’ has always been a key domestic issue as much as a foreign policy one. With deputy prime minister L K Advani taking a much more hawkish line—note his intermittent invocation of the ‘‘list of 20’’ people that Pakistan must hand over to India—the PM obviously has his work cut out. Fernandes—and Digvijay Singh—could turn out to be more clairvoyant than they had bargained for.

Playing It Safe On Salem

Portugal has told India that it is not about to hand over Abu Salem, one of the prime accused in the 1993 serial bomb blasts in Mumbai, without going through the due process of law at home. After last month’s euphoria, when authorities in Lisbon arrested Salem and wife Monica Bedi on charges of carrying false documents, hope ran high that Salem would be soon deported. The Portuguese, working closely with New Delhi, were then reported to have indicated as much. So what happened?

What happened was that the CBI team, which went to Portugal soon after Salem’s arrest on September 18, spent much of their time confabulating with the Americans on how to fix Salem. In the Portuguese and the Indian media, too, the CBI were ecstatic about all the help the FBI was giving them, implying in the bargain that Lisbon was merely a tool in the hands of the big superpower. So when External Affairs minister Yashwant Sinha wrote seeking Salem’s deportation, his Portuguese counterpart Jaime Gama wrote back, saying, that that was not possible since the judicial process had to be gone through.

The MEA, having once been embarrassed by the CBI on the Nadeem extradition—when it put together such a shoddy case that London turned down MEA’s request—is now wondering what it will next do with Salem.

Talking Tehran

Foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal was in Iran over the weekend for the second ‘‘strategic dialogue’’ and foreign office consultations. With Tehran having emerged as a key transit point in the North-South corridor (Russia in the north, India in the south), as well as an entrepot for Indian business to the strategic prize, Afghanistan, Sibal’s trip—one of the first direct flights by Mahan Air—may well turn out be a building block in the bilateral relationship. The continuing tension in Teheran, between the reformers and the conservatives, which manifests itself in various ways—including Iran’s ‘‘actively neutral’’ position on a potential American strike on Iraq—must be one of the most interesting stories of our times.