NEW DELHI - Clearing the way for close military ties, resumed sale of defense equipment and millions of dollars in direct economic assistance, United States President George W Bush has lifted the sanctions imposed against Pakistan following the bloodless military coup led by now-President General Pervez Musharraf in October 1999. The move comes a week after US Secretary of State Colin Powell announced in Islamabad that Pakistan's status was being elevated to that of a major non-NATO ally (MNNA). Sanctions related to Pakistan's nuclear tests in 1998 have already been lifted.
As a result, India is questioning its own "strategic partnership" with Washington, and many influential Indians are calling US rhetoric hollow and saying it confers no benefits. Some influential Indians even are talking of economic warfare with the US "enemy".
India is deeply worried, in view of Pakistan's past belligerence toward New Delhi whenever it was able to establish close military and economic ties with the US. The Sikh-majority Indian state of Punjab and Muslim-majority Kashmir became problem spots for India during the period of close Pakistan-US military ties in the 1980s when they launched a joint campaign to send Soviet troops packing from Afghanistan. Now the US and Pakistan have launched what some in India consider to be another joint jihad, this time against the same jihadis whom they had urged, trained and financed to fight the Soviet infidels in the 1980s. At that time they were referentially called mujahideen, but now the joint jihad has forged even closer ties between Washington and Islamabad.
"There could be problems if Pakistan uses its MMNA tag to put up a price vis-a-vis Indo-Pak issues," a senior official in India's Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) told journalists. MEA officials are indicating that New Delhi will formalize its position on Islamabad's MNNA status only after getting to understand its "behavior pattern" in the aftermath of the US decision.
India's experience in the context of Pakistan's Cold War-era alliance with the West under the Baghdad Pact - a defense pact involving Middle Eastern countries from 1954 until 1979 - and its successors, the Central Treaty Organization and the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) was no different. Pakistan tried to get help from its allies for its war against India in 1965 and 1971, but without success. Citing these experiences, India's ministry of external affairs sources said: "The MNNA status is an enabling provision aimed at facilitating defense supplies. We have to see what actually gets delivered."
Soon after Powell's announcement, Robert Blake, deputy to US ambassador David C Mulford, had met senior MEA officials, US embassy sources said. Blake is believed to have told officials that Washington considered India as its strategic partner and was committed to further cementing Indo-US ties.
Yet, a lot of confusion and uncertainty has crept into the steadily growing US-India relationship. The fact that India was kept completely in the dark about the latest lifting of sanctions against Pakistan has exposed what New Delhi considers to be the hollowness of claims that India-US ties are strategic in nature.
Busy in their re-election campaign, Indian leaders are trying to show that they are not worried about Pakistan's major non-NATO ally (MNNA) status. They have even rejected with disdain the suggestion that the US also was willing to consider a MNNA status for India, if it applied for it.
But the more India thinks, the more it gets worried. Pakistan's MNNA status cannot be simply dismissed as of no great consequence. The worry is, however, not just about how Pakistan will respond and how this will affect India's relations with the US. The entire gamut of India's ties with the West, even the policy framework regarding globalization and liberalization of its economy, is coming under scrutiny. The very feasibility of the transfer of Western technology to India - the primary reason why India had decided to open up its economy in the early 1990s - is becoming questionable. Hardly any worthwhile technology transfers have taken place as of yet or are likely to take place in the foreseeable future, despite all the promises and sweet words about so-called strategic ties.
One reason this is cause for serious concern for those espousing pro-globalization policies in the last few years is that from all indications, the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is likely to increase its tally of seats in the parliament this spring. If this happens, the BJP will grow stronger in the governing alliance and its ideological mentor, the Hindu fundamentalist Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) and its extended family, called the Sangh Parivar, will come to have a greater say in policy formulation.
The RSS-linked Swadeshi Jagran Manch, with its pronounced anti-globalization views, is waiting in the wings to run India's economy and foreign relations, something that will not suit the US. The manch believes that the West has been able to maintain its economic pre-eminence by teaching false economics to the developing countries. While some can dismiss leftist and socialist anti-globalization campaigns as of no consequence, they cannot treat the Hindu Right in present-day India with the same contempt.
So the future of US-India ties will depend largely on the election results. RSS-supported economists believe that the world has entered the era of economic warfare with the developed nations and that by kowtowing to the US, India is merely prolonging its status as a developing country. This is also the view of India's president, missile scientist Dr Abdul Kalam, whom the RSS sponsored for the post of the president, even though he is a Muslim. The ideas expressed in his books - about economic warfare - are very popular in the country.
In a recent write-up, Sangh Parivar's favorite economist, Bharat Jhunjhunwala, praises Kalam: "President Kalam has placed the objective of India becoming developed by 2020. The Western countries have misled us into believing that we can improve our conditions only by receiving technology and capital from them. A healthy young man will stop playing football if he is told everyday that he is not capable of playing the game. Similarly, the West has told us that we cannot become equal to them and we have meekly accepted their talk. The West has no roadmap for the developing countries becoming "equal" even, say, after hundred years. Their strategy is to keep us locked into the "developing" mode. Dr Kalam has done well to break this hypnosis and proclaim that our objective is to become developed by 2020."
Whether or not Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishan Advani fully understand the implications of Kalam's 2020 vision, they are crisscrossing the country in the present election campaign propagating his message. "India 2020" has become a BJP slogan. In his book, India 2020: A Vision for the New Millennium, Kalam says, "It is not just that the Indian nuclear tests are resented. If tomorrow Indian software export achieves a sizable share in the global market, we should expect different types of reactions.
"Similarly, if India becomes a large exporter of agro-products, various new issues would be raised. Developed countries are setting up non-tariff barriers to trade to deny us the opportunities to reach the developed status. Even a simple analysis of many of these global transactions indicates a much deeper fact: The continuous process of domination over others by a few nations. India has to be prepared to face such selectively targeted actions by more powerful players. What appears to be emerging is new kind of warfare."
Jhunjhunwala, comments in his column in the pro-government newspaper The Pioneer, considered close to the RSS: "The West has been able to maintain its economic pre-eminence by teaching false economics to us. It has taught that developing countries should increase their exports so that their production comes up to global standards. But increase in exports also means we export more of our resources. We pack our water and soil into the basmati rice and send it for consumption by foreign people. The farmer is being told that selling his water and soil is the route to prosperity. We are exporting larger quantities of our resources at lower prices.
"It never dawns upon us that it is not necessary to export in large quantities to attain global efficiency. Exports in small quantities are sufficient for the purpose, just as one reception is sufficient to establish the beauty of the new bride. The correct route is to produce efficiently, reduce the quantity and increase the price of our exports and consume more of it ourselves. But we have been taught that eating coarse rice ourselves and exporting basmati rice will beget us prosperity. Truly, we should make cartels of our exports like iron ore, tea, coffee and jute and raise their prices like OPEC [Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries] has done for oil. We should increase our imports, not exports."
This is consistent with Kalam's observation that since 1990s the "world has graduated into economic warfare". Jhunjhunwala continues: "There is need to clearly understand our role in maintaining the strength of the developed countries. The World Bank has pointed out in its Global Development Finance report that the developing countries have become net exporters of capital. Developing countries are buying US Treasury Bills and depositing their money in Western banks in order to hold their forex reserves. Each year they are collectively sending about US$100 billion to the developed countries through this route. Another $100 billion is going through illegal remittances.
"The developed countries are receiving about $200 billion a year through these routes and are making $150 billion worth of FDI [Foreign Direct Investment] in the developing countries. They are net recipients of capital of about $50 billion. They are using their money sent by us to buy our goods. The Reserve Bank of India buys US Treasury bills and Indian businessmen send their incomes abroad through hawala [illegal channels]. The US uses the money to buy our cloth and basmati rice, which we sell cheap in order to increase our export volumes as mentioned earlier.
"At the center of this unholy cycle - of we providing money to our enemy - is our continued buying of US Treasury bills or the dollar-denominated US securities. The US is running a trade deficit of $500 billion a year. The strength of the US and the dollar exists only as long as it can persuade the rest of the world to provide it with capital inflows to this extent. India and China are willing accessories to this US dominance by providing it with money through purchase of US Treasury bills and the like. If we were to stop sending this money to the US, the US would not be able to meet its import bills and the dollar would have to collapse - taking the US economic strength down along with it. That would lead to a totally different world scenario."
This is hardly the language of strategic partnership with the West that the BJP and the main opposition Congress party have been speaking of in the past decade. Indeed phrases like "economic warfare" and expressions like "enemy" for the West sound ominous coming from the pens of eminent personalities who have no reason to mouth empty rhetoric in the fashion of rabble-rousing politicians. These are deeply thought-out positions taken by responsible thinkers who have the good of India and the developing world at heart.
Even the original architect of India's globalization policy, the former Congress prime minister P V Narasimha Rao (1991-96) is alarmed at the turn of events. In a recent two-part article in the influential newspaper The Hindu, the octogenarian says: "In point of fact, not much that can be called meaningful has happened after the Cold War to demonstrate that a new era has dawned. One feels a little alarmed about why the expected golden period has not arrived and why the possibility of its appearance is becoming dimmer by the day ? If we are to sustain democracy and development round the globe, there is no alternative to a genuinely multilateral, non-discriminatory, and development-oriented trading system."
India's hopes go up in smoke
India's dream that Bush's "next steps in the strategic partnership with India" would lead to easier access to US high technology has been dashed. The US placed severe restrictions on transfer of dual-use technologies, which have both civilian and military applications, to India following its 1974 nuclear tests. But In mid-January 2004, Bush and Vajpayee announced the upgrading of the existing "Glide Path" relationship to "Next Steps". Both leaders heralded it as a new era of cooperation. Curiously, they refused to provide any details. Two months later, as Powell visited India this month, he brought nothing worthwhile with him.
A senior US official stated that "India would receive no substantial technology unless the US was satisfied that India had tightened export controls." He further insinuated that Indian organizations had re-exported US technology to former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's regime, but didn't provide any evidence to support his allegations. Another senior US official stated that US cooperation in space technology would be "limited to humanitarian and scientific issues ... and would not have anything to do with electronic components or space launch vehicles or high-resolution imagery".
Analyst Ravi Visvesvaraya Prasad comments in an article in the Hindustan Times titled "America's two-timing": "It's hypocritical for the US to deny much-needed technology to the peaceful space program of a fellow democracy and a key ally in the 'War on Terror', when it has long countenanced transfer of dual-purpose technologies by US corporations to a totalitarian nuclear power like China. China's People's Liberation Army obtained satellite and missile technologies - such as encrypted radiation-hardened integrated circuits from Loral, post-boost vehicle technologies from Lockheed, telemetry systems from Motorola and nose-cone technologies from Hughes. Washington had denied permission for export of these very technologies to India following its Pokhran nuclear tests in May 1998.
The greatest disappointment to India has of course been in what is now known as the A Q Khan affair. US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz revealed that Washington acquiesced in Musharraf's pardon of Khan in return for greater Pakistani cooperation in crushing the Taliban and al-Qaeda. It was after this revelation that Indian intelligence and defense officials stopped wondering why the US had not put enough pressure on Pakistan to call off its test firing of the Shaheen II nuclear missile on March 9, even though it appeared so inconsistent with the mood of bonhomie prevailing in the sub-continent on account of the ongoing peace process and several successful confidence-building measures, including the resumption of cricketing ties after 14 years.
The US has about two months to change its current outlook. Whichever government comes to power in India following the forthcoming elections, it will insist that Washington clarify the meaning of terms like "strategic partnership", see that Pakistan does not resume its roguish behavior vis-a-vis India and transfer not only dual-use technologies, but even the much-needed defense, space, nuclear and missile technologies to India. The alternative will be strengthening the hands of those who want to take India down a different path.
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