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US pressures on India will not work

India's Jaswant Singh and the State Department's India hand, Strobe Talbott, met in Rome for their seventh round of talks since Pokhran-II. Their meeting came in the wake of the completion of the first round of talks between India and Pakistan since Pokhran-II.

The contrasting figures tell their own story of how skewed is India's foreign policy. We may have been seen heading somewhere if it had been seven rounds with Pakistan and one with the US, for we have it in us to determine the course of India-Pakistan relations. As for the United States, the US administration is the prisoner of so many pressures, passions and prejudices that the only compromises it is capable of contemplating are those that India or Pakistan will make, not what Washington will make.

This has been underlined by two recent events that have clouded the Rome encounter. The first is an interview given by Talbott to the Indian media. Unambiguously, and with double stress, he has said the US will never accord recognition to India or Pakistan as nuclear weapon powers in the context of NPT definitions. This shows that the previous six rounds have been an exercise in futility. The gestures of goodwill -- Talbott driving to the Watergate Hotel in Washington to take Jaswant home to a meal personally cooked by Strobe's wife -- have been empty gestures. The US bottomline is that India accede to NPT as a non-nuclear weapon power and fall in line on the CTBT.

No Indian government can do that and survive. CTBT, perhaps yes, but barely; NPT, no. Not even if Pakistan were to bend at the knee. The American strategy appears to be to divide India and Pakistan and then, taking advantage of Pakistan's economic difficulties (which are very much greater than India's) induce Pakistan to sign up and then confront India with a Pakistani signature.

Unfortunately, India and Pakistan have passed up a splendid opportunity to counter this version of divide-and-rule which was theirs for the taking at the UN General Assembly. The Americans also know that the threat of a South Asia n-war is a bogey of their own making. It is not going to happen. Yet, what the Americans know but will not say is that there is a host of unavowed threshold n-weapon powers with whom their relations are hostile. Prime among these are North Korea and Iran. The US dare not accord recognition to the n-status of India and Pakistan for fear that this might open up the doors of the n-club to others like Iran and North Korea whom they are determined to blackball.

Which is why it follows that both Jaswant Singh and Strobe Talbott are talking to the wrong person: each other. Jaswant ought to be talking to the Pakistanis and Talbott to the Iranians. That is why their tango in Rome, like their earlier tangos in other exotic locales, is only getting their legs tangled.

Realising this, albeit faintly, the Americans are switching from coercion to discrimination. Although the US President has been authorised by Congress to lift economic sanctions against both countries, earlier mandated by the Glenn Amendment, the White House has chosen to exercise this power more in favour of Pakistan than India. The stick not having quite worked, the carrot is now being dangled. India, however, is no donkey. (Nor, for that matter, is Pakistan).

Far from rushing to sign the CTBT, even without any commitment on NPT, notwithstanding newspaper reports of Pakistan's willingness to do so, the combination of coercion and discrimination has pushed even so weak a government as Vajpayee's to say more unambiguously than it has done since Pokhran-II that the CTBT is not on, and that the NPT is out of the question.

If, therefore, Indo-Pak diplomacy is skewed by the failure of both countries to accord higher priority to each other than to the outside world, so also is American diplomacy skewed by imagining that American concerns and American priorities can take precedence in South Asia over South Asian concerns and South Asian priorities. So naive has America's South Asian policy been that they seem to have imagined that the prospect of a visit by President Clinton would be enough to bring both countries slavering to the negotiating table. That, at least as for as India is concerned, has just not been the case. Even the more conciliatory approach adopted by Pakistan has more to do with economic compulsions than any change of heart.

The best friends of India and Pakistan in the United States are the US business lobby. If American companies either make money in South Asia or, because of US foreign policy, lose out to competitors from elsewhere, they have the power to twist and turn State Department policies to their business ends. Uniquely, in the US system, the business of government is the business of business. US business interest are, therefore, keeping the worst of sanctions at bay. While this is of assistance to both South Asian countries, it does little to resolve either their mutual problems or their troubled relations with the United States.

It would, therefore, appear to be in the interests of all to keep US-South Asia relations simmering on a backburner while addressing more vigorously (and constructively) the India-Pakistan dialogue. Meanwhile, if India and Pakistan were jointly to ready a fresh initiative for the elimination of n-weapons (drawing from the 1988 Rajiv Gandhi Action Plan) and pursue this together, first in the Non-Aligned Movement and then at the UN/CD, and, of course, with third countries, including the US, the fact that the two countries have stepped across the n-threshold might still turn out to be a giant leap for peace instead of, as at present, the sounding of the bugles of war.

Mani Shankar Aiyar