asianaffairs

Singh's spiralling woes

As the UN General Assembly meets in New York, Inder Malhotra looks at the problems facing India both at home and abroad, including her dwindling relationship with America.

By Inder Malhotra

BAD TO WORSE?: Dr Singh's decision to meet Mahmoud Ahmedinejad on American soil will not improve Indo-US relations

At the time of writing, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is in New York to attend a session of the UN General Assembly (UNGA). He had not been there for three consecutive years and this time around has gone reluctantly, primarily because, after an interval of 20 years, this country is a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council until the end of 2012. Also, India's leader could not abstain from a session where the issue of Palestine's statehood has come to the fore.

The dilly-dallying made the usual meeting on the sidelines of UNGA with US president Barack Obama impossible. Luckily, there has not been too much hand-wringing in India on this score because the truth is that, even if such a meeting had taken place, no useful purpose would have been served. For Indo-US relations have lost considerable steam since Obama's visit to New Delhi in November last year when the visiting president dubbed the ties between the two nations 'the defining relationship of the century'.

For instance, the Americans are miffed by India's nuclear liability law that has prevented American firms from partaking in this country's lucrative nuclear market, worth $150 billion. India, on the other hand, is dismayed

that, having promised it 'full nuclear cooperation' under the 2008 nuclear deal, the US is now trying to deny it enrichment and reprocessing technologies. The crowing irony is that both Dr Singh and Mr Obama are so deeply mired in domestic crises and challenges that neither is in a position to assuage the other's concerns.

That said, there are some unstated nuances of the Singh-Obama non-meeting. The ostensible reason for their failure to meet is that the US President had to leave New York before the Indian Prime Minister's arrival. But such a situation created no problem during the George W Bush era. A much warmer friend of India, he would invite Dr Singh to the White House. Mr Obama was in no position to do so for an intriguing reason.

Currently America's relations with Pakistan, for long bruited as its 'key ally' in the 'war on terror', are so bad as to have reached rock bottom. Yet Pakistan's Prime Minister, Yusaf Raza Gilani, while completing all arrangements for going to the UN, sent an urgent request for a meeting with the US president, whose reply was a curt 'no'. Thereupon, Mr Gilani cancelled his visit on the pretext that he wanted to take care personally of the horrendous damage caused by savage floods. The Pakistani media has ridiculed the explanation.

For his part, Mr Obama, having snubbed Mr Gilani, could not possibly have gone out of his way to ask Dr Singh over to the White House. There is no escaping the 'hyphenation' between India and Pakistan. It is in this context that a US state department official blandly declared: 'We are not receiving any leader from South Asia this time', and went on to add that Dr Singh would have two opportunities to meet Mr Obama soon — at the East Asia summit in Bali in October, and at November's G-20 summit in Cannes.

As for Palestinian statehood, the gulf between the US and India is as obvious as it is wide. Mr Obama has already declared that the US would veto the Palestinian request; India is honour-bound to stand up and be counted in Palestine's favour. This country's support for the cause of Palestine may no longer be as ardent as it used to be before the transformation of relations with America and establishment of full and friendly relations with Israel. But it remains unmistakable. New Delhi is one of the few world capitals to host an ambassador of Palestine.

Moreover, the US president was aware that Dr Singh's main theme at the UNGA session, as in a face-to-face meeting with him, would be the urgent need to speed up long overdue UN reform, including that of the Security Council. A permanent seat on the council for India is an integral part of this scheme. In New Delhi last year, Mr Obama had made his hosts ecstatic by offering full and unqualified support to Indian aspirations. Ten months on, he is in no position to deliver on his promise. For, to use American jargon, Washington has not yet made any 'determination' on what its stand on UN reform should be.

As it happens, Dr Singh has decided to meet Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, than whom there is no greater bête noire of the US, on American soil. India's close relationship with Iran is an irritant to Indo-US relations.
The US has made it extremely difficult, virtually impossible, for this country to pay for its huge imports of Iranian oil. It remains to be seen whether the US will tighten the screws further after the Singh-Ahmedinejad pow-wow.

In any case, on his return home in a few days, Dr Singh is likely to find life harder than it was before he left. During his absence, a finance ministry note to his office has leaked out which all but accuses home minister P Chidambaram, who was finance minister until 2008, of being an accomplice in a G-2 Spectrum scam of the then telecom minister, A Raja, who is now in jail. The Indian media is therefore buzzing with reports of a 'war within' the Congress-led ruling coalition. A maverick Opposition leader has petitioned the Supreme Court to make Mr Chidambarm a 'co-accused'.

In Afghanistan, the assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani, head of the Peace Council, soon after a Taliban attack on the US embassy in Kabul has greatly complicated Indian problems in the Af-Pak endgame. Dr Singh's policy of engaging with Pakistan now has fewer takers than before.

Meanwhile, China is steadily raising the ante in an India-China spat over the joint Indo-Vietnamese exploration for oil within Vietnam's continental shelf. Arrogantly, the Chinese are claiming sovereign ownership of the entire South China Sea and telling India to desist. India has flatly refused.

The saddest part of the Indian foreign policy story relates to Bangladesh. After 40 years of uncertain, even unhappy, relations with a neighbour India had helped liberate itself from Pakistan, Dr Singh had succeeded in bringing about a paradigm change in the bilateral relationship. At the 11th hour and 59th minute, West Bengal's mercurial chief minister Mamata Banerjee practically wrecked the grand venture. Her objection to a treaty on sharing the waters of the Teesta River drove Dhaka to cancel its plan to give India vital transit facilities. Dr Singh and his Bangladeshi opposite number, Sheikh Hasina, tried to salvage the situation as best they could. But to quote Bangladeshi sources: 'It took us 30 years to achieve what has been destroyed. Now we will have to wait another 30 years.'

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