NEW DELHI: With the prospect of extended US military presence in Central Asia now increasingly likely, Russia has revived a three-year-old proposal to rope India and China into a trilateral power axis. When Russian leader Yevgeni Primakov first proposed a trilateral axis against a US-centred, unipolar world in December 1998, he did not elicit too much enthusiasm in either New Delhi or Beijing — thanks to mutual suspicions lingering from the Cold War.

But Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji’s successful India tour in January, followed by the visit of Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, are believed to have fast forwarded interest in the idea to the point where “working towards informal alliance” was now possible, said an Indian spokesperson.

International affairs analysts say the vast US military presence in Central Asia, occasioned by the war in Afghanistan, have compelled the three powers to reconsider the Primakov proposal — if not to counter the unipolar world order, then to protect their own interests in the strategic, fossil-fuel rich region.

According to Jean-Pierre Cabestan, director of the Hong Kong-based French Centre for Research on Contemporary China, the growing US military and diplomatic influence in Central and South Asia is not in Beijing’s interests.

“The US-led war in Afghanistan has compromised Beijing’s fundamental and long-term objectives, increased the say that its Asian rivals (in particular Japan and India) have in regional security issues and on the whole weakened its image as a great power,” Cabestan said in a lecture here last month.

Cabestan said Beijing has begun to take India more seriously as a result of its newly overt nuclear policy, its open-door economy and because of its status as a rival power that could get uncomfortably too close to the US. This trend is palpable in New Delhi’s loud support for the US national missile defence (NMD) programme.

Russia wields considerable influence in both India and China as a major supplier of military hardware to both countries. Indeed India is finalising, this week, the purchase of an aircraft career, nuclear-powered submarines and long-range strategic bombers from Russia as part of a multi-billion dollar shopping list.

Ivanov used the opportunity to vigorously promote the idea of a trilateral axis and has sought to allay apprehensions that this would in any way be detrimental to India’s rapidly improving ties, including military cooperation, with the United States.

In his State of the Union address last week, US President George Bush clubbed the three powers together when he said that America was “working with Russia and China and India, in ways we have never before, to achieve peace and prosperity”.

Bush added: “In this moment of opportunity, a common danger is erasing old rivalries.”

Rajiv Nayan, a researcher at the prestigious Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), said that a government funded think tank, it is important to note that at the present moment, none of three countries that would form the trilateral axis wants to be seen as a long-term dissident to US policy.“All three want to be recognized as responsible countries of the international community and its institutions and norms so that occasional defiance is accompanied by rigorous attempts to integrate with the system,” Nayan said.

On the other hand, said Nayan, the triangle as envisaged by Primakov “would not like to make the US a natural ally because the very objective of the triangle is to create a competing centre against the United States”.

India, which throughout the Cold War years was aligned economically and militarily with the former Soviet Union, is now ruled by a right-wing coalition that has aggressively sought to increase its contacts at all levels with the United States.

But Nayan said India sought support from the United States rather than from Russia in containing China and that is one reason why it cheered on the NMD enthusiastically and was among the first countries to offer support to the US in its anti-jihadist campaign after the Sept 11 terrorist attacks.

Soon after India’s nuclear tests in 1998, India’s Defence Minister George Fernandes declared that China represented the main threat to India and that the government wrote to the then US President Bill Clinton to say that China (rather than Pakistan) was the important factor in this country’s nuclear weapons programme.

Although relations between India and China have been steadily improving since their 1993 landmark agreement to maintain peace and tranquillity along their common borders, a major irritant for New Delhi has been the continued proliferation of missile and nuclear weapon technology from Beijing to Islamabad.

“The reported nuclear and missile related transfer in January is indicative of the problem and India remains deeply suspicious in spite of China’s denials,” said Kanti Bajpai, professor of international relations at the Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Bajpai said the proposed trilateral axis had, at once, the potential of building an Asian security system, tackling religious extremism, utilising Central Asian energy resources efficiently and handling better the US missile defence plan. —Dawn/ InterPress Service.