NEW DELHI: Now that India has rejected a request from its newfound friend, the United States, to send a division of its troops to Iraq, it is beginning to dawn on many that the whole idea was unpalatable from the start.

For weeks before the Indian government announced its decision on Monday, debates raged in the rather outlandish studios of myriad television channels on whether or not India should accede to Washington’s demand. Retired diplomats and generals pitched in on one side or the other.

After the decision was made, the residual question is how India, with its history of anti-colonial struggle, could even have seriously considered pitching in on what is essentially a colonial enterprise — and one which probably has altered permanently long-accepted concepts of sovereignty.

“Our long-term national interest, our concern for the people of Iraq, our longstanding ties with the Gulf region as well as our growing dialogue and strengthened ties with the US have been key elements in this consideration (of Washington’s request),” India’s Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha explained to journalists on Monday.

But it was as if, for several weeks, Sinha’s ruling pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government was ready to give more weight to the “strengthened ties with the US” part rather than to “concern for the people of Iraq”.

To be fair to Sinha, the BJP and its advisers desperately want Washington to replace Pakistan with India as the United States’ “most allied ally” in South Asia.

Washington, of course, has its own calculations. When it went to war with Afghanistan, it politely declined the embarrassingly overt offers of logistical support from New Delhi. It preferred, instead, to turn again to Pakistan.

After a meeting with US President George W. Bush in Camp David last month and securing a handsome $3 billion aid package, Musharraf pledged up to 10,000 troops for ‘peacekeeping’ duties in Iraq provided Washington paid the bills and met certain other “conditions”.

India and Pakistan are two of more than 20 countries Washington has asked to help ‘stabilize’ Iraq by sending troops there.

To Indian leaders, one of Musharraf’s conditions to the US government would certainly have been support for Pakistan’s long-standing claims to Kashmir, which the general has declared readiness to prize out of India’s grip with nuclear devices, if necessary.

Religious groups in Pakistan had worse things to say about Musharraf’s offer.

In India, similar sentiments were heard not only from the media and opposition groups led by the formidable Congress party — responsible for much of India’s foreign policy during its decades in power that coincided with the Cold War years — but also from organizations close to the BJP.

Days before India formally made its decision, the ‘Panchjanya’ weekly, the mouthpiece of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) that provides ‘mind and muscle’ to the BJP, demanded to know in an editorial why India was being asked to “clean up the garbage left behind by the US in Iraq”.

There was no way that the RSS, an ultra-nationalist organization often accused of fascism, could have stomached the idea of Indian troops serving under the US Central Command or getting shot in what critics call ‘someone else’s dirty war’.

Supporters of the RSS have been busy pointing out US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) revelations that intelligence on Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the main reason given for the war, were faulty. But that may have been to give its sister concern, the BJP, a safe, face-saving exit on the issue of whether to send troops to Iraq.

Through the Iraq war, fundamentalists in India and Pakistan, historically implacable foes, were, for a change, seeing eye-to-eye on a major international issue.

In the dying days of the Saddam Hussein regime, India’s Parliament went one step further and passed a resolution deploring the war and asking for the quick withdrawal of US troops. This added to the Vajpayee government’s difficulties in meeting Washington’s request for troop support.

Credit for the resolution of the issue of whether India should send troops to Iraq should go to the Congress party.

Its leader, Sonia Gandhi, forcefully declared that her party would be “totally opposed to the deployment of Indian troops under any arrangement other than a UN command or as part of a multinational peacekeeping force that has the explicit mandate of the UN.”

That was precisely the line that the Vajpayee government took on Monday when it turned down the US request made by Bush himself and followed up by a high-powered team of persuaders from Pentagon flown into New Delhi last month.

“We would have hoped that India would have made a different choice, that they would be there,” US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said on Monday in Washington.

“But I think, at the same time (I) need to reiterate that India remains an important strategic partner for the United States and that the continuation of the transformation of Indo-US relations is something that is important to us and that we expect to see,” he added.

India, which has one of the largest standing armies in the world, has since its independence in 1947 committed 60,000 troops in 36 UN-led missions and is considered a major player in the peacekeeping business.

But India also knows the pitfalls of peacekeeping. Invited to keep peace on the northern Jaffna peninsula in 1987 by then Sri Lankan President Junius Jayawardene, the Indian army ended up taking on the formidable Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) rebels and losing 1,200 men in the bargain.

Five years later, India lost one of its most charismatic political leaders, Rajiv Gandhi, the husband of Sonia Gandhi, when a woman suicide bomber sent by the Tamil Tigers, garlanded him at a political rally and then set off a powerful bomb strapped to her body.—Dawn/The InterPress News Service.