HE Indians thought they’d their man in Obama from the moment the president and his wife kicked off their visit to India by dancing, literally, to Indian tunes.
President Obama had sent Indian expectations soaring by choosing to start his official engagements in India with a visit to the ‘shrine’ erected outside the ornate Taj Mahal Hotel of Mumbai in the memory of those 166 people killed in the Mumbai carnage of November 26, 2008. And then the ‘first couple’s’ dancing with school children whetted the Indian appetite a notch further.
They saw their heart’s desire of getting Pakistan nailed for sponsoring that tragedy seemed so much closer to getting fulfilled, at last.
So it wasn’t just an off-the-cuff question asked by a young student at Obama’s ‘town hall’ meeting at the prestigious, hundred year-old St. Xavier’s College, as to why Pakistan hadn’t been declared a terrorist state for that crime in Mumbai. The young man seemed to have been carefully coached, in all the nuances of the loaded question, with the intent to put Obama on the spot and ferret out of him a pronouncement on Pakistan being an international pariah.
However, Obama proved far too nimble and diplomatic in his response than what the Indians expected of him. Unlike BillClinton who had played right into the Indian hands, despite his much-touted savvy in international relations, when he visited India a decade before, Obama dodged the bait and walked a fine line on the sordid India-Pakistan tangle.
Bill Clinton, in his hauteur and handicapped by an incontinent urge to please his Indian hosts, had made it a point to denigrate Pakistan by spending barely four hours in Islamabad, compared with four days in India. On top of it, he’d used that flying visit to Islamabad to lecture Pakistan and the Pakistanis on public television.
Obama steered clear of the net the Indians may have hoped he’d walk into. With a deftness that could easily shame seasoned pundits, Obama turned the question on its head, telling the Indians how important it was and in their best interest to have a stable Pakistan and graduate to normal relations with its western neighbour by tackling easier problems first and moving on to nettlesome disputes at the peak of the process.
Obama not only blunted the thrust of the question but came up with a road map which, if seriously followed, may take the sting out of the tangled India-Pakistan equation, foster tension-free relations between the two neighbours that have a vast heritage of shared history, and usher in prosperity across the ‘Great Divide’ to the common benefit of the two peoples.
But reaction across the Indian intellectual and informed landscape was just the opposite. It raised hackles in the establishment news media, with a hawkish Times of India leading the charge and taking umbrage to Obama’s principled response. The media pundits by and large poured scorn on Obama. Shekhar Gupta, the astute editor of the Indian Express stood out as one journalist and opinion-maker with the gumption and moral clout to remind his countrymen that as the bigger partner in the sordid equation in South Asia India had the major obligation to show magnanimity in untying the Gordian knot.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, with the reputation of being soft and conciliatory, didn’t inspire any confidence either that the Indians would have any interest in giving Obama’s prescription for peace in South Asia a try. The very next day in Delhi, standing next to Obama at their joint press conference, Manmohan fired his own burning arrow at Pakistan by reminding his honoured guest that he can’t talk with Pakistan at this juncture while “its terror machine is as active as ever before.”
It seems India’s anger had been registered well with Obama by the time he set foot in Delhi after what he himself described as the ‘job’s fair’ in Mumbai. The two days he spent in the Indian capital were suffused with all the praise and accolades he could have showered on the Indians.
In his eagerness to ingratiate himself with his hosts after failing to alert them to the reality check he’d tried to administer in Mumbai, Obama, otherwise cool and calculated, went overboard. With uncharacteristic relish and an abundance reeking of a school boy’s infatuation with his master, he hailed India as a global power that had already arrived. “It has emerged,” were the words he used to portray India’s rapid growth as an international player. Trying to outdo himself as a votary of India, Obama set his own cachet on the greatness of India by telling the world that India-US relationship was a ‘defining feature of the 21st century.’
Comforting his hosts with assurances that the US Homeland Security will be sharing intelligence with India to combat terrorism, Obama came close, in his ceremonial address to a joint sitting of both Houses of the Indian Parliament, to naming Pakistan as a state providing ‘safe havens’ within their boundaries for terrorist camps but held back, in further evidence of his tight rope-walking between India and Pakistan.
But that didn’t check a sensation-mongering Indian media from putting words in his mouth and claiming that Obama had lambasted Pakistan for providing safe havens to terrorists. However, the biggest trophy the Indians have been after for so long was delivered by Obama in the heat of his parliamentary address when he endorsed India’s quest for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council of which it is in blatant and persistent default of categorical resolutions on the Jammu and Kashmir dispute. To his lavishly cheering audience in the packed chamber it must have sounded like Lord Krishna playing the flute to mesmerise his nubile acolytes.
The only reference to the Kashmir dispute occurred in Obama’s address to the parliament without any effort on his part to break any new ground. He played up to the Indian gallery by repeating the hackneyed mantra that the US would help only if both sides asked for it, knowing fully well that Delhi doesn’t want any third party to butt in. So it was akin to giving India a veto on Kashmir, with or without it being a permanent SC member.
But Obama knows it as well as Manmohan Singh, or anybody else in the Indian pantheon for that matter that without a nod from China India will never have the jewel it covets to adorn its crown. China, though hardly mentioned during Obama’s Indian safari, was the proverbial elephant in the room. And China will remain central to any further forays into bilateral or multilateral diplomacy by Washington or Delhi.
The biggest reason for India being courted so fervently by the ‘biggies’ of the western world is China. David Cameron visited India within weeks of settling down in 10 Downing Street. Obama is going to be followed by Sarkozy of France and Medvedev of Russia. The name of the game, in which US is playing the lead role, is encircling China. The hallmark of the initiative from Washington, according to The New York Times, is to set up a ‘circle of democracy’ to counter China.
It’s a case of US fearing its turf of Asian dominance being poached on by a China armed with unprecedented economic muscle.
So Washington is trying hard to resurrect its Cold War era system of alliances aimed at insulating China and making it a pariah in Asia.
Incidentally, Manmohan Singh himself was on a swing across Asia until a few days before Obama arrived in India. Delhi put the label of ‘Looking East’ on Manmohan’s mission. China’s official newspaper the People’s Daily in an op-ed simply asked: “Does India’s ‘Look East’ policy mean ‘Look to encircle China’?”
Of course, neither Delhi nor Washington would bother to answer this question. But it’s one that will be posed across Asian capitals with greater frequency as the embryonic Indo-US juggernaut acquires more fangs and teeth.
K_K_ghori@yahoo.com