Afghan Ceasefire
C Raja Mohan

As the international diplomacy on Afghanistan acquires a new edge, Rawalpindi is pushing for the idea of a ceasefire between the US-led international forces and the militant groups, including the Taliban and the Haqqani network, supported by Pakistan.

Saarc: India needs to lead the way
Srinath Raghavan

The upcoming summit of South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc) will be held against the backdrop of important global and regional developments. On one hand, it is increasingly clear that the advanced Western economies are unlikely to see off the economic downturn in the short-run. This will have a knock on economic effects on South Asian countries in the form of weakening the demand for their products.

US and Islamists: It takes two to tango
Brahma Chellaney

When Libya's interim government announced the official " liberation" of the country on October 23, it also declared that a system based on the Islamic sharia, including polygamy, will replace the dictatorship that Col Muammar Qaddafi ran for 42 years.

"We as a Muslim nation have taken Islamic sharia as the source of legislation, therefore any law that contradicts the principles of Islam is legally nullified," declared interim leader Mustafa Abdul Jalil.
Swapping one evil for another may seem a cruel political comedown after seven months of relentless NATO air strikes in the name of promoting democracy in Libya - an air war that enabled the ragtag rebel militias to triumph but left a vast trail of death and destruction.
The Western powers that militarily effected the regime change in Libya, in fact, have not sought to stop its new rulers from establishing a theocratic system founded on Islamic jurisprudence. For these powers, such a political turn is an unavoidable price to pay to have their own men in power. The Islamist embrace indeed helps protect the credibility of men who otherwise may be seen as foreign puppets in their own society.
This is the same reason why the US, Britain and France have condoned the rulers of the oil sheikhdoms for their longstanding alliance with radical clerics. For example, the US-backed House of Saud not only practices the century-old political tradition of Wahhabi Islam but also exports this fringe form of Islam, with the result that the more liberal Islamic traditions elsewhere are being gradually snuffed out. The plain fact is that the US-led strategy is driven by narrowly defined geopolitical interests. The imperative to have pliant regimes in oil-rich countries trumps other considerations.
With the US support they enjoy, the most-tyrannical regimes - the monarchies - have been able to ride out the Arab Spring, emerging virtually unscathed. Libya has the world's largest reserves of light sweet crude - the top-notch oil that American and European refineries prefer - and the NATO-scripted regime change there was clearly not about ushering in an era of liberal democracy. Having been born in blood, the new Libya faces uncertain times. The only certain element is that its new rulers will remain beholden to those that helped install them.
More fundamentally, America's troubling ties with Islamist rulers and groups was cemented in the 1980s when the Reagan administration openly employed Islam as an ideological tool to spur the spirit of jihad against the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan . It was at a White House ceremony attended by some "holy warriors" from the Afghanistan-Pakistan belt in the mid-1980 s that Reagan proclaimed the mujahideen as the "moral equivalent of America's Founding Fathers." Two such moral equivalents, Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, later became America's nemesis.
Make no mistake: international terrorism and the modern-day Frankenstein's monsters are the haunting byproducts of the war against atheism and communism that the US was supposed to have won. Yet the lessons from that war have already been forgotten, including the need to keep the focus on long-term goals and not be carried away by political expediency. The current attempt to strike a Faustian bargain with the Taliban, for example, ignores the very lesson from the creation of this evil force.
It has been argued by exponents of the US policy approach that because a war runs on expediency, with strange bedfellows involved as partners, unsavory allies are unavoidable. Paradoxically, the US practice of propping up malleable but Islamist rulers in the Middle East creates a street-level situation not only laden with strong anti-US sentiment but also support for more authentically Islamist and independent forces. So, if elections are held, it is such autonomous Islamists that often emerge as winners, as the diverse cases of Gaza and Tunisia attest.
Let's be clear: The global fight against terrorism can succeed only by ensuring that states do not harbour militants or contribute in any way to the rise of virulent Islamic fundamentalism extolling violence as a sanctified religious tool. Yet today, history is in danger of repeating itself.
The brutal killing of Gaddafi by his NATO-backed captors and the macabre public display of his body for several days were redolent of the manner former Afghan President Najibullah was dragged out of the UN compound in Kabul by the Taliban in 1996 and hung from a traffic barricade. What followed was unending bloodletting. So, it is fair to ask: Will Libya become another jihadist haven?

When Libya's interim government announced the official " liberation" of the country on October 23, it also declared that a system based on the Islamic sharia, including polygamy, will replace the dictatorship that Col Muammar Qaddafi ran for 42 years.
"We as a Muslim nation have taken Islamic sharia as the source of legislation, therefore any law that contradicts the principles of Islam is legally nullified," declared interim leader Mustafa Abdul Jalil.
Swapping one evil for another may seem a cruel political comedown after seven months of relentless NATO air strikes in the name of promoting democracy in Libya - an air war that enabled the ragtag rebel militias to triumph but left a vast trail of death and destruction.

Winds of Change in Myanmar
G Parthasarathy
WESTERN attempts to impose “regime change” in West Asia have had unexpected results. The American invasion of Iraq not only exacerbated Shia-Sunni tensions within the country, but also produced a virtual Shia-dominated Iraq-Iran condominium, challenging the regional supremacy of neighbouring Sunni sheikhdoms, led by Saudi Arabia. It remains to be seen whether the ouster of Col Muammar Gaddafi in Libya will convert that country into a haven of secular democracy and tribal harmony. Libya’s new rulers are already talking of imposing Sharia law. Democracy cannot be imported. It has to emerge and to be nurtured from within.
Nearer India, the Americans have supported military or military-backed regimes in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Thailand for decades. For over 25 years, they backed the regime of Myanmar’s military dictator Gen New Win, whose main contribution to relations with India was his expulsion of over half a million Indians from the country. When the new military junta took over in 1988, the Americans suddenly rediscovered the virtues of democracy in that country.
Prime Minister Narasimha Rao decided that given their history, the Burmese would evolve their own ways towards a more representative government and that India’s long-term interests were best served if the military regime was constructively engaged, adopting policies akin to those of its ASEAN neighbours. India’s pragmatic approach has paid significant dividends. Myanmar and India share a 1640-km land border. Myanmar has cooperated constructively in dealing with cross-border insurgencies afflicting some of India’s north-eastern states. It has respected Indian security concerns arising from its increasing military cooperation with China.
It conclusively established that reports about it providing facilities to China in its Cocos Islands were baseless. Moreover, it assuaged Indian concerns about providing base facilities for the Chinese Navy in the port of Sittwe by agreeing that India would construct this port and build a corridor giving its landlocked north-eastern states access to the sea. Thousands of “Stateless” people of Indian origin have been assured Myanmar citizenship.
The recent visit of Myanmar’s President Thein Sein to India came just after he had taken a series of widely welcomed measures. These included the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and the commencement of dialogue with her. On October 12, as many as 6,359 detainees were released. They included such notables as Ashin Gambara from the All-Burma Monks Association, who led the street protests in 2007; comedian and social activist Zarganar, who criticised the government’s response to the travails of victims of Cyclone Nargis; and the head of the Shan State Army insurgent group. President Thein Sein signed preliminary peace agreements with the two eastern armed groups. Non-Burmese ethnic groups now have a say in their own future after the recent elections enabled them for the first time in history to elect their representatives to the newly established Assemblies for States and Regions in the country.
Yielding to public protests, the government halted construction in the Kachin state of a $3.6 billion hydroelectric project, being built with Chinese assistance. Behind the seeming bonhomie, rifts are emerging in the Sino- Myanmar relationship. In the past two decades, millions of Chinese have moved into Myanmar from neighbouring Yunnan and other Chinese provinces. They now own virtually all the choice properties, pushing the Burmese to the outskirts in cities like Mandalay. Ethnic Chinese now control major businesses across Myanmar and swarms of Chinese workers dominate the construction of Chinese-aided projects. Networks of Chinese-built roads in Myanmar appear designed to give China access to the Bay of Bengal, facilitating the movement of goods, oil and gas, bypassing the Straits of Malacca.
The situation on Myanmar’s borders with China is a matter of concern within Myanmar. In the Wa Hills, tribesmen of Chinese origin are actively involved in gun-running, including to Indian insurgent groups. Tensions along the border further north emerged when the powerful Mandarin-speaking militia of the Kokang tribe refused to become part of the Myanmar government’s border militia. In the ensuing military crackdown, over 20,000 Kokang tribesmen fled across the border into China. Alarmed at the prospect of a similar crackdown on the Wa Army, Chinese leaders, including future President Xi Jinping and Premier Wen Jiabao, visited Yangon last year with promises of further aid. The situation was defused, but resentment against the millions of Chinese settlers and their Wa and Kokang compatriots can intensify as it did in 1967.
Myanmar’s rulers have no illusions that India can replace China as a partner for rapid growth of its infrastructure. India’s track record in Myanmar is abysmal. Work on the much-touted Kaladan corridor, linking Myanmar to the sea, proceeds at a snail’s pace. After “consideration” for over 15 years, India has not even finalised a project report for a 1500-MW hydroelectric project across the Chindwin river, adjacent to Manipur. Thein Sein is naturally looking for new tie-ups with more dynamic countries like Japan, which has described recent developments in Myanmar as a positive “step towards democratisation and national reconciliation”.
Japan has agreed to resume economic and cultural exchanges and its aid programme, suspended for two decades. Indonesia has reacted similarly. Western sanctions are, however, unlikely to end in the immediate future. There now seems to be a clear divide between Asia and the Western world on how to approach relations with Myanmar. It will take around a decade before Myanmar enjoys democratic freedoms akin to those prevalent in neighbouring Indonesia.
Comparing his country’s relations with India and China, a senior Myanmar leader once remarked: “While we may have to go to Beijing for arms, as devout Buddhists, we have to go to Bodh Gaya for salvation.” Sadly, the reality is that in Buddhist countries, ranging from Sri Lanka to Thailand and beyond, the main factor that inhibits their devotees from visiting India is what is described as the “primitive” and ‘pathetic” facilities available for pilgrims and tourists, interested in visiting Buddhist heritage and pilgrimage sites.
Across the world, people have commented on the efficiency and precision with which the Formula 1 event was conducted in the National Capital Region, while recalling the inefficiency, mismanagement and corruption that marked the arrangements for the Asian Games. One hopes that New Delhi will draw up a realistic public-private partnership for providing modern amenities, accommodation and infrastructure for tourists and pilgrims visiting Buddhist heritage sites to complement its plans for the development of Nalanda University. Former UN Secretary-General U Thant’s grandson, Thant Myint U, even envisages a situation where “Burma” located at the “New Crossroads of Asia,” becomes the country where “China meets India”. 

WESTERN attempts to impose “regime change” in West Asia have had unexpected results. The American invasion of Iraq not only exacerbated Shia-Sunni tensions within the country, but also produced a virtual Shia-dominated Iraq-Iran condominium, challenging the regional supremacy of neighbouring Sunni sheikhdoms, led by Saudi Arabia. It remains to be seen whether the ouster of Col Muammar Gaddafi in Libya will convert that country into a haven of secular democracy and tribal harmony. Libya’s new rulers are already talking of imposing Sharia law. Democracy cannot be imported. It has to emerge and to be nurtured from within.

The sole neighbour
C Raja Mohan
The 17th summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation in Maldives this week happens at a rather opportune moment for India. For the first time in years, Delhi’s bilateral relations with most of its immediate neighbours are on the mend and have set a very different stage for annual regional consultations.
India’s unending tension with Pakistan has cast a shadow over the proceedings of the annual South Asian summitry in recent years, much to the irritation of the rest of the subcontinent.
In a break from that tradition, it is good news about Indo-Pakistan relations that is likely to dominate the headlines from Maldives. The current thaw in Indo-Pakistan relations and Islamabad’s proposal to normalise trade relations with India will surely be welcomed by other members of SAARC.
Even more significant has been the dramatic transformation of India’s relations with Bangladesh in the time since Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina came to India in January 2010.
While Delhi’s engagement with Islamabad is based on hope, ties with Dhaka are now driven by a shared commitment to resolve all outstanding bilateral political issues, deepen economic cooperation and build an enduring partnership.
Dr Singh’s visit to Dhaka in September was robbed of its full significance by the failure to sign the Teesta waters accord, thanks to a last-minute tantrum from the volatile chief minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee. Yet there is no denying unprecedented progress on the full range of issues between Delhi and Dhaka.
India’s trade and investment ties, as well as political and security cooperation, with Sri Lanka and Maldives are growing. India has every reason to celebrate Bhutan’s democratic transition under the new monarch and encourage the recent moves in Nepal to take the peace process to its logical conclusion. India’s engagement with Afghanistan has now been elevated to the level of a formal strategic partnership.
To be sure, there are many problems as well — and none more important than the rapidly deteriorating situation in the border lands between Afghanistan and Pakistan and the potentially huge consequences for regional security.
Nevertheless, the Maldives summit offers a moment to savour the rare optimism about India’s relations with its South Asian neighbours. However, good mood alone is not enough to accelerate regional integration in South Asia.
The Maldives summit is not going to set the Indian Ocean on fire with the kind of agreements that are on the anvil — a regional mechanism for rapid response to disasters, a South Asian seed bank, and two agreements on regional standards.
The utterly modest pickings at the Maldives summit are not a reflection on the possibilities of South Asian regionalism. They are an important reminder of the real limitations of SAARC as the driver of South Asian regionalism.
Regional integration in the subcontinent is not going to come through the pitifully slow multilateral negotiations under SAARC. It can only come through decisive Indian leadership of South Asian regionalism.
Leadership does not only mean India proposing new ideas for collective consideration and steering them through the painful SAARC process. It is about taking positive and unilateral steps that fundamentally alter the context and structure of regional cooperation in the subcontinent.
That it is India’s task to lead the region, if necessary through unilateral actions, towards peace and prosperity is defined by its unique location in the subcontinent.
India has operational borders with all other South Asian countries except Afghanistan. None of the other members of the SAARC, except Afghanistan and Pakistan have a frontier with each other.
This unique geographic circumstance and the facts that India is the largest nation and the biggest economy in the region has meant that Delhi always had the power to mould South Asian regionalism unilaterally.
Put simply, given India’s size and the economic geography of South Asia, Delhi’s national policy decisions would automatically shape the regional environment.
India’s inward economic orientation and an insistence on strict reciprocity meant Delhi was unable to benefit from its natural preponderance in the region for much of the post-Independence period.
This began to change with the liberalisation of the Indian economy and the new political conviction in Delhi that its search for a larger global role must be rooted firmly in solid South Asian regionalism.
That India is prepared to take unilateral initiatives in promoting South Asian regionalism and present itself as an economic opportunity for its neighbours has been repeatedly articulated by Dr Singh in recent years.
The very fact that Islamabad, which has been so persistent in its refusal to engage Delhi in economic cooperation, is now prepared to normalise trade relations underlines the new recognition among the South Asian elites that they can and must partake of and prosper in India’s economic growth.
It is up to India now to strengthen this emerging trend in our neighbourhood, by reinforcing Dr Singh’s strategy of positive unilateralism. Outlining a series of national steps that will promote regional integration should be at the heart of his engagement with the South Asian leaders this week.
These steps could include, for one, further unilateral reduction of tariffs on imports from the neighbouring countries. India enjoys trade surplus with all its neighbours and it is in Delhi’s self-interest to make regional trade fair and beneficial to all.
Second, India’s many non-tariff barriers to trade with the neighbours are notorious and Dr Singh must announce a plan to dismantle them quickly.
Third, India must offer an ambitious plan for trade facilitation with its South Asian neighbours. India’s infrastructure for trans-border commerce and connectivity is poorer than most of its neighbours. Delhi will help its own border states and the neighbours by unveiling a credible action plan to modernise its border infrastructure.
For India, SAARC is the annual stage, where it must set an ambitious agenda for South Asian regionalism and demonstrate the national political will to act unilaterally in promoting it.

The 17th summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation in Maldives this week happens at a rather opportune moment for India. For the first time in years, Delhi’s bilateral relations with most of its immediate neighbours are on the mend and have set a very different stage for annual regional consultations.India’s unending tension with Pakistan has cast a shadow over the proceedings of the annual South Asian summitry in recent years, much to the irritation of the rest of the subcontinent.

Myanmar rolls out red carpet for India
G Parthasarathy
For more than 25 years, the US backed the regime of Burma's military dictator General New Win, whose main contribution to relations with India was his expulsion of more than half a million Indians from the country. When the new military junta took charge in 1988, the Americans suddenly reinvented the virtues of democracy in that country. But democracy cannot be imported. It has to be nurtured from within.
Therefore, Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao decided that given their history, the Burmese would evolve their own ways towards more representative Government and that Indian long-term interests were best served if the military regime was constructively engaged. India's pragmatic approach has paid significant dividends.
DEMOCRACY IN MYANMAR
Myanmar and India share a 1640-kilometre land border. Myanmar has cooperated constructively in dealing with cross-border insurgencies afflicting some of India's north-eastern states. It has respected Indian security concerns arising from its increasing military cooperation with China.
It established that reports on its providing facilities to China in the Cocos Islands were baseless. Moreover, it assuaged Indian concerns on providing base facilities for the Chinese Navy in the port of Sittwe, by agreeing that India would construct this port and build a corridor, giving its landlocked north-eastern states access to the sea. Thousands of “Stateless” people of Indian origin have been assured Myanmar citizenship.
The recent visit of Myanmar's President Thein Sein to India came just after he had taken a series of measures, which have been widely welcomed. These included the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and commencement of dialogue with her.
On October 12, 6359 detainees were released. They included notables such as Ashin Gambara from the All Burma Monks Association, who led the street protests in 2007, comedian and social activist Zarganar, who criticized the Government's response to the travails of victims of Cyclone Nargis; and the Head of the Shan State Army insurgent group.
President Thein Sein signed preliminary peace agreements with the two eastern armed groups. Non-Burmese ethnic groups now have a say in their own future, after the recent elections enabled them, for the first time in history, to elect their representatives to the newly-established Assemblies for States and Regions in the country.
ISSUES WITH CHINA
Yielding to public protests, the Government halted construction in the Kachin State of a $ 3.6-billion hydro-electric project, being built with Chinese assistance.
Behind the seeming bonhomie, rifts are emerging in the Sino-Myanmar relationship. In the past two decades, millions of Chinese have moved into Myanmar from neighbouring Yunnan and other Chinese Provinces.
They now own virtually all the choice properties, pushing the Burmese to the outskirts, in cities such as Mandalay. Ethnic Chinese now control major businesses across Myanmar, and swarms of Chinese workers dominate the construction of Chinese aided projects. Networks of Chinese-built roads in Myanmar appear designed to give China access to the Bay of Bengal, facilitating the movement of goods, oil and gas, bypassing the Straits of Malacca.
The situation on Myanmar's borders with China is a matter of concern within Myanmar. In the Wa Hills, tribesmen of Chinese origin are actively involved in gun-running, including to Indian insurgent groups. Tensions along the border further north emerged, when the powerful Mandarin-speaking militia of the Kokang tribe refused to become part of the Myanmar Government's border militia. In the ensuing military clampdown, more than 20,000 Kokang tribesmen fled across the border into China.
Alarmed at the prospect of a similar clampdown on the Wa Army, Chinese leaders, including future President Xi Jinping and Premier Wen Jiabao, visited Yangon last year, with promises of further aid.
The situation was defused, but resentment against the millions of Chinese settlers and their Wa and Kokang compatriots can blow up, as they did in 1967.
TIES IN ASIAN REGION
Myanmar's rulers have no illusions that India can replace China as a partner for rapid growth of their infrastructure. India's performance record in Myanmar is disappointing. Work on the much-touted Kaladan corridor, linking Myanmar to the sea, proceeds at a snail's pace. After ‘consideration' for more than 15 years, India hasn't even finalised a Project Report for a 1500 MW hydro-electric project across the Chindwin River, adjacent to Manipur. Mr Sein is naturally looking for new tie-ups with more dynamic countries such as Japan, which has described recent developments in Myanmar as a good “step towards democratisation and national reconciliation”. Japan has agreed to resume economic and cultural exchanges, and its aid programme, on hold now for two decades. Indonesia has reacted similarly. Western sanctions are, however, unlikely to end in the immediate future.
There now seems to be a clear divide between Asia and the Western realm, on how to approach relations with Myanmar. It will take around a decade before Myanmar enjoys democratic freedoms akin to those prevalent in neighbouring Indonesia.
Comparing his country's relations with India and China, a senior Myanmar leader once remarked: “While we may have to go to Beijing for arms, as devout Buddhists, we have to go to Bodh Gaya for salvation.”

For more than 25 years, the US backed the regime of Burma's military dictator General New Win, whose main contribution to relations with India was his expulsion of more than half a million Indians from the country. When the new military junta took charge in 1988, the Americans suddenly reinvented the virtues of democracy in that country. But democracy cannot be imported. It has to be nurtured from within.

Ingenuous Indian Diplomacy
Brahma Chellaney
It is well known that Indian politicians are hard-headed while serving their personal interests but faint-hearted while dealing with national interests. India’s Pakistan policy, for example, remains based on hopes and gushy expectations, rather than any farsighted strategy. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh still dreams of open borders with terror-exporting Pakistan.
The Indian wishful thinking on Pakistan was on public display at the just-concluded SAARC summit in the Maldives, where Singh hyped his bilateral meeting with Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani as if Gilani were the top decision-maker in Pakistan.
More important, Gilani thanked India for its two recent favours: At the WTO not vetoing the European Union’s special trade concessions for Pakistan, and helping Pakistan to enter the UN Security Council. Singh, however, has secured no reciprocal concession from Pakistan, not even the actual grant of most-favoured-nation status to India.
Fifteen years after India gave Pakistan MFN status, the Pakistani Cabinet last week decided merely to open bilateral negotiations on a reciprocal MFN grant. Islamabad is seeking to leverage an action that it is obligated to undertake under WTO rules. The lack of MFN reciprocity has thus far blocked the opening of normal Indo-Pakistan trade and required most traded products to move via a third country like the UAE. Yet, even before normal trade has opened, India at the Maldives meeting promised a Preferential Trade Agreement with Pakistan.
The EU trade concessions to Pakistan are significant because they exempt as many as 75 Pakistani products from duties for three years. This will allow Pakistan to earn several hundred million euros annually through tariff-free exports to the large, 27-nation EU market while undercutting similar Indian exports.
At the WTO’s trade committee, India first objected to this EU move because it flouts the WTO rules for a level-playing field among trading partners. But last month — after receiving several demarches from EU states — India withdrew its objection, without having secured anything in return from Pakistan.
In a fundamentally competitive world marked by the aggressive pursuit of relative gains, Indian diplomacy has stood out for not learning from mistakes and continuing to operate on ingenuous premises. It is not uncommon for Indian leaders to feed to the nation dreams sold to them by others — or their own personal dreams.
In dealing with Pakistan, India has assumed that Islamabad will do what New Delhi does well — jettison beliefs, perceptions and policies overnight. Pakistan has no intention of discarding terrorism as an instrument of state policy. Even with the US, Pakistan still plays games, continuing to shield its own militant proxies despite coming under mounting American pressure. If the powerful US has been unable to rein in Pakistan’s actions in the Afghanistan theatre, can India realistically persuade Islamabad to go after the terrorist groups it has nurtured?
Whereas Pakistan’s India policy has remained consistent for long, India’s Pakistan policy continues to send out contradictory and confusing signals. Just three days after the Indian home secretary said there has been no change in Pakistan’s official support for terrorism against India, the aging and increasingly clueless external affairs minister declared this week that the trust deficit with Pakistan is “shrinking.” Singh, for his part, hailed Gilani — widely regarded as the Pakistani military’s man — as “a man of peace.”
No less disturbing is the timing of India’s new bonhomie with Pakistan just when the latter has come under increasing US pressure. The mood in America has changed to the extent that strategists are openly calling for the “containment” of Pakistan, with one author even suggesting that the U.S. should “start regarding it as an enemy — at least as far as the Afghan War is concerned.”
Instead of taking advantage of the new American spotlight on Pakistan’s roguish conduct, New Delhi has done exactly the opposite: It has come to the aid of Islamabad by singing the virtues of an “uninterrupted and uninterruptible” dialogue and seeking to “write a new chapter” of peace. In fact, the external affairs minister publicly advised the US and Pakistan, “two friendly powers,” to amicably settle all “outstanding” issues, as if terrorism is not an outstanding matter in the Indo-Pakistan relationship.
Worse still, India has effectively sidelined the issue regarding the involvement of Pakistani state actors in the 26/11 terrorist strikes. By agreeing to welcome a supposed judicial commission from Pakistan, India is only aiding the Pakistani game-plan to shield the key masterminds through dilatory and deflective tactics and to create an impression that a due process is under way.
One possible explanation for India’s coming to Pakistan’s succour at this hour — a course that actually mocks the memory of the 26/11 victims — is that Singh needs to divert attention away from corruption scandals that have undermined his credibility and brought him under a political siege. Because nothing seems to be going right for him domestically, he has stepped up foreign travels and hyped progress in diplomatic ties with Pakistan.
Singh’s fixation on quasi-failed Pakistan has been an enduring element of his stint in office — an obsession that has made him shy away from drawing the right lesson from his past blunder at Sharm el-Sheikh (where he included Baluchistan in the agenda) or at Havana (where he turned the terror sponsor into a fellow victim of terror and set up the infamous Joint Anti-Terror Mechanism).
If India’s Pakistan policy is adrift, it is not entirely due to Singh, however. It was Singh’s predecessor, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who laid the foundation of an ad hoc, personality-driven, meandering approach toward Pakistan that said goodbye to institutionalized policymaking.
The weak-in-the-knees Vajpayee took India on a jarring roller-coaster ride with an ever-shifting policy on Pakistan. It was under Vajpayee that personal rather than professional characteristics began to define India’s policy. And it was Vajpayee’s Agra invitation that helped Pervez Musharraf to come out of the international doghouse for staging a military coup. Singh is following in Vajpayee’s footsteps.

It is well known that Indian politicians are hard-headed while serving their personal interests but faint-hearted while dealing with national interests. India’s Pakistan policy, for example, remains based on hopes and gushy expectations, rather than any farsighted strategy. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh still dreams of open borders with terror-exporting Pakistan.
The Indian wishful thinking on Pakistan was on public display at the just-concluded SAARC summit in the Maldives, where Singh hyped his bilateral meeting with Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani as if Gilani were the top decision-maker in Pakistan.

The return of treaty diplomacy
C Raja Mohan
A new partnership agreement with the the Maldives that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is expected to sign this week marks two definitive trends in India’s foreign policy.
One is the growing importance of the Maldives in India’s strategic calculus, especially in the maritime domain.  The agreement with the Maldives also brings into bold relief India’s new “treaty diplomacy” with its neighbours.
Straddling the vital sea lines of communication between East Asia and the Middle East, the Maldives has emerged as a critical element of any future security order in the Indian Ocean. It was the Maldives’ special geopolitical location — at the virtual centre of the Indian Ocean — which saw the British Raj develop an air base at Gan island on the Addu atoll (where the South Asian summit is taking place) during the Second World War.
For nearly two decades after that, the Gan facility was an important waystation for the movement of troops and equipment between the Middle East and the Pacific. It also served as a communication facility for British and Western forces in the early years of the Cold War.
Today, as the Indian Ocean becomes a new theatre for competing great powers as well as menacing pirates, cooperation between India, the Maldives and other island states such as Sri Lanka, Mauritius and Seychelles, has become essential for the maintenance of peace and stability in the region.
The formalisation of a new partnership with the Maldives follows Delhi’s conclusion of far-reaching agreements with Afghanistan last month and Bangladesh in September. Taken together, these agreements mark a historic shift away from the old treaties that India had with most of its neighbours and the institution of new agreements that reflect contemporary realities.
While India’s ties with each of its neighbours are unique, the new partnership agreements that India is signing with them underline Delhi’s commitment to build enduring security cooperation on the basis of equality and mutual benefit.
Some of India’s past bilateral treaties with its neighbours have been widely seen as “hegemonic”. Rightly so. Take, for example, the 1949 treaty of friendship between India and Bhutan. Article 2 under the treaty talked about Bhutan being guided by India in the conduct of its foreign policy.
That arrangement made sense in the middle of the 20th century, when the small Himalayan kingdoms like Bhutan and Nepal turned to India for protection against the consequences of Communist China’s entry into Tibet. But at the turn of the 21st century, unequal treaties are neither sustainable nor effective. Recognising the new imperative to modernise the relationships with its small neighbours, India revised the treaty with Bhutan in early 2007. The offending provisions were removed and a new basis was crafted for security and political cooperation between Bhutan and India. Thus, the treaty with Bhutan became the new template for India’s engagement with its other neighbours.
Many in Nepal, especially the Maoists, have long denounced the 1950 treaty with India as a symbol of Delhi’s dominance over Kathmandu. Delhi, however, has been ready for quite some time to revise the treaty with Nepal. That commitment was reiterated during the recent visit of Nepalese Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai. But Nepal’s divided political classes are some distance away from coming to an agreement on exactly what kind of a treaty they want with India.
Some of India’s treaties were derived from the legacy of the British Raj, which provided security to a large number of countries and territories in Southern Asia and the Indian Ocean littoral. With India seen as the successor to the Raj after the partition of the subcontinent, many countries in the region looked to India for security assurances.
Not all treaties that India signed with its neighbours after independence were unequal and hegemonic. Jawaharlal Nehru signed a friendship treaty with Afghanistan in 1950 that laid out a broad framework for bilateral cooperation as Kabul came to terms with the partition of the subcontinent and a new neighbour on its eastern frontiers — Pakistan. The strategic partnership agreement signed by Dr Singh and President Hamid Karzai last month recalls with great warmth the importance of the 1950 treaty and its commitment to “everlasting friendship” between Delhi and Kabul.
Dhaka had good reasons not to recall an earlier peace and friendship treaty it had signed with India in 1972. The arrangement, signed in the immediate wake of the liberation of Bangladesh, was similar to the treaties that Delhi and Dhaka had signed with Moscow. The treaty, which was to be valid for 25 years, was quickly forgotten amidst the turbulent political evolution of our eastern neighbour during the last few decades.
The framework agreement signed in September by Dr Singh and Sheikh Hasina does not recall the 1972 treaty but lays out a comprehensive basis for mutually beneficial cooperation on the basis of sovereign equality.
In the early 1950s, Nehru and Prime Minister U Nu of Burma (now Myanmar) actively discussed the idea of a security treaty, but chose not to pursue it and decided instead on comprehensive functional cooperation. As India and Myanmar rebuild their cooperation in a very different context, the idea of a bilateral partnership agreement can’t be outside the realm of possibility.
But there is one agreement that Dr Singh has found elusive. In 2006, speaking in Amritsar, not too far from the border with Pakistan, Dr Singh hoped that the negotiations with Islamabad would culminate in a comprehensive treaty of peace, friendship and security.
If the peace process had taken a beating after the Mumbai terror attacks at the end of 2008, hope has again been rekindled in the last few months. While India must persist in its effort to normalise relations with Pakistan, the treaties it is signing with other neighbours constitute a new beginning in South Asia’s international relations.
As our neighbours seek solid partnerships with India, it is up to Delhi to match its new treaty diplomacy with domestic institutions that can respond to the emerging regional opportunities.

A new partnership agreement with the the Maldives that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is expected to sign this week marks two definitive trends in India’s foreign policy.One is the growing importance of the Maldives in India’s strategic calculus, especially in the maritime domain.  The agreement with the Maldives also brings into bold relief India’s new “treaty diplomacy” with its neighbours.

South Asia Rising
C Raja Mohan
Although India has always been wary of external interference in the affairs of the subcontinent, Delhi can no longer simply ignore the growing third-party interest, especially that of China.
The eight-member South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC), whose leaders are meeting this week in the Maldives, already has nine observers. These are the United States, China, Japan, South Korea, Myanmar, Australia, Iran, Mauritius and the European Union. Turkey is now pressing to join SAARC as an observer.
For a regional organisation that is widely considered a slow-boat, the increasing international interest in SAARC would seem anomalous. The reality is, that after being relatively marginal to international politics all these decades, the subcontinent is reclaiming its position at the crossroads of Asia.
As the subcontinent’s geopolitical weight grows, India must devote some attention to the emerging role of South Asia as a bridge between different regions —East Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East.
Instead of keeping outsiders at bay, India must ask itself if there is a way to benefit from the growing number of SAARC observers. Right now, the SAARC members are divided on the role of observers. India’s smaller neighbours, for example, want to see China play a larger role in the economic development of the region and take a more active part in the SAARC process. Beijing, in turn, has invested considerable diplomatic, political and economic energies in promoting a South Asian regionalism of its own imagination.
Delhi’s own strategic instinct has been to limit the role of China in SAARC. That, however, has not stopped Beijing from taking the lead on regional economic integration.
China has always resented India’s claims for an exclusive sphere of influence in the subcontinent. From Beijing’s perspective, it has as much right as any one else to develop all-round cooperation with India’s neighbours. Beijing is also acutely aware that the subcontinent is an important element of its periphery. That the subcontinent borders some of the more sensitive frontier regions of China - Xinjiang, Tibet and Yunnan - makes the region very special from Beijing’s internal security perspective.
Sub-regionalism
China encourages all its provinces with international borders to initiate direct engagement with countries across the fence. Whether abutting the Russian Far East, the Korean Peninsula, Indo-China, Thailand, Burma, Nepal or Central Asia, China’s border provinces are now in diplomatic overdrive.
This, of course, stands in contrast to some of our own chief ministers in border states, for example, in West Bengal or Tamil Nadu, who think burning bridges with the neighbours makes better political sense.
As China began to invest in the transformation of its far western regions over the last decade, its engagement with the subcontinent has rapidly grown. This has involved building road and rail networks and pipelines to connect the remote regions of China to the warm waters of the Indian Ocean.
For more than a decade, the Yunnan province has spent much energy in developing economic cooperation with Burma, Bangladesh and India. The Tibetan regional government in Lhasa wants to develop closer links with Bhutan, Nepal and India. Xinjiang, which had long benefited from trans-Karakoram links with Pakistan, is now exploring similar connectivity with Afghanistan. As China develops the historic city of Kashgar in Xinjiang as a regional hub, the idea of a “Pamir Group” bringing Xinjiang, Afghanistan and Pakistan together into a regional forum is gaining ground.
SAARC Plus One
To complement China’s bilateral and sub-regional engagement with each of India’s neighbours, Beijing has begun to focus on a collective engagement with SAARC. In the last few years, China has made sustained overtures to the SAARC secretariat and developed a track-two process involving consultations with scholars and policymakers from the eight member states.
The notion of “SAARC Plus China” does not find too many takers in official India. No surprises there. The one missing link in China’s SAARC policy is a comprehensive dialogue with India on South Asia. A structured bilateral conversation between Beijing and Delhi could help dispel the notion of a Sino-Indian rivalry in the subcontinent and explore ways to leverage the weight of the world’s two fastest-growing economies for regional stability and prosperity.

Although India has always been wary of external interference in the affairs of the subcontinent, Delhi can no longer simply ignore the growing third-party interest, especially that of China.

Mapping the Indo-Pacific
Shyam Saran

Over the past year, the term “Indo-Pacific” has gained currency in strategic discourse in India. From a geopolitical perspective it represents the inclusion of the Western Pacific within the range of India’s security interests, thus stretching beyond the traditional focus on the Indian Ocean theatre.