Is the United States trying to play the India card against China while India is much more obsessed with Pakistan? Is the Indian behavior reinforcing the India-Pakistan hyphenation that the Indians claim to detest?
To answer these questions, let's take a look at the contents of the media reports on the Delhi visit by the US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter.
As the US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter recently went to New Delhi to pursue what he described as "whole global agenda" with India, the Indian media responded by focusing their questions to him on US-Pakistan ties. Here's a sample of what transpired:
Indian Media: Why do you continue to have close ties with Pakistan?
Ash Carter: India also has relations with other countries like Russia. We respect that. We value our relations with Pakistan.
Question: Why are you supplying F-16s to Pakistan?
Answer: What we do in Pakistan is directed towards counter terrorism. We too have suffered from terrorism emanating from the territory, more specifically Afghanistan. Pakistan has used F-16 in operations in FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas). We have approved it.
Anticipating questions about US-Pakistan ties during his India visit, here's what Cartertold Council of Foreign Relation in Washington D.C. before leaving for New Delhi:
“I’m sure I’ll be asked about it in India, but I think the first thing one needs to say from an American policy point of view, these (India and Pakistan) are both respected partners and friends.”
"Pakistan is an important security partner", Carter added.
While US is courting India to check China's rise, the China-Pakistan ties have now moved well beyond “higher than Himalayas and sweeter than honey,” as officials on both sides say. Chinese strategists openly talk of Pakistan as their nation’s only real ally.
And China is investing heavily in Pakistan to build the Gwadar deep sea port as part of a much more ambitious and strategic China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) that India is attempting sabotage.
Let me conclude with a quote from from Brookings' Stephen Cohen on India-Pakistan power equation:
“One of the most important puzzles of India-Pakistan relations is not why the smaller Pakistan feels encircled and threatened, but why the larger India does. It would seem that India, seven times more populous than Pakistan and five times its size, and which defeated Pakistan in 1971, would feel more secure.
This has not been the case and Pakistan remains deeply embedded in Indian thinking. There are historical, strategic, ideological, and domestic reasons why Pakistan remains the central obsession of much of the Indian strategic community, just as India remains Pakistan’s.”
There's a good critique of Indian foreign policy in a book by ex FM Jaswant Singh that talks about its "strategic confinement" between LoC and LAC. It's a good read.
"The principal purpose and objectives of our (India's) foreign policy have been trapped between four lines: the Durand Line,; the McMahon Line; the Line of Control (LoC) and the Line of Actual Control (LAC). To achieve autonomy, an absolute necessity in the conduct of our foreign policy, we have to first find an answer to this strategic confinement".
There's a good critique of Indian foreign policy in a book by ex FM Jaswant Singh that talks about its "strategic confinement" between LoC and LAC. It's a good read.
"The principal purpose and objectives of our (India's) foreign policy have been trapped between four lines: the Durand Line,; the McMahon Line; the Line of Control (LoC) and the Line of Actual Control (LAC). To achieve autonomy, an absolute necessity in the conduct of our foreign policy, we have to first find an answer to this strategic confinement".
The Koh-e-Noor saga taken another interesting turn on Monday as Indian-born British politician said the coveted diamond actually belonged to Pakistan.
“If Koh-e-noor belongs to anybody, it belongs to Pakistan,” Lord Meghnad Desai said while speaking to India Today.
Referring to the 19th-century Sikh king Ranjit Singh, who had given the stone to the British, Lord Desai reasoned that since Singh’s seat was in Lahore, the diamond should go to Pakistan.
“Because his territory was mainly in, what is now Pakistan – in Lahore there is a Ranjit Singh museum – it will go back to wherever the Punjab kingdom had its seat and his seat was in Lahore. So I think if it belongs to anybody, it belongs to Pakistan,” he said.
Indian government said Tuesday that it will make all possible efforts to get back the Koh-e-Noor Diamond from Britain despite comments by New Delhi’s solicitor general that the priceless jewel should stay with the former colonial ruler.
India has repeatedly demanded that Britain return the 105-carat diamond, which was presented to Queen Victoria in 1850 and today sits on display as part of the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London.
Read more: India backtracks, says will now try to reclaim Koh-i-Noor from UK
India’s solicitor general surprised many on Monday when he told the Supreme Court that his country should forgo its claims to the jewel because it was given to Britain as a gift by an Indian king in 1851, rather than stolen as many Indians today believe.
The ministry said the stone was a “valued piece of art with strong roots in our nation’s history” and that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was determined to get it back.
A lawyer in Pakistan last year filed a court petition calling for the stone’s return.
The Koh-e-Noor is set in the crown worn by Queen Elizabeth, the mother of the reigning monarch, at the coronation of her husband George VI in 1937, and was placed on her coffin at her funeral in 2002.
The Duchess of Cambridge, who last week visited India with her husband, Prince William, will wear the crown on official occasions when she becomes queen consort. William is second in line to the British throne.
Tarek Fatah, who's received a lot of adulation by the Indian Hindu diaspora and been an honored guest Hindu Nationalists in India, called for dissolution of India in an interview a few years ago:
Tarek Fateh calls for dissolution of India into multiple nations
"India, the whole sub-continent, you see it was never been one country....even during the British, India has not been one country under Ashoka, not even under Aurangzeb
The future that I see, if I had my dreams come true, something like Europe, the entities that exist are Bengal. Punjab with no borders, common currency,
there's more in common between someone in Lahore and Delhi than between someone between Delhi and Madras.
Break-up of India, that's my analysis of what will happen in the future, if it's ever dissolved voluntarily, would be best thing to happen to India, like Europe has.
