|
 |
 |
|
There is bad news all over the Indian subcontinent; bad news, too, for those in Bush II who toy with the hypothesis that India might play a role in Washington’s increasing difficulties with a vexatious Communist China.
Item: Nepal, the Himalayan Hindu kingdom landlocked between India and Chinese-controlled Tibet, is wrestling with a self-proclaimed Maoist insurgency. Borrowing from 30 years of “fellow ideologues”, the Naxalites in neighboring northeastern India, they are killing police, judges and schoolmasters in five western districts, violence sometimes erupting in the capital of Katmandu.
Item: Sri Lanka, off India’s southern coast, is again facing gains by the 18-year-old Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam [ITTE] revolutionaries, dedicated to an independent state that would try to break off 65 million Tamils in south India whose underground logistic support sustains them. The insurgency’s origins, ethnic injustices decades old, lie in Indian sponsorship back in the 1960s. Subsequent New Delhi efforts to help the predominantly Buddhist Singhalese establishment solve the problem through Indian military assistance [“New Delhi’s Vietnam”] and efforts to reign in their southern compatriots have flopped.
Item: Bangla Desh army units badly mauled Indian paramilitaries last month along their border, echoing a half dozen continuing ethnic, linguistic, and regional conflicts in India‘s neighboring northeast abutting Burma and China. Elections in Assam have cost 50 lives including a candidate of the BJP, leader of the shaky coalition in New Delhi, with a boycott by a party calling for independence.
Item: Burma, India’s eastern neighbor whose brutal military junta Washington has sought unsuccessfully to isolate, is caught in a new economic crisis and haunted by the 1991 elections which legally voted them out. For New Delhi -- and Washington — a question is how far its members are playing with the Chinese Communists. Recent reports have Beijing’s submarines and military visiting Bay of Bengal ports following on Chinese increasing ambitions for sea power.
Item: Pakistan, India’s Siamese twin in the division of British India, is unrelenting in its pursuit of a settlement in predominantly Moslem Kashmir, a hangover from the 1948 split. The military chief of state, Gen. Mussaraf is digging in his heels with no signs of a quick return to parliamentary government. India is probably correct that some of her troubles in the neighborhood is Pakistan’s doing, Islamabad’s rebuttal to New Delhi’s ambitions for hegemonic power in region. But any Kashmir settlement must take into account India’s own Moslem community of 150 million, more restive than at any time since Independence. [Indian courts have just thrown out an indictment of the regime’s strong man, Minister of Home Affairs Advani, implicated in the razing of a 16th century mosque by Hindu zealots in 1992, sparking India's worst Hindu-Muslim riots in half a century].
It does not take much imagination to see Beijing, if the need arises from its viewpoint and with its long history of supporting overseas insurgencies, adding fuel to any of these fires.
New Delhi’s answer to all this are current military exercises, largest in two decades. Some 60,000 troops equipped with everything from Russian T27 tanks to simulated nuclear warfare tactics, are intended as a message that despite the nuclear/missiles stand-off with Pakistan, New Delhi has the capacity and will to take on any conventional strategic threat. That’s apparently what the Indians will tell Henry Shelton, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs and State’s Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage, arriving shortly to discuss security questions.
As important, of course, is that India is stumbling, still, along that road that was supposed to have led its economy away from Soviet-style planning that inhibited economic growth for 40 years. Recent stock market scandals, trials and tribulations with state and federal government bureaucrats of foreign investors from Enron to MacDonald’s, and the impact of the US dot.com bust on India’s vaunted software sector, have cast a shadow over globalization efforts. Too many American and other foreign investors have made the invidious comparison to China’s effort to woo foreign investors, Communism or no Communism.
The bottom line has to be that no Indian government, whatever its ideological proclivities, will have the option of moving into an alliance with the US, tacit or otherwise — were that to be offered. Internal and external considerations point to New Delhi’s continuing to pursue old policies seeking the piecemeal benefits from all interested parties. Some of those policies — its refusal to halt the nuclear/missiles race with Pakistan, continued heavy reliance on Soviet weaponry, its offer of collaboration with Iran, its anti-American diplomatic role in the UN and the Third World — will continue to irritate Washington. And while the optimism of the Clinton Administration’s rhetoric about a new era in relations with India continues, the reality will be a very modest cooperation between New Delhi and Washington on a limited number of issues.
Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@abac.com), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International.
He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.