Under full pressure from the Bush
administration, India's Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh, lining up behind the United States, voted
to open the way to bring "belligerent " Iran to
the United Nations Security Council for discussion
on its nuclear program.
Sections of the US
media said that India voted with the US to placate
the US Congress and the White House.
On
September 24, the International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA) passed a resolution calling for Iran
to end the conversion of uranium and to answer
more questions about its past nuclear activities.
Failure to comply with these demands could result
in Iran's nuclear case being brought before the UN
Security Council, and the possible implementation
of sanctions. Action will only be taken in
November, after IAEA chief Mohammad elBaradei
delivers his next report on Iran.
In
deciding to be on the right side of the Bush
administration on the Iran issue, India clearly
bent under US pressure. "Everybody
would
like to avoid a confrontation ... Everybody would
like to avoid a contentious debate in the Security
Council," India's External Affairs Minister Natwar
Singh, who visited Iran this month, had told the
media earlier in September in New York.
Less than promising US-India
relations, which seemed so rosy and healthy in the
wake of Manmohan's July 18 meeting with US
President George W Bush, are now apparently on a
bumpy and uncertain track. There is little doubt
that Washington is willing to put its "friendship"
with New Delhi on the line to accomplish what it
considers the most urgent issue at hand - the
denuclearization of Iran.
The Indian
premier got a taste of things to come following
the first full-house testimony on September 8 at
the US House International Relations Committee,
where two senior State Department officials
defended the Bush administration for its
extraordinary proposal to share civilian nuclear
technology with India.
While the
Republican legislators at the committee en masse
expressed concerns that the deal could set back
the administration's goal of preventing the spread
of nuclear weapons, even a prominent member of the
India lobby on Capitol Hill and minority leader in
the committee, Tom Lantos, went after the deal
with a big hammer.
He said, "New Delhi
must understand how important their cooperation is
and support is for US initiatives to counter the
nuclear threat from Iran. India must decide where
it will stand: with the ayatollahs of terror in
Tehran or with the United States."
Other
critics, who included committee representative
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and chairman Henry Hyde,
alluded negatively to India's friendly relations
with Iran. "Will we secure India's cooperation in
areas that otherwise would not be forthcoming?"
Hyde asked rhetorically.
The committee
hearing made it evident to India that US lawmakers
were prepared to use the July 18 agreement, signed
by Bush to provide India with civilian nuclear
reactors and some hi-tech equipment, as leverage
to garner India's support for the US against Iran.
What exact form such support would take was blurry
at the time, but it is now becoming increasingly
clear.
IAEA board meeting Under
the assumption that India would not vote with the
US, Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad had
called the Indian premier over the phone to thank
him in advance for India's support. The Iranian
president, during this call, reportedly hailed the
positive stands of the Indian government in the
IAEA and expressed his belief that adopting such
constructive positions by India would lead to
further deepening and continuation of bilateral
ties.
As it turned out, it was unwise for
Tehran to expect that India would come in the way
of undermining Washington's "interest" on such an
"important" issue by lending support to Iran. From
vague statements issued earlier by Manmohan, it
should have been evident to Tehran that India was
sitting on the fence, ready to be pushed over.
At the same time, the Indian stance did
not really surprise everybody. "If New Delhi
decides to vote against the resolution, that would
definitely put obstacles at least in the nuclear
deal signed in July 2005," warned Henry Sokolski,
executive director of the Washington-based
Non-Proliferation Policy Education Center.
It was also evident that the Manmohan
government was preparing to crawl an extra mile to
soften up the US lawmakers' hardened position on
the July 18 nuclear agreement.
Washington on the move Reports
suggest that earlier the Bush administration had
dispatched intelligence experts to China and India
to brief them on Tehran's alleged efforts to
develop a missile capable of delivering a nuclear
warhead. Reportedly, the US had already shared
this intelligence with Britain, which supported
the Iraq war, and with France and Germany, which
opposed it, as well as with top officials at the
IAEA.
Prior to this, US pressure on India
had centered on Delhi's proposed gas deal with
Iran and Pakistan to have Iranian gas piped from
Iran to India via Pakistan.
During her
visit to India in March, then newly appointed US
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made clear
that the US remained opposed to a gas pipeline
from Iran to India, while noting at the same time
that rising energy demands in South Asia needed to
be met.
Earlier, according to the Indian
daily newspaper, Indian Express, US ambassador to
India David Mulford, pointing out Washington's
serious difficulties with Iran on its nuclear
weapons program with no immediate solution in
sight, had conveyed Washington's reservations to
the Manmohan government on the Iran-India energy
deal during a meeting with Indian authorities in
New Delhi.
At a joint news conference with
her Indian counterpart, Natwar Singh, in New
Delhi, Rice said, "I think that our views
concerning Iran are very well known by this time.
We have communicated to the Indian government our
concerns about the gas pipeline cooperation
between Iran and India."
India is a huge
and growing natural-gas market. According to the
US-based Energy Information Administration,
natural gas use in India was nearly 25 billion
cubic meters in 2002 and is projected to reach 34
billion cubic meters in 2010 and 45.3 billion
cubic meters in 2015. India produces gas and has
worked with outside partners - including Bechtel,
Gaz de France, General Electric, Total and Unocal
- to increase production, but it will be looking
to other countries in the years to come to fulfill
its requirements.
Expressing her
understanding of India's growing energy demands,
Rice told New Delhi, "We need to look at the
broader question as to how India meets its energy
needs over the next decade. We believe that a
broad energy dialogue should be launched with
India because the needs are there." Some observers
point out that the Bush administration's agreement
on July 18 to ease restrictions on nuclear reactor
exports to India was part of Washington's response
to helping India meet its energy demands.
Washington has noted with dismay that the
tripartite talks to lay the 2,700-kilometer and
$7.4 billion gas pipeline, which began in 1994,
have continued. Apart from the pipeline issue,
India has also signed a $22 billion deal to buy
five million tons of liquefied natural gas (LNG)
annually from Iran over 25 years (beginning in
2009). The contract was signed between the
National Iranian Gas Export Company and three
Indian firms (Indian Oil Company, Gail and Bharat
India).
New Delhi reports that discussions
will continue over awarding India exploitation
rights in the Jofeir oilfield and 10% of a field
at Yadvaran in southwest Iran, and an increase of
2.5 million tons to the LNG deal (which would also
increase Yadvaran ownership to 20%).
Some Indian moves Washington
also watched efforts by New Delhi to deflect US
pressure. It noted that the foreign ministers of
India, China and Russia, meeting at New York, said
recently that they favored a "consensus approach"
to the issue of Iran's nuclear program.
Washington followed closely Natwar Singh's
three-day visit to Tehran in early September. This
followed the visit of Iran's top nuclear
negotiator, Ali Larijani, to Delhi at the end of
August. Singh's meeting with the Iranian president
and his statement, since denied, that "India's
relations with Iran is not predicated on positions
and views attributed to some governments", has
been interpreted in Washington as a show of
defiance on behalf of the friendly Manmohan
government.
Reports indicate Washington
has also exerted pressure by telling New Delhi
that the US is not keen in pushing India's case
with the 44-nation Nuclear Suppliers' Group (NSG)
to grant the country a special status that would
permit import of civilian nuclear technology,
equipment and fuel.
Observers claim that
at least four NSG states have turned adamantly
against India and it is most unlikely that India
can overcome the opposition of these four nations
without active support from Washington.
The US has reportedly conveyed to the
Indian leadership that were India to support Iran
at the IAEA board meeting, then the Bush
administration would withdraw from the ongoing New
Steps in Strategic Partnership (NSSP), which would
immediately hit the July 18 civilian nuclear
agreement between the two countries.
The
NSSP, which took off in January 2004, expands
civilian nuclear, civilian space and high
technology cooperation between India and the US.
In the interim, Boeing Satellite Systems is
permitted to jointly develop and market
communications satellites with India.
There are some in India who openly
question the inadequacy of Manmohan in failing to
decouple the nuclear deal with the US from India's
energy deals with Iran during his July 18 talks
with Bush. It affected New Delhi's foreign policy
apparatus, they point out.
At the same
time, there are many others in India who would
like the Manmohan government to cool its heels on
the Iran issue. They point out that Iran has had a
patchy record of friendship with India and has
never supported India's position on Kashmir. In
addition, Iran was implicated in the early years
of the insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir. Iranian
envoys opposed India vis-a-vis Pakistan in those
years, and visited the Kashmir Valley with the
intent of criticizing "Indian occupation".
On the other hand, those in India who
would like the Manmohan government to abandon
Iran, facing a hostile US, are in a minority. Many
have no hesitation in pointing out that the
civilian nuclear agreement with the US will not
entirely, or even partially, help meet India's
vast energy needs. Besides, India has a
four-decade nuclear energy program, which could be
accelerated to generate more commercial power. The
Indian nuclear program is technically sound,
self-sufficient and engages the best of India's
scientists and engineers.
They point out
that India, for example, needs a huge amount of
oil and gas available from the Central Asian
fields, Bangladesh, Myanmar and the Middle East.
This is a policy of the future and this policy
cannot rest on what the energy-supplying
countries' relations happen to be with Washington
at any given time.
It is evident that the
Manmohan government is now caught between a rock
and a hard place. The domestic compulsion will not
allow Manmohan to let the US ride roughshod over
India on Iran, or any other issue.
The
Communist Party of India, whose support in the
Indian parliament has kept Manmohan's United
Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition government
alive, has already asked the government to rebuff
US demands for joining the anti-Iran bandwagon.
It pointed out that a statement by Rice
that Russia, India and China should join the US in
demanding that Iran halt its nuclear program
showed how the US expected India to behave if it
wanted the status of a strategic ally.
It
would also be naive to assume that only the Indian
communists will oppose the US diktat on what
should be India's relations with Iran.
In
fact, if the majority of Indians come to the
conclusion that Iran was abandoned by New Delhi at
the expense of securing a nuclear deal with the
US, it is almost a certainty that the UPA
government will face serious instability in the
coming days, and opposition to Manmohan's
government will make it a "cause" in no time.
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