Clinton hard talk: Let’s not be naïve
US secretary of state Hillary Clinton has caused comment by arriving in Kolkata and seeing West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee before keeping her appointments in New Delhi. Ardent Leftists have naturally seen an imperialist plot while others have worried about a too clever American attempt to exploit circumstances created by the existence of a weak Centre. The reality may be more mundane. (US President Barack Obama too had first landed in Mumbai, and then flown to New Delhi.) After completing a strategic and economic dialogue in Beijing, Ms Clinton simply swung by Bangladesh and India to round off a trip to this part of Asia — possibly her last chance to do so as secretary of state. In Kolkata she held a public engagement where she answered hard political questions — a stab at public diplomacy before signing off.
But there is also probably just a hint of a signal in reaching Kolkata from Dhaka before proceeding to the Indian capital — that India’s Look East policy that takes in Bangladesh and links with Burma and other countries in Southeast and East Asia is synchronous with America’s renewed emphasis on the Asia-Pacific, giving both countries something to think about, and Kolkata, India’s eastern metropolis, would naturally be the economic hub of the effort on the Indian side — the “Mahanagar” taking off after an indecent interregnum.
It would be naïve to get carried away by Ms Clinton’s emphatic words that Pakistan has not done enough to check the launch of terrorism from its soil, and naming Lashkar-e-Tayyaba’s Hafiz Saeed as the prime suspect behind the Mumbai 26/11 attacks. The US is having a hard time of late at the hands of Pakistan on the terrorism front in the Afghan context and is happy to vent itself in India in the hope of finding kindred spirits here. But it is well to remember that Islamabad is Washington’s non-Nato strategic ally even if many in the US are lately beginning to get cheesed off with it.
It was plain that Ms Clinton’s three-day visit was fundamentally about urging this country to be with the US sanctioning of Iran on the nuclear issue and duly cutting its oil imports from Tehran, and about underlining the need to facilitate participation of US firms in India’s civil nuclear programme. This means easing up on the question of liability for US firms in case of an accident. India held firm on both counts. It told Ms Clinton its relations with Iran went beyond energy issues, and had strategic dimensions. It also clearly spelt out that India supported US participation in civil nuclear commerce within the framework of international agreements and the boundaries set by India’s parliamentary processes.
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