Brahma Chellaney, Japan Times, June 7, 2012

WASHINGTON — Was the U.S.-India strategic partnership oversold to the extent that it has failed to yield tangible benefits for the United States? Even as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has just held detailed discussions in New Delhi, an increasing number of analysts in Washington have already concluded that the overhyped relationship is losing momentum.

The skeptics cite two high-visibility issues in particular: India’s rejection of separate bids by Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co. to sell 126 fighter-jets, and New Delhi’s reluctance to snap energy ties with Iran. The discussion over these issues, however, obscures key facts.

Take the aircraft deal.  Despite that setback, U.S. firms have clinched several other multibillion-dollar arms deals in recent years. These contracts have been secured on a government-to-government basis, without any competitive bidding.  But in the one case where India invited bids, American firms failed to make it beyond the competition’s first round because they did not match the price and other terms offered by the French manufacturer of the Rafale aircraft and the European consortium that makes the Eurofighter Typhoon.

The most-startling yet little-publicized fact is America’s quiet emergence as the largest arms seller to India. In the decade since President George W. Bush launched the vaunted U.S.-Indian strategic partnership, India has fundamentally reoriented its defense procurement, moving away from its traditional reliance on Russia. Indeed, nearly half of all Indian defense deals by value in recent years have been bagged by the U.S. alone, with Israel a distant second and Russia relegated to the third slot.

Given that India has become the world’s largest arms importer and the United States remains the biggest exporter, U.S. firms are set to secure more contracts in India, which plans to spend more than $100 billion over the next four years to upgrade its military capabilities, including by buying submarines, heavy lift and attack helicopters, howitzers, and tanks.

Now consider the Iran issue. Just as the Indian rejection of the Boeing’s F/A 18 and Lockheed-Martin’s F-16 bids has made big news but the U.S. landing of multiple arms contracts has received little notice, India’s reluctance to publicly support U.S. energy sanctions on Iran has been in the spotlight but not the quiet Indian strategy since the late 1990s to let the share of Iranian oil in India’s energy imports gradually decline — a trend that has seen the importance of Iranian oil supplies for India considerably weaken.

Few in India consider Iran a friend. But given India’s troubled neighborhood, with the country wedged in an arc of problematic states, New Delhi is reluctant to rupture its ties with Iran, its gateway to Afghanistan — the top recipient of Indian aid. India already has paid a heavy price for taking America’s side on some critical issues in its long-running battle against Iran, even though Washington doesn’t take India’s side in its disputes with China or Pakistan.

The Bush administration persuaded India not to conclude any new long-term energy contracts with Iran, and — in return for a civil nuclear deal with the U.S. — abandon its plan to build a gas pipeline from Iran. New Delhi, by voting against Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s governing board in 2005 and 2006, invited Iranian reprisal in the form of cancellation of a 25-year, $22-billion liquefied natural gas deal which had terms highly favorable to India. That deal’s scrapping alone left India poorer by several billion dollars.

Now the U.S. energy embargo against Iran has pushed international oil prices higher, significantly increasing India’s oil bill. The embargo also threatens to undercut India’s import-diversification strategy by making it place most of its eggs in the basket of the Islamist-bankrolling, Saudi Arabia-led oil monarchies that continue to play a role in South Asia detrimental to Indian interests. In fact, thanks to the U.S. embargo against Iran, the swelling coffers of the iron-fisted oil sheikhdoms are set to overflow, increasing their leverage in the region and beyond.

Lost in the U.S. public discussion is an important fact — the declining share of Iranian crude in India’s total oil imports as part of a conscious Indian effort to reduce supply-disruption risks linked with the lurking potential for Iran-related conflict. Since 2008 alone, Iranian oil imports have swiftly fallen from 16.4 percent to 10.3 percent. Given India’s soaring oil imports and search for new sources of supply, the Iranian share is set to decline further, even without India’s participation in the U.S. embargo.

Make no mistake: India shares U.S. objectives on Iran but the exigencies of its regional situation compel it to toe a more cautious line.

The repositioning of the U.S.-India relationship was never intended to be transactional. Rather it was designed as an important geostrategic move to underpin Asian security and serve the long-term U.S. and Indian interests. But even if the relationship were viewed in transactional terms, the U.S. has reaped handsome dividends.

On Iran, the right course for U.S. policy would be to encourage India to continue reducing Iranian oil imports by granting it a waiver from American sanctions law — as Washington has to Japan and nine other countries — and by helping to finance the retrofitting of Indian refineries that presently have a technical capacity to process only Iranian oil.

More fundamentally, just as the Bush administration exaggerated the importance of a single deal with India, contending that the nuclear deal would be fundamentally transformative, it is an overstatement that the U.S.-India relationship today is losing momentum. The geostrategic direction of the relationship is irreversibly set — toward closer collaboration. Even trade between the countries has continued to grow impressively, from $9 billion in 1995 to $100 billion in 2011. While it is too much to expect a congruence of U.S. and Indian national-security objectives in all spheres, the two countries are likely to deepen their cooperation in areas where their interests converge, such as ensuring Asian power equilibrium.

Barack Obama had stroked India’s collective ego by inviting Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for his presidency’s first state dinner, leading to the joke that while China gets a deferential America and Pakistan secures billions of dollars in U.S. aid periodically, India is easily won over with a sumptuous dinner and nice compliments.

The mutual optimism and excitement that characterized the blooming U.S.-Indian ties during the Bush years, admittedly, has given way to more realistic assessments as the relationship has matured. Geostrategic and economic forces, however, continue to drive the two countries closer. Indeed, Obama’s recent pivot to Asia has made closer U.S. strategic collaboration with India critical.

(c) The Japan Times, 2012.

Brahma Chellaney

Hindustan Times, March 30, 2012

BRICS represents the first important non-Western global initiative in the post-Cold War world. But despite the forward movement achieved at their New Delhi summit, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa remain in search of a common ground that can help turn BRICS into a weighty geopolitical alliance. Without clearly defined objectives and an agreed plan of action, BRICS will be weighed down by internal contradictions, as symbolized by its members’ starkly varying political systems, economies, and national ambitions.

The disparate nature of the group’s membership — bringing together the world’s largest autocracy and democracy, as well as commodity-exporting and resource-hungry economies — has prompted cynics to dismiss BRICS as an acronymic ingenuity without substance. To its protagonists, however, BRICS is a product of the ongoing global power shifts, and has the potential to evolve into a major instrument in shaping the architecture of global governance. As a unified grouping, BRICS could play midwife at a time the qualitative reordering of power symbolizes the birth-pangs of a new international order.

On burning international geopolitical issues like Iran and Syria, BRICS actually stands out as the voice of moderation and caution, seeking to provide the balance to the interventionist impulse of Western powers. But as the recent UN human-rights resolution on Sri Lanka showed, the grouping is badly split on other issues. The group’s main economic giant, China, is also the political outlier that rejects the very concept of national elections and is ever ready to advance its commercial and strategic interests by coming to the succour of a fellow human rights-abusing state.

Economically, BRICS is likely to remain the most-important source of global growth. The BRICS grouping, after all, represent more than a quarter of the Earth’s landmass, over 41 per cent of its population, almost 25 per cent of world GDP, and nearly half of all foreign-exchange and gold reserves. In a spectacular reversal of fortunes, the developing economies, with their large foreign-currency holdings, now finance the mounting deficits of the wealthy economies.

In this light, BRICS, with its members’ collective weight, can exercise significant global financial clout if it gets its act together.  BRICS indeed can be called the R-5, after the names of its members’ currencies — the real, rouble, rupee, renminbi, and rand.

Yet in the period since the Russia-India-China (RIC) initiative enlarged in 2008 to include Brazil and take the name of BRIC — a term coined by a Goldman Sachs economist in 2001 — the group has remained a loose, informal bloc. Last year’s expansion of BRIC into BRICS with South Africa’s addition has only accentuated the challenge to establish an institutional structure and a common plan of action, even as this enlargement threatens to make irrelevant yet another initiative — IBSA (India, Brazil, and South Africa).

For Brazil, South Africa, Russia, and India, BRICS serves as a forum to underscore their rising economic clout and showcase their emergence as global players. But for China, which needs no recognition as a rising world power, BRICS offers tangible — not just symbolic — benefits. China indeed has cast a lengthening shadow over the grouping, seeking, for example, to control the proposed common development bank — something India and Russia, in particular, are loath to accept.

At a time when China is under pressure for continuing to manipulate the value of the renminbi in order to artificially reduce the price of its goods and services abroad, the BRICS framework offers it a platform to expand its currency’s international role. As part of its quest to build the renminbi into an international currency, a cash-rich China is to extend renminbi loans to the other members of BRICS.

Lending and trading in renminbi will further boost China’s international status and clout. China’s undervalued currency and hidden export subsidies, however, have been systematically undermining manufacturing in other BRICS states, especially India and Brazil.

BRICS proponents still hope the group can serve as a catalyst for international institutional reforms. The global institutional structure has remained virtually static since the mid-20th century despite the rise of non-Western economic powers, and even the G-20’s formation was an improvisation designed to defer genuine reforms.

Yet, on international institutional reforms, China is hardly on the same page as the other BRICS members. It is a revisionist power concerning the global financial architecture, seeking an overhaul of the Bretton Woods system. But it is a status quo power with respect to the UN system, and unwaveringly opposes expansion of the Security Council’s permanent membership. It wishes to remain Asia’s sole country with a permanent seat — a position that illuminates its effort to regionally confine India.

BRICS can become a pressure group in international relations only if its members are able to agree on a common action-plan. The BRICS states, for example, are generally united in their frustration with — but not in their proposed response to — the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency. Indeed, the most-important bilateral relationship each BRICS country has is with the US. As long as BRICS is unable to present itself as a unified bloc seeking to push specific changes in the present ailing international order, it will continue to be seen by the old powers as embodying an aspiration rather than a threat.

Despite the steps agreed upon at the New Delhi summit, it is uncertain whether BRICS will evolve into a cohesive grouping with defined goals and institutional mechanisms to help pluralize the global order or remain an initiative with a beguiling acronym that does little more than annually bring together its leaders for more discussions. If it is able to develop brick by brick, BRICS could find itself on the evolutionary path treaded by the now-supplanted G-7, which also began as a discussion platform before advancing to joint coordination and action among its members on key international issues.

Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research.

Brahma Chellaney

A Project Syndicate column internationally distributed

As it prepares to hold its latest annual summit in New Delhi on March 28-29, the BRICS grouping — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — remains a concept in search of a common identity and institutionalized cooperation. That is hardly surprising, given that these countries have very different political systems, economies, and national goals, and are located in very different parts of the world. Yet the five emerging economies pride themselves on forming the first important non-Western global initiative.

The lack of common ground among the BRICS has prompted cynics to call the grouping an acronym with no substance. To its protagonists, however, it is a product of today’s ongoing global power shifts, and has the potential to evolve into a major instrument in shaping the architecture of global governance — the midwife of a new international order.

After all, the BRICS economies are likely to be the most important source of future global growth. They represent more than a quarter of the Earth’s landmass, over 41% of its population, almost 25% of world GDP, and nearly half of all foreign-exchange and gold reserves. The BRICS, in fact, might also be dubbed the R-5, after its members’ currencies — the real, ruble, rupee, renminbi, and rand.

At the New Delhi summit, the BRICS leaders will discuss the creation of joint institutions, particularly a common development bank that can help to mobilize savings between the countries. Currently, the BRICS countries constitute a loose, informal bloc. If the group’s leaders fail to make progress on establishing an institutional structure, they will lend credence to the contention that it is merely a “talking shop” for countries so diverse that their shared interests, to the extent that there are any, cannot be translated into a common plan of action.

It was just last year that BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) became BRICS with the addition of South Africa. The BRIC concept, conceived in 2001 by Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs, was embraced by the four original countries only in 2008, when their foreign ministers met on the sidelines of a Russia-India-China (RIC) trilateral meeting. The addition of Brazil paved the way for the first BRIC summit in 2009, which, interestingly, piggybacked on the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) meeting in Yekaterinburg, Russia, that year.

That association helped the SCO — still largely a Sino-Russian enterprise — to receive more publicity, but it left the BRIC countries with little space to start formulating a unified action plan. The subsequent enlargement to include South Africa has made the BRICS a more global grouping, which threatens to render irrelevant yet another initiative, the IBSA (India, Brazil, and South Africa).

For Brazil, Russia, India, and South Africa, the BRICS grouping serves as a forum to underscore their rising economic clout and showcase their emergence as global players. But, for China, which needs no recognition as a rising world power, the BRICS offers tangible — not just symbolic — benefits. As a result, China indeed has cast a lengthening shadow over the group, openly seeking, for example, to control the proposed common development bank — something that India and Russia, in particular, are loath to accept.

At a time when China is under pressure for manipulating the value of the renminbi to maintain export competitiveness, the BRICS framework offers it a platform to expand its currency’s international role. As part of its quest for a global currency that could rival the dollar or the euro, a cash-rich China plans to extend renminbi loans to the other BRICS members.

Lending and trading in renminbi is likely to boost China’s international standing and clout further. But its undervalued currency and hidden export subsidies have been systematically undermining manufacturing in other BRICS countries, especially India and Brazil.

Proponents of the BRICS concept nonetheless remain hopeful that the group can serve as a catalyst for global institutional reform. With existing international arrangements remaining virtually static since the mid-twentieth century (even as non-Western economic powers and nontraditional challenges have emerged), the world needs more than the halfhearted and desultory steps taken thus far. The formation of the G-20, for example, was an improvisation designed to defer genuine financial reform.

In fact, the modest measures implemented in response to the changing distribution of global power have been limited to the economic realm, with the hard core of international relations — peace and security — remaining the exclusive preserve of a handful of countries.

China is not on the same page as the other BRICS countries when it comes to global institutional reform. It is a revisionist power concerning the global financial architecture, seeking an overhaul of the Bretton Woods system. But it is a status quo power with respect to the United Nations system, and steadfastly opposes enlargement of the Security Council’s permanent membership. It wishes to remain Asia’s sole country with a permanent seat — a stance that places it at odds with India.

If the BRICS countries are to jell as a pressure group in international relations, they must agree on what they believe to be attainable political and economic objectives. For example, they are generally united in their frustration with — but not in their proposed response to — the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency. Indeed, the most important bilateral relationship each BRICS country has is with the United States.

The BRICS concept represents, above all, its members’ desire to make the global order more plural. But it is uncertain whether the group’s members will ever evolve into a coherent grouping with defined goals and institutional mechanisms. In the coming days, we might find out whether the BRICS will ever be more than a catchy acronym with an annual boondoggle attached.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author of Asian Juggernaut and Water: Asia’s New Battlefield.

(c) 1995-2012 Project Syndicate.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author of Asian Juggernaut and Water: Asia’s New Battleground.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2012.
www.project-syndicate.org

More Project Syndicate columns by Brahma Chellaney.

By pressuring New Delhi to deny the Dalai Lama a public platform of "any form," Beijing is seeking to undercut the exiled Tibetan leader's value for India.

New moves of an encircler

Just as China is seeking to extend its annexation of Tibet to India’s northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, it is seeking to extend its containment of India to the Dalai Lama. And to contain the Dalai Lama, it brazenly demands India’s cooperation.

Brahma Chellaney, The Times of India, December 4, 2011

As geopolitical rivals, India and China face each other over a highly disputed border. The inviolability of virtually the entire 4,057 km border — one of the longest in the world — has been called into question by China’s increasing cross-frontier military incursions and its calculated refusal to mutually draw a fully agreed line of control along the Himalayas.

The amount of Indian land China occupies or openly covets tops 135,000 square kilometres, or approximately the size of Costa Rica. China currently has unresolved land and sea border disputes with 11 other neighbours. But in comparison with China’s territorial disputes with other neighbours now or even in the past, its land disputes with India stand out for their sheer size and importance.

Beijing’s last-minute postponement of a scheduled round of border talks constitutes no real loss for New Delhi because China has used these 30-year-long negotiations to keep India engaged while blocking any real progress. Even as Beijing has since 2006 provocatively revived its claim to Arunachal Pradesh and concurrently stepped up cross-border forays in all sectors, New Delhi has stayed locked in these fruitless talks.

Let’s be clear: These talks, constituting the longest and the most-barren process between any two nations post-World War II, have only aided the Chinese strategy to mount more military pressure while working to hem in India behind the cover of engagement.

For example, by deploying several thousand troops in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and playing the Kashmir card against India in various ways, China has clearly signalled its intent to squeeze India on Jammu and Kashmir. The military pressure China has built up on Arunachal may just be tactical. The plain fact is that India’s vulnerability in J&K has been heightened by the new Chinese military encirclement.

To help undermine the Dalai Lama’s role, Beijing is now exerting pressure on India to deny the Tibetan leader any kind of public platform. The recent diplomatic spat, as the Chinese foreign ministry has acknowledged, was not just about the Dalai Lama’s address to a religious conference that overlapped with the now-scrapped talks. Rather, Beijing brashly insists that India not provide him a public platform of “any form.”

Beijing draws encouragement from its success in bringing India’s Tibet stance in full alignment with the Chinese line. In 2003, the aging and ailing Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee surrendered India’s last remaining leverage on Tibet when he formally recognized the cartographically dismembered Tibet that Beijing calls the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) as “part of the territory of the People’s Republic of China.” In recent years, even as Beijing has mocked India’s territorial integrity, New Delhi has not sought to subtly add some flexibility to its Tibet stance.

In fact, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s climbdown in first suspending bilateral defence exchanges and then meekly resuming them has only emboldened Beijing. India froze defence exchanges in response to Beijing’s stapled-visa policy on J&K and its refusal to allow the Northern Command chief to head an Indian military delegation to China. Yet Singh personally delivered a two-in-one concession to Beijing earlier this year, agreeing to resume defence talks by delinking them from the stapled-visa issue and dropping the Northern Command chief as the Indian military team’s leader.

Even in the latest dust-up, where was the need for the Indian President to first agree to inaugurate the international Buddhist conference and then chicken out even after the Chinese had cancelled the scheduled border talks? The Prime Minister too backed out from the conference, where he was to be the “guest of honour.”

Just as Beijing compelled New Delhi to climb down on the defence talks, it is likely to drive a hard bargain on the border talks, even though their indefinite suspension can only help bare the actions of the encircler, which wishes to expand its 1951 Tibet annexation to Arunachal.

China has upped the ante on the Dalai Lama because it recognizes that he remains a major strategic asset for India. By asking New Delhi to go beyond denying him a political platform to denying him even a religious platform, it is seeking to extend its containment of India to the Dalai Lama. And it wants India’s help in this endeavour.

Actually, China has embarked on a larger strategy to cement its rule on an increasingly restive Tibet by bringing Tibetan Buddhism under the tight control of an atheist state. From its capture of the Panchen Lama institution to its decree to control the traditional process of finding the reincarnation of any senior lama who passes away, Beijing is acting long term. It is also waiting to install its own marionette as the next Dalai Lama when the present incumbent dies. Only India can foil this broader strategy — and it must for the sake of its own interests.

The writer is a strategic analyst.

(c) The Times Of India, 2011.

BRAHMA CHELLANEY
The Economic Times, November 12, 2011

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.

The author is a professor of strategic studies at the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research.

(c) The Economic Times, 2011.