Lest we are caught napping, 1962-style

Clueless on China

Brahma Chellaney

India Abroad, September 18, 2009

The latest round of the unending and fruitless India-China talks on
territorial disputes was a fresh reminder of the eroding utility of this
process. It is approaching nearly three decades since China and India began these negotiations. In
this period, the world has changed fundamentally. Indeed, with its rapidly
accumulating military and economic power, China
itself has emerged as a great power in the making, with Washington’s
Asia policy now manifestly Sino-centric. Not
only has India allowed its
military and nuclear asymmetry with China
to grow, but also New Delhi’s
room for diplomatic maneuver is shrinking. As the Indian navy chief, Admiral
Suresh Mehta, has put it plainly, the
power “gap between the two is just too wide to bridge and getting wider by the
day.”

Of course, power asymmetry in interstate relations does not mean
the weaker side must bend to the dictates of the stronger or seek to propitiate
it. Wise strategy, coupled with good diplomacy, is the art of offsetting or
neutralizing military or economic power imbalance with another state. But as Admiral
Mehta warned, “China
is in the process of consolidating its comprehensive national power and
creating formidable military capabilities. One it is done, China is likely
to be more assertive on its claims, especially in the immediate neighborhood.”

It is thus obvious that the longer the process of border-related talks continues
without yielding tangible results, the greater the space Beijing
will have to mount strategic pressure on India and the greater its leverage
in the negotiations. After all, China
already holds the military advantage on the ground. Its forces control the
heights along the long 4.057-kilometer Himalayan frontier, with the Indian
troops perched largely on the lower levels. Furthermore, by building new railroads,
airports and highways in Tibet,
China is now in a position
to rapidly move additional forces to the border to potentially strike at India at a time
of its choosing.

Diplomatically, China
is a contented party, having occupied what it wanted — the Aksai Chin plateau,
which is almost the size of Switzerland
and provides the only accessible Tibet-Xinjiang route through the Karakoram passes of the Kunlun Mountains.
Yet it chooses
to press claims on additional Indian territories as part of a grand strategy to
gain leverage in bilateral relations and, more importantly, to keep India under military
and diplomatic pressure.

At the core of its strategy is an apparent resolve to indefinitely hold off
on a border settlement with India
through an overt refusal to accept the territorial status quo. In not hiding
its intent to further redraw the Himalayan frontiers, Beijing only helps highlight the futility of
the ongoing process of political negotiations. After all, the territorial
status quo can be changed not through political talks but by further military
conquest. Yet, paradoxically, the political process remains important for Beijing to provide the façade of engagement behind which
to seek India’s
containment.

Keeping India
engaged in endless talks is a key Chinese objective so that Beijing can continue its work on changing the
Himalayan balance decisively in its favor through a greater build-up of military
power and logistical capabilities. That is why China
has sought to shield the negotiating process from the perceptible hardening of
its stance towards New Delhi and the
vituperative attacks against India
in its state-run media. Add to the picture the aggressive patrolling of the
Himalayan frontier by the People’s Liberation Army and the growing Chinese
incursions across the line of control.

Let’s be clear: Chinese negotiating tactics have shifted markedly over
the decades. Beijing originally floated the swap idea — giving up its claims in
India’s northeast in return for Indian acceptance of the Chinese control over a
part of Ladakh — to legalize its occupation of Aksai Chin. It then sang the
mantra of putting the territorial disputes on the backburner so that the two
countries could concentrate on building close, mutually beneficial relations. But
in more recent years, in keeping with its rising strength, China has escalated border tensions
and military incursions while assertively laying claim to Arunachal Pradesh.
According to a recent report in Ming Pao, a Hong Kong paper with close ties to the
establishment in Beijing, China is seeking “just” 28 percent
of Arunachal. That means an area nearly the size of Taiwan.

In that light, can the Sino-Indian border talks be kept
going indefinitely? Consider two important facts.

First, the present border negotiations have been going on continuously
since 1981, making them already the longest and the most-barren process between
any two countries in modern history. The record includes eight rounds of senior-level talks between 1981 and
1987, 14 Joint Working Group meetings between 1988 and 2002, and 13 rounds of
talks between the designated Special Representatives since 2003. 

It seems the only progress
in this process is that India’s
choice of words in public is now the same as China’s. “Both countries
have agreed to seek a fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable settlement of
this issue,” Indian External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna told Parliament on
July 31. “The matter, of course, is complex and requires time and lots of
patience.” It was as if the Chinese foreign minister was speaking. Isn’t it odd
for India
— the country at the receiving end of growing Chinese bellicosity — to plead
for more time and patience after nearly three decades of negotiations?

Second, the authoritative People’s Daily — the
Communist Party mouthpiece that reflects official thinking — made it clear in a
June 11, 2009 editorial: “China
won’t make any compromises in its border disputes with India.” That reflects the Chinese
position in the negotiations. But when Beijing
is advertising its uncompromising stance, doesn’t New Delhi get the message?  The recent essay posted on a Chinese
quasi-official website that called for India
to be broken into 20 to
30 sovereign states cannot obscure an important fact: Dismember India is a
project China
launched in the Mao years when it trained and armed Naga and Mizo guerrillas. In
initiating its proxy war against India,
Pakistan
merely took a leaf out of the Chinese book. 

Today, China’s
muscle-flexing along the Himalayas cannot be
ignored. After all, even when China
was poor and backward, it employed brute force to annex Xinjiang (1949) and Tibet (1950), to raid South
Korea (1950), to invade India
(1962), to initiate a border conflict with the Soviet Union through a military
ambush (1969)
and to attack Vietnam
(1979). A prosperous, militarily strong China cannot but be a threat to its
neighbors, especially if there are no constraints on the exercise of Chinese
power.

So, the key question is: What does India gain by staying put in an interminably
barren negotiating process with China?
By persisting with this process, isn’t India
aiding the Chinese engagement-with-containment strategy by providing Beijing the cover it
needs? While Beijing’s strategy and tactics are
apparent, India
has had difficulty to define a game-plan and resolutely pursue clearly laid-out
objectives. Still, staying put in a barren process cannot be an end in itself
for India.

India indeed has retreated to an
increasingly defensive position territorially, with the spotlight now on China’s Tibet-linked claim to Arunachal Pradesh than
on Tibet’s
status itself. Now you know why Beijing invested so much
political capital over the years in getting India
to gradually accept Tibet
as part of the territory of the People’s Republic. Its success on that score
has helped narrow the dispute to what it claims. That neatly meshes with China’s
long-standing negotiating stance: What it occupies is Chinese territory, and
what it claims must be on the table to be settled on the basis of give-and-take
— or as it puts it in reasonably sounding terms, on the basis of “mutual
accommodation and mutual understanding.”

As a result, India
has been left in the unenviable position of having to fend off Chinese territorial
demands. In fact, history is in danger of repeating itself as India gets
sucked into a 1950s-style trap. The issue then was Aksai Chin;
the issue now is Arunachal. But rather than put the focus on the source of
China’s claim — Tibet — and Beijing’s attempt to territorially enlarge its
Tibet annexation to what it calls “southern Tibet,” India is willing to be
taken ad infinitum around the mulberry bush. Just because New
Delhi has accepted Tibet
to be part of China should
not prevent it from gently shining a spotlight on Tibet as the lingering core issue.

Yet India’s
long record of political diffidence only emboldens Beijing. India
accepted the Chinese annexation of Tibet
and surrendered its own British-inherited extraterritorial rights over Tibet on a
silver platter without asking for anything in return. Now, China wants India to display the same “amicable
spirit” and hand over to it at least the Tawang valley.

Take the period since the border talks were “elevated” to
the level of special representatives in 2003. India
first got into an extended exercise with Beijing
to define general principles to govern a border settlement, despite China’s
egregious record of flouting the Panchsheel principles and committing naked
aggression in 1962. But no sooner had the border-related principles been
unveiled in 2005 with fanfare than Beijing
jettisoned the do-not-disturb-the-settled-populations principle to buttress its
claim to Arunachal.

Yet, as the most-recent round of talks highlighted this
month, India has agreed to
let the negotiations go off at a tangent by broadening them into a diffused strategic
dialogue — to the delight of Beijing.
The process now has become a means for the two sides to discuss “the entire gamut of bilateral relations and regional and
international issues of mutual interest.”

This not only opens yet another chapter in an increasingly
directionless process, but also lets China condition a border settlement
to the achievement of greater Sino-Indian strategic congruence. Worse still, New Delhi is to observe 2010 — the 60th anniversary of China becoming India’s
neighbor by gobbling up Tibet
— as the “Year of Friendship with China”
in India.

(c) India Abroad,
2009.

Dragon’s war dance

India is in serious danger of sliding into a 1962-type dragon trap. It needs high-quality statecraft to ensure that it does not get caught in China’s elaborate efforts to ratchet up border tensions, says Brahma Chellaney

DNA newspaper, September 11, 2009

The 32-day surprise Chinese invasion in 1962 lasted longer than the 1965 and 1971 wars with Pakistan and claimed the lives of more Indian soldiers than any other aggression faced by India since independence, with the exception of 1971. Yet the myth still being peddled internationally is that 1962 was a brief war. Today, as Chinese cross-frontier incursions grow and border tensions rise, the situation is becoming similar to the one that prevailed in the run-up to 1962. The several parallels raise the spectre of another Chinese attack.

First, like in the pre-1962 period, it has become commonplace internationally to speak of India and China in the same breadth. The aim of “Mao’s India war”, as Harvard scholar Roderick MacFarquhar has called it, was large political: To cut India to size by demolishing what it represented — a democratic alternative to the Chinese autocracy. The brute force with which Mao Zedong humiliated India helped discredit the Indian model, boost China’s international image and consolidate Mao’s internal power. The return of the China-India pairing decades later is something Beijing viscerally loathes.

Second, the Dalai Lama’s flight to India in 1959 — and the ready sanctuary he got there — paved the way for the Chinese military attack. Today, 50 years after his escape, the exiled Tibetan leader stands as a bigger challenge than ever for China, as underscored by Beijing’s stepped-up vilification campaign against him. With Beijing now treating the Dalai Lama as its Enemy No. 1, India has come under greater Chinese pressure to curb his activities and those of his government-in-exile. The continuing security clampdown in Tibet since the March 2008 Tibetan uprising parallels the harsh Chinese crackdown in Tibet during 1959-62.

Three, the present pattern of cross-frontier incursions and other border incidents, as well as new force deployments and mutual recriminations, is redolent of the situation that prevailed before the 1962 war. According to the Indian army chief, “This year, there were 21 incursions in June, 20 in July and 24 in August.” Such is the rising graph of Chinese cross-border forays that such intrusions nearly doubled in two years, from 140 in 2006 to 270 in 2008. Little surprise the defence minister warned as early as April 2008 that there is “no room for complacency” along the Himalayan frontier.

Four, the 1962 invasion occurred against the backdrop of China instigating and arming insurgents in India’s northeast. Although such activities ceased after Mao’s 1976 death, China seems to be coming full circle today, with Chinese-made arms increasingly flowing into guerrilla ranks in northeastern India, including via Burma. India has taken up this matter with Beijing at the foreign minister-level. Indeed, Pakistan-based terrorists targeting India now rely on Chinese arms — from the AK-56 assault rifles to the Type 86 grenades made by China’s state-owned Norinco firm. To add to India’s woes, Beijing has blocked efforts to get the United Nations to designate as a terrorist the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Muhammad group chief, Masood Azhar.

Five, then-Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s slogan, “Hindi-Chini bhai bhai” (Indians and Chinese are brothers), is today matched by the “Chindia” concept, which — disregarding the rivalry and antagonisms — blends the two Asian giants together.

Sixth, just as India had retreated to a defensive position in the border negotiations with Beijing in the early 1960s after having undermined its leverage by accepting the “Tibet region of China” through the 1954 Panchsheel Agreement, New Delhi similarly has been left in the unenviable position today of having to fend off Chinese territorial demands. Whatever leverage India still had on the Tibet issue was surrendered in 2003 when it shifted its position from Tibet being an “autonomous” region within China to it being “part of the territory of the People’s Republic of China.” Little surprise the spotlight now is on China’s Tibet-linked claim to Arunachal Pradesh than on Tibet’s status itself.

That explains why Beijing invested so much political capital over the years in getting India to gradually accept Tibet as part of China. Its success on that score narrows the dispute to what it claims today. The issue in 1962 was Aksai Chin; the issue now is Arunachal, particularly Tawang. But had Beijing really believed Tawang was part of Tibet and hence belonged to China, the Chinese military would have held on to that critical corridor after its capture in 1962, just as it kept the territorial gains of that war in Ladakh.

With India in serious danger of sliding into a 1962-type dragon trap, the country needs high-quality statecraft to handle the present situation and ensure the nation is not again told what Nehru stated the day China attacked — that Beijing returned “evil for good.”

Brahma Chellaney is professor at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.

Russia, the world’s critical "swing" state

Brahma Chellaney The Hindu newspaper June 16, 2009

Even if it is to prescheduled Brazil-Russia-India-China (BRIC) and Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit meetings, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is making the symbolically significant first foreign visit of his second term in office to Russia, which he had once called a “tried and tested friend” of India. Russia, with its vantage location in Eurasia and matching strategic concerns, is a natural ally of India. A robust relationship with Moscow will help New Delhi to leverage its ties with both Washington and Beijing. 

Which is the only power India can tap for critical military technologies? Which country today is willing to make a nuclear-powered submarine for India? Which state is ready to sell India a large aircraft carrier, even if an old one? Which power sells New Delhi major weapons without offering similar systems to India’s adversaries? The answer to all these questions is Russia. Little surprise Dr. Singh admitted in early 2007: “Although there has been a sea-change in the international situation during the last decade, Russia remains indispensable to the core of India’s foreign-policy interests.”

Three facts about Russia

Three important facts about Russia stand out. One, Russia has gradually become a more assertive power after stemming its precipitous decline and drift of the 1990s. Two, it now plays the Great Game on energy. Competition over control of hydrocarbon resources was a defining feature of the Cold War and remains an important driver of contemporary geopolitics, as manifest from the American occupation of Iraq and U.S. military bases or strategic tie-ups stretching across the Persian Gulf, the Caspian Sea basin and Central Asia.

Three, Russian democracy has moved toward greater centralized control to bring order and direction to the state. During Vladimir Putin’s presidency, government control was extended to large swaths of the economy and the political opposition was systematically emasculated. 

Such centralization, though, is no different than in, say, Singapore and Malaysia, including the domination of one political party, the absence of diversified media, limits on public demonstrations and the writ of security services. But in contrast to Russia, Singapore and Malaysia have insulated themselves from official U.S. criticism by willingly serving Western interests. When did you last hear American criticism of Singapore’s egregious political practices?

Yet Russia faces a rising tide of Western criticism for sliding toward autocracy. Indeed, ideological baggage, not dispassionate strategic deliberation, often colours U.S. and European discourse on Russia. Another reason is Russia’s geographical presence in Europe, the “mother” of both the Russian and U.S. civilizations. There is thus a greater propensity to hold Russia to European standards, unlike, say, China. Also, Russia was considered a more plausible candidate for democratic reform than China. Little surprise Russia’s greater centralization evokes fervent Western reaction.  

Today’s Russia, however, bears little resemblance to the Soviet Union. Life for the average Russian is freer and there is no Soviet-style shortage of consumer goods. There are also no online censors regulating Internet content. But what now looks like a resurgent power faces major demographic and economic challenges to build and sustain great-power capacity over the long run. 

Demographically, Russia is even in danger of losing its Slavic identity and becoming a Muslim-majority state in the decades ahead, unless government incentives succeed in encouraging Russian women to have more children. The average age of death of a Russian male has fallen to 58.9 years — nearly two decades below an American. Economically, the oil-price crash has come as a warning against being a largely petro-state.

In fact, Moscow’s economic fortunes for long have been tied too heavily to oil — a commodity with volatile prices. In 1980, the Soviet Union overtook Saudi Arabia as the biggest oil producer. But oil prices began to decline, plummeting to $9 a barrel in mid-1986. U.S. intelligence, failing to read the significance of this, continued to claim Moscow was engaged in massive military modernization. During the Putin presidency, rising oil prices played a key role in Russian economic revival. The higher the oil prices, the less the pressure there is on Russia to restructure and diversify its economy. The present low prices thus offer an opportunity to Moscow to reform. 

Still, it should not be forgotten that Russia is the world’s wealthiest country in natural resources — from fertile farmlands and metals, to gold and timber. It sits on colossal hydrocarbon reserves. It also remains a nuclear and missile superpower. Indeed, to compensate for the erosion in its conventional-military capabilities, it has increasingly relied on its large nuclear arsenal, which it is ambitiously modernizing.

Right international approach

Whatever its future, the big question is: What is the right international approach toward a resurgent Russia? Here two aspects need to be borne in mind.

That the choice made was wise can be seen from the baneful impact of the opposite decision that was taken on Burma after 1988 — to pursue a punitive approach relying on sanctions. Had the Burma-type approach been applied against China, the result would not only have been a less-prosperous and less-open China, but also a more-paranoid and possibly destabilizing China. The lesson is that engagement and integration are better than sanctions and isolation.

Today, with a new chill setting in on relations between the West and Russia, that lesson is in danger of getting lost. Russia’s 16-year effort to join the World Trade Organization has still to bear fruit, even as Moscow is said to be in the last phase of negotiations, and the U.S.-Russian nuclear deal remains on hold in Washington.

Little thought is being given to how the West lost Russia, which during its period of decline eagerly sought to cosy up to the U.S. and Europe, only to get the cold shoulder from Washington. Also, turning a blind eye to the way NATO is being expanded right up to Russia’s front-yard and the U.S.-led action in engineering Kosovo’s February 2008 self-proclamation of independence, attention has focused since last August on Moscow’s misguided but short-lived military intervention in Georgia and its recognition of the self-declaration of independence by South Ossetia and Abkhazia — actions that some portrayed as the 21st century’s first forcible changing of borders.

But having sponsored Kosovo’s self-proclamation of independence, the U.S. and some of its allies awkwardly opposed the same right of self-determination for the people of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. It is as if the legitimacy of a self-declaration of independence depends on which great power sponsors that action.

The world cannot afford a new Cold War, which is what constant bear-baiting will bring. Fortunately, there are some positive signs. Nuclear arms control is back on the U.S.-Russian agenda, and U.S. President Barack Obama is scheduled to be in Moscow for a July 6-7 summit meeting. The U.S. is going slow on missile-defence deployments in Eastern Europe and there is a de facto postponement of NATO expansion to Ukraine and Georgia. As part of what Obama has called a “reset” of the bilateral relationship, a U.S.-Russia joint commission headed by the two presidents is to be established, along with several sub-commissions. This is an improvement on the 1993 commission established at the level of No. 2s, Vice President Al Gore and Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin.

The key issue is whether the U.S. and Russia will be able to seize the new opportunity to redefine their relationship before it becomes too late. For Russia, the challenge is to engage the West more deeply. It also needs to increase its economic footprint in Asia, where its presence is largely military. For the U.S., the challenge is to pursue new geopolitics of engagement with Moscow.

Brahma Chellaney is professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

(c) The Hindu, 2009.

China aided Sri Lanka bloodbath

The Economic Times, June 8, 2009

Like in the case of the Darfur genocide in Sudan, Chinese weapons and aid to Sri Lanka facilitated the bloodbath on that tiny island-nation that left thousands of trapped civilians dead this year as government forces decimated the Tamil Tiger guerrillas in a brutal military campaign. More people have been killed in Sri Lanka this year than in Afghanistan, Iraq and Gaza combined, according to the United Nations.

George W. Bush and Manmohan Singh — nuclear soulmates?

By Brahma Chellaney

A Reuters column January 20, 2009

They were certainly not made for each other. Yet the trigger-happy George W. Bush found a soulmate in diffident Manmohan Singh. When the Indian prime minister publicly told the little-loved Bush that the "people of India deeply love you," he was expressing his own deep-seated admiration of a U.S. president whose just-ended term in office constituted a nadir from which it will take America years to recoup its losses.

Singh’s fulsome praise for Bush stood out at that September 25, 2008 White House news conference. The Indian leader had actually timed that visit to Washington so that it coincided with the expected congressional ratification of the controversial U.S.-India nuclear deal. But the Senate clearance of the deal got delayed because of the new congressional and executive focus on a bailout package to rescue sinking U.S. financial institutions.

Almost every paragraph in the prepared statement Singh read out at that press conference ended with a sappy tribute to Bush:

•"And the last four-and-a-half years that I have been prime minister, I have been the recipient of your generosity, your affection, your friendship. It means a lot to me and to the people of India."

•"And Mr. President, you have played a most-important role in making all this happen."

•"And when history is written, I think it will be recorded that President George W. Bush made an historic goal in bringing our two democracies closer to each other."

•"And when this restrictive regime ends, I think a great deal of credit will go to President Bush. And for this I am very grateful to you, Mr. President.”

•“So, Mr. President, this may be my last visit to you during your presidency, and let me say, Thank you very much. The people of India deeply love you.”

Referring to Singh’s expression of love for the much-despised Bush, Anand Giridharadas wrote in the New York Times, “Laura Bush is not alone, after all.” Perhaps the only thing Singh didn’t do at that event was to hand Bush, with tear-welled eyes, a rose.

Bush’s otherwise negative legacy includes a foreign-policy triumph – the nuclear deal with India, consummated through his bonding with Singh.

These two dissimilar personalities displayed similar political traits at critical times. Their bond served as a reminder that, contrary to international-relations theory, history is shaped not just by cold calculations of national interest, but heavily by the role of personalities, including their personal attributes, idiosyncrasies and hobbyhorses.

Their personalities were apart, yet Bush and Singh showed they share a lot in common, including an emphasis on spinning reality to suit political ends. While Bush led the U.S. into Iraq through lies and deception, Singh’s Iraq was the nuclear deal, into which he led India blindly. And just as Bush claimed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Singh asserted fanciful benefits in the nuclear deal.

While Bush was a catalyst in America’s declining global influence, Singh has served as a catalyst in undermining India’s inner strength to the extent that New Delhi today pursues a policy of propitiation toward China and a policy of empty rhetoric against Pakistan-fomented terrorism even as its internal security has come under siege.

Under their leadership, America and India became internally weaker.

Bush and Singh, although one was strident and the other soft-spoken, displayed the same fondness for generalities and the same knack of handling crises in ways that make them exponentially worse.

Yet neither wavered from his chosen path even when the democratic majority was against that course.

When Bush could not have his way, he resorted to bullying and intimidation. Singh does it differently — he goes into a sulk, threatening to resign, as he did last summer until the Congress Party gave in to his wishes on the nuclear deal.

Singh’s obsessive fixation on that deal was matched by Bush’s destructive mania on Iraq, where his swan song involved ducking shoes.

While Bush will be remembered for horrors like Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo and blunders like Iraq and Afghanistan, Singh will be remembered for the “cash-for-votes” scandal that marred his July 22, 2008 win in a Parliament confidence vote and his memorable credulity in setting up a joint anti-terror mechanism with terror-exporting Pakistan.

Indeed, Singh’s first diplomatic response to the Mumbai attacks was to invite the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) chief to India. But for second thoughts in Islamabad, the head of that rogue Pakistani agency would have landed up in India, as per the invitation, “to assist in the investigations” — analogous to a mafia leader assisting police.

Handing Islamabad a dossier of evidence the same day Singh said “some official agencies in Pakistan must have supported” the attacks symbolized unremitting naïveté. If state agencies were involved, how could New Delhi expect the Pakistani state to act against them?

While Bush allowed his national-security agenda to be hijacked by neocons, the onetime-socialist Singh emerged as India’s chief neocon.

His two votes against Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) board, for example, cost India hundreds of millions of dollars as Tehran, in reprisal, reneged on the terms of a liquefied natural gas (LNG) contract, forcing New Delhi to buy LNG from other suppliers at a much higher price.

Bush was always protective of Singh. The Bush administration’s unclassified answers to 45 congressional questions on the nuclear deal were kept secret for nine months not only because the replies belied Singh’s assurances to Parliament, but also as their disclosure “could have toppled the government” in New Delhi, according to Glenn Kessler in the Washington Post. The answers became public only after the danger to Singh’s political survival had passed.

Singh, for his part, shielded even a Bush political appointee. “To err is human,” Singh famously said when Ambassador David Mulford triggered a furore in early 2006 with undiplomatic remarks.

Now, on two consecutive days this month, Mulford ticked off Singh himself for linking Pakistani “official agencies” to the Mumbai attacks.

On one occasion, Mulford said: “I think one needs to be very, very careful about making those kinds of allegations unless you have very concrete evidence to that degree of specificity.” On another occasion, he declared: “I don’t think we want to take the view that we make accusations against certain parties without the usual evidences and proofs.”

How did New Delhi respond to that scolding? It made not even a peek.

Both Bush and Singh squandered taxpayer money. While the economic costs of the Bush-initiated wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have already totalled a staggering $1.6 trillion, with the Bush administration having awarded billions of dollars in no-bid reconstruction contracts to favoured companies that did little on the ground, Singh, as a “thank-you” to Bush for the nuclear deal, unveiled yet another purchase of obsolescent arms — eight Boeing P-8I long-range maritime reconnaissance aircraft, in a $2.1 billion deal.

Another “thank-you” — a nuclear-accident liability coverage bill, currently in circulation within the government — could be pushed in the brief Parliament session in February in the same manner eight bills were rammed through in 17 minutes on December 23, 2008 in the midst of continuous uproar in the Lok Sabha, the ruling lower House.

Bush famously said about Russian leader Vladimir Putin: “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward… I was able to get a sense of his soul.” That prompted Senator John McCain to claim he also looked into Putin’s eyes, only to see three letters: K-G-B.

But if there is anyone who says he got a sense of Bush’s soul it is Singh. He looked into Bush’s eyes and read three words: love for India. While the U.S.-India relationship began to blossom under Bush, the wreckage he has left — extending from Pakistan-Afghanistan to Wall Street — will cost India dear.

(Brahma Chellaney is Professor of Strategic Studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi)

(Brahma Chellaney is a Reuters columnist. The views expressed are his own.)

http://in.reuters.com/article/specialEvents1/idINIndia-37547520090120?sp=true