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If we've to choose between Israel and Iran, choose the former
Feb 15, 2012
The sticker-bomb attack on an Israeli embassy car in Delhi and the soft coup in Maldives, supported by Islamic extremists, show how sadly out of touch India's foreign policy establishment is about the challenges facing the country from Islamic extremism and global powerplays.
India's policy responses have been inadequate since they flow from non-strategic thinking, and a vain belief that our neighbours will see the benefit of peaceful cooperation and progress. But this is simply not true. Certainly not with China, Pakistan and that autonomous force called Islamic fundamentalism.
Two simple illustrations will help illustrate this point.
In the car-bomb case, Israel has accused Iran of being behind the attack. We have, so far, rightly refrained from falling for this, but no matter what turns out to be the truth, we need to ask ourselves one thing: how has our kowtowing to the Islamic world benefited us? We can say cheap oil – but neither Iran nor Saudi Arabia is in the business of selling us cheap oil. But even while profiting from selling us their oil, they follow policies driven by Islamism that are against our interests in Kashmir and in the rest of India.
In the Maldives, an island country with barely 400,000 people, recent developments have been largely anti-India in content. In the rioting that preceded the ouster of the country's first democratically-elected president, Mohammed Nasheed, guess what the rioters targeted: a museum with Indian artifacts.
The Washington Post, quoting AP reports, notes that the Maldives' national museum reopened on Tuesday minus all its pre-Islamic era exhibits. "About 35 exhibits — mostly images of the Buddha and Hindu gods — were destroyed."
In the car-bomb case, Israel has accused Iran of being behind the attack. We have rightly refrained from falling for this, but we need to ask ourselves one thing: how has our kowtowing to the Islamic world benefited us? AP
According to museum director Ali Waheed, 99 percent of the Maldives' pre-Islamic artifacts from before the 12th century, when most inhabitants were Buddhists or Hindus, were destroyed. "Some of the pieces can be put together but mostly they are made of sandstone, coral and limestone, and they are reduced to powder," he said.
Even worse was Waheed's explanation for the vandalism. According to an ABC News report, Waheed said the attackers did not understand that the museum exhibits were not promoting other religions in this Muslim country. So, clearly, even in tiny Maldives, extremism is alive and well.
And big powers inimical to India are fishing in the Maldives.
An Indian Express interview with deposed President Mohammed Nasheed quotes him as saying that his army was in favour of a defence pact with China. Why does Maldives need a defence pact? And against whom? India?
In fact, senior defence officers told Nasheed he had to sign the China defence agreement. "I had the paper on my desk two weeks back to approve the agreement. The MNDF (Maldivian National Defence Force) had sent it three months ago also but I refused to sign it. They sent it again saying that I have to sign it," said Nasheed.
So why did India acquiesce in the replacement of Nasheed by his deputy? To give China a free run in the neighbourhood? Do we really know where our interests lie?
Now, the car bomb base. Thanks to India's large Muslim population, our foreign policy has been skewed towards appeasing domestic Muslim sentiment by seeming to be friendly with all the murderous regimes of West Asia instead of creating long-term alliances that are truly in our interest.
In this case, it should be obvious to anyone that India's strategic interests are most tied to Israel, which faces the same kind of hostile neighbourhood that India does – though it bears repeating that we have done nothing to deserve anyone's enmity, while Israel has.
India's friendship may even help Israel follow a less brutally repressive regime in Palestine – but that is another story. For now, we will focus on our hostile neighbourhood.
Between Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Burma, Nepal, Bhutan and Maldives, only Bhutan really counts as a friendly neighbour – and it almost does not count.
This does not mean all the others are our enemies, but it does mean we need to have a separate policy for each one of them. China is making its moves everywhere, and so is Pakistan (or Pakistan-based Islamic groups). China's bid for a defence pact in the Maldives — which can have no target but India — shows what's going on. Add the Islamic thrust of the Maldivian rebels, and it is not difficult to see how both China and Islamic groups may be involved.
If we assume that Pakistan is always going to be an enemy, and China an ever-present military threat and half-enemy, it figures that we have to get the rest of our policies right, apart from the larger geopolitical alignments.
Nepal: We have traditionally presumed Nepali friendship, on the assumption that since they are a Hindu country and we allow all Nepalese to enter India freely to work and to prosper, they should be thankful for the same. Wrong. The Nepali Communists have used both the population's innate envy of India and China's willingness to invest there to put India on notice. Clearly, we have to rebuild trust with Nepal, even while quietly leaning on them to protect our interests.
Bangladesh: We have squandered an opportunity to rebuild our relationship during Sheikh Hasina's regime. She has tried to reduce the overt Islamism of the regime, and taken the country towards secularism, even while being helpful in reducing the Islamic fringe's anti-India activities. Clearly, we need to deliver more to Bangladesh in terms of trading benefits. Perhaps, we need to have an arrangement like Nepal for free movement of people here for work. It is happening clandestinely. Many Bangladeshis have even entered voter lists.
Demography is destiny. There is nothing we can do to reduce the Bangladeshi influx – just as the US cannot do anything about Hispanic immigration. We now need to formalise an arrangement with Bangladesh by giving more work permits to its citizens, but without voting or citizenship rights.
The Maldives national museum in Male is reopening without some of its most valuable exhibits a week after a mob of suspected religious extremists smashed images from the pre-Islamic era of this Indian Ocean archipelago.
Sri Lanka: With our southern neighbour, our relationship has been much better after the end of the LTTE. But China is already spending huge amounts to woo Sri Lanka – and that country is happy to use this opportunity. Tamil Nadu's on-and-off efforts to stoke trouble among the Tamils of northern Sri Lanka make it easier for that country to seek Chinese help as an insurance policy.
India's policy needs three elements: a guarantee that Tamil politicians will not start meddling in that country's ethnic issues; more Indian investment to counter the Chinese; and a free trade agreement that is tilted towards Sri Lanka.
Myanmar: We seem to have got the broader policy of engagement and slow march towards democracy largely right in Myanmar. We should now open up border trade, both to benefit them and our eastern states. An eastern Free Trade Area comprising West Bengal, Bangladesh, Burma, and our north-eastern states will lift millions out of poverty in less than one or two decades.
Pakistan: Our western neighbour will always remain an enemy till its army and the mullahs realise that Islamism is not the answer. So the best thing we can do is to keep improving trade, but we will always have to stay vigilant on terrorism and other kinds of mischief. Pakistan can always count on China to back it against India as long as the Islamists – who work on their own agendas – prove too difficult for the Chinese themselves to deal with.
China: With China, only a hard line will work. We need to beef up our defences, both the army and airforce, both in the north-east and in Ladakh, and we have to stop saying that Tibet is a part of China. While we don't have to go the other way and talk about Tibetan independence, we should stop mentioning Tibet as a part of China till China reciprocates our goodwill. Currently, China takes our goodwill for granted, but gives nothing in return. This won't work. We have to move out of the Nehruvian mould on foreign policy driven by generosity and righteousness.
This brings us to the larger geopolitical alignments we need to make to counter Pakistan, China and the Islamic powers that back Pakistan for their own and fundamentalist reasons.
India's natural partners are the US, Russia, Japan, and Israel. The first three are important as a counterweight to China, and the last one is important in our anti-terror stance.
In the Muslim world, India needs good relationships with Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, but we have to be clear that the relationship must be based on quid pro quo. Iran is the fountainhead of the Shia world, and hence a natural rival to Saudi Arabia, which foments hardline Wahabi doctrines. But Iran is a fundamentalist regime in its own way, and so our relationship should be based on mutual respect and balance.
If Iran is going to keep backing the Kashmir cause, we need to make it clear that it comes at a cost. Ditto for Saudi Arabia – where we have to oppose their funding of conservative ulema and Wahabi mosque building.
We cannot do this without first reducing our dependence on Iranian and Saudi oil. It's not impossible, but the change has to start by pricing our oil at realistic levels. Our foolish subsidisation of oil — diesel, kerosene and cooking gas — makes our people use oil inefficiently, increasing our dependence on Saudi and Iranian oil. We are actually subsidising Saudi Arabia and Iran — not our poor.
A higher price for oil means alternative sources of hydrocarbon and renewable energy will become more economic. Thanks to high oil prices, and the discovery of shale oil and gas, America's dependence on West Asian oil is down to just 16 percent of imports, which too are down from 60 percent of US needs to just around 46 percent, says a report in The Wall Street Journal.
Israel, with the world's third largest reserves of shale, is also heading towards less dependence on oil.
And India? We now import 80 percent of our oil requirements, and due to unfair pricing, our gas output is also falling – even though we have lots of it in the Krishna-Godavari basin. We are busy increasing our dependence on West Asian oil, and circumscribing our foreign policy options in the process.
If we had to choose between Iran and Israel, who should we then choose? The answer is obvious. With Israel we have no conflicts of interest. While this does not mean we should be drawn into Israel's larger West Asian conflicts, there is no reason why we should not expand our economic, defence, security and geopolitical relationship to the limit.
If we’ve to choose between Israel and Iran, choose the former | Firstpost
Feb 15, 2012
The sticker-bomb attack on an Israeli embassy car in Delhi and the soft coup in Maldives, supported by Islamic extremists, show how sadly out of touch India's foreign policy establishment is about the challenges facing the country from Islamic extremism and global powerplays.
India's policy responses have been inadequate since they flow from non-strategic thinking, and a vain belief that our neighbours will see the benefit of peaceful cooperation and progress. But this is simply not true. Certainly not with China, Pakistan and that autonomous force called Islamic fundamentalism.
Two simple illustrations will help illustrate this point.
In the car-bomb case, Israel has accused Iran of being behind the attack. We have, so far, rightly refrained from falling for this, but no matter what turns out to be the truth, we need to ask ourselves one thing: how has our kowtowing to the Islamic world benefited us? We can say cheap oil – but neither Iran nor Saudi Arabia is in the business of selling us cheap oil. But even while profiting from selling us their oil, they follow policies driven by Islamism that are against our interests in Kashmir and in the rest of India.
In the Maldives, an island country with barely 400,000 people, recent developments have been largely anti-India in content. In the rioting that preceded the ouster of the country's first democratically-elected president, Mohammed Nasheed, guess what the rioters targeted: a museum with Indian artifacts.
The Washington Post, quoting AP reports, notes that the Maldives' national museum reopened on Tuesday minus all its pre-Islamic era exhibits. "About 35 exhibits — mostly images of the Buddha and Hindu gods — were destroyed."
In the car-bomb case, Israel has accused Iran of being behind the attack. We have rightly refrained from falling for this, but we need to ask ourselves one thing: how has our kowtowing to the Islamic world benefited us? AP
According to museum director Ali Waheed, 99 percent of the Maldives' pre-Islamic artifacts from before the 12th century, when most inhabitants were Buddhists or Hindus, were destroyed. "Some of the pieces can be put together but mostly they are made of sandstone, coral and limestone, and they are reduced to powder," he said.
Even worse was Waheed's explanation for the vandalism. According to an ABC News report, Waheed said the attackers did not understand that the museum exhibits were not promoting other religions in this Muslim country. So, clearly, even in tiny Maldives, extremism is alive and well.
And big powers inimical to India are fishing in the Maldives.
An Indian Express interview with deposed President Mohammed Nasheed quotes him as saying that his army was in favour of a defence pact with China. Why does Maldives need a defence pact? And against whom? India?
In fact, senior defence officers told Nasheed he had to sign the China defence agreement. "I had the paper on my desk two weeks back to approve the agreement. The MNDF (Maldivian National Defence Force) had sent it three months ago also but I refused to sign it. They sent it again saying that I have to sign it," said Nasheed.
So why did India acquiesce in the replacement of Nasheed by his deputy? To give China a free run in the neighbourhood? Do we really know where our interests lie?
Now, the car bomb base. Thanks to India's large Muslim population, our foreign policy has been skewed towards appeasing domestic Muslim sentiment by seeming to be friendly with all the murderous regimes of West Asia instead of creating long-term alliances that are truly in our interest.
In this case, it should be obvious to anyone that India's strategic interests are most tied to Israel, which faces the same kind of hostile neighbourhood that India does – though it bears repeating that we have done nothing to deserve anyone's enmity, while Israel has.
India's friendship may even help Israel follow a less brutally repressive regime in Palestine – but that is another story. For now, we will focus on our hostile neighbourhood.
Between Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Burma, Nepal, Bhutan and Maldives, only Bhutan really counts as a friendly neighbour – and it almost does not count.
This does not mean all the others are our enemies, but it does mean we need to have a separate policy for each one of them. China is making its moves everywhere, and so is Pakistan (or Pakistan-based Islamic groups). China's bid for a defence pact in the Maldives — which can have no target but India — shows what's going on. Add the Islamic thrust of the Maldivian rebels, and it is not difficult to see how both China and Islamic groups may be involved.
If we assume that Pakistan is always going to be an enemy, and China an ever-present military threat and half-enemy, it figures that we have to get the rest of our policies right, apart from the larger geopolitical alignments.
Nepal: We have traditionally presumed Nepali friendship, on the assumption that since they are a Hindu country and we allow all Nepalese to enter India freely to work and to prosper, they should be thankful for the same. Wrong. The Nepali Communists have used both the population's innate envy of India and China's willingness to invest there to put India on notice. Clearly, we have to rebuild trust with Nepal, even while quietly leaning on them to protect our interests.
Bangladesh: We have squandered an opportunity to rebuild our relationship during Sheikh Hasina's regime. She has tried to reduce the overt Islamism of the regime, and taken the country towards secularism, even while being helpful in reducing the Islamic fringe's anti-India activities. Clearly, we need to deliver more to Bangladesh in terms of trading benefits. Perhaps, we need to have an arrangement like Nepal for free movement of people here for work. It is happening clandestinely. Many Bangladeshis have even entered voter lists.
Demography is destiny. There is nothing we can do to reduce the Bangladeshi influx – just as the US cannot do anything about Hispanic immigration. We now need to formalise an arrangement with Bangladesh by giving more work permits to its citizens, but without voting or citizenship rights.
The Maldives national museum in Male is reopening without some of its most valuable exhibits a week after a mob of suspected religious extremists smashed images from the pre-Islamic era of this Indian Ocean archipelago.
Sri Lanka: With our southern neighbour, our relationship has been much better after the end of the LTTE. But China is already spending huge amounts to woo Sri Lanka – and that country is happy to use this opportunity. Tamil Nadu's on-and-off efforts to stoke trouble among the Tamils of northern Sri Lanka make it easier for that country to seek Chinese help as an insurance policy.
India's policy needs three elements: a guarantee that Tamil politicians will not start meddling in that country's ethnic issues; more Indian investment to counter the Chinese; and a free trade agreement that is tilted towards Sri Lanka.
Myanmar: We seem to have got the broader policy of engagement and slow march towards democracy largely right in Myanmar. We should now open up border trade, both to benefit them and our eastern states. An eastern Free Trade Area comprising West Bengal, Bangladesh, Burma, and our north-eastern states will lift millions out of poverty in less than one or two decades.
Pakistan: Our western neighbour will always remain an enemy till its army and the mullahs realise that Islamism is not the answer. So the best thing we can do is to keep improving trade, but we will always have to stay vigilant on terrorism and other kinds of mischief. Pakistan can always count on China to back it against India as long as the Islamists – who work on their own agendas – prove too difficult for the Chinese themselves to deal with.
China: With China, only a hard line will work. We need to beef up our defences, both the army and airforce, both in the north-east and in Ladakh, and we have to stop saying that Tibet is a part of China. While we don't have to go the other way and talk about Tibetan independence, we should stop mentioning Tibet as a part of China till China reciprocates our goodwill. Currently, China takes our goodwill for granted, but gives nothing in return. This won't work. We have to move out of the Nehruvian mould on foreign policy driven by generosity and righteousness.
This brings us to the larger geopolitical alignments we need to make to counter Pakistan, China and the Islamic powers that back Pakistan for their own and fundamentalist reasons.
India's natural partners are the US, Russia, Japan, and Israel. The first three are important as a counterweight to China, and the last one is important in our anti-terror stance.
In the Muslim world, India needs good relationships with Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, but we have to be clear that the relationship must be based on quid pro quo. Iran is the fountainhead of the Shia world, and hence a natural rival to Saudi Arabia, which foments hardline Wahabi doctrines. But Iran is a fundamentalist regime in its own way, and so our relationship should be based on mutual respect and balance.
If Iran is going to keep backing the Kashmir cause, we need to make it clear that it comes at a cost. Ditto for Saudi Arabia – where we have to oppose their funding of conservative ulema and Wahabi mosque building.
We cannot do this without first reducing our dependence on Iranian and Saudi oil. It's not impossible, but the change has to start by pricing our oil at realistic levels. Our foolish subsidisation of oil — diesel, kerosene and cooking gas — makes our people use oil inefficiently, increasing our dependence on Saudi and Iranian oil. We are actually subsidising Saudi Arabia and Iran — not our poor.
A higher price for oil means alternative sources of hydrocarbon and renewable energy will become more economic. Thanks to high oil prices, and the discovery of shale oil and gas, America's dependence on West Asian oil is down to just 16 percent of imports, which too are down from 60 percent of US needs to just around 46 percent, says a report in The Wall Street Journal.
Israel, with the world's third largest reserves of shale, is also heading towards less dependence on oil.
And India? We now import 80 percent of our oil requirements, and due to unfair pricing, our gas output is also falling – even though we have lots of it in the Krishna-Godavari basin. We are busy increasing our dependence on West Asian oil, and circumscribing our foreign policy options in the process.
If we had to choose between Iran and Israel, who should we then choose? The answer is obvious. With Israel we have no conflicts of interest. While this does not mean we should be drawn into Israel's larger West Asian conflicts, there is no reason why we should not expand our economic, defence, security and geopolitical relationship to the limit.
If we’ve to choose between Israel and Iran, choose the former | Firstpost
