Avoid spin, train mind on new thinking regarding Iran
Hasn’t someone said, ‘Success has a thousand fathers, while failure is an orphan?’ Delhi is the latest claimant to the legacy of having secretly fathered the US-Iranian engagement. The Indian officials are busy planting
media stories (in more than one newspaper) that they “always pushed” Iran to talk things over with Uncle Sam.
This’s simply hilarious. Did the Iranians ever need anyone’s “push” to talk to the Americans? For heaven’s sake, they’ve been bending over backward for ages to catch the Eagle’s eye. How many overtures Tehran made? In his briefing at Geneva on Sunday in the wee hours of the morning after a whole night of hard negotiations with the Iranians, US secretary of state John Kerry openly acknowledged this.
In a poignant passage a visibly exhausted Kerry said, “In 1973-19-excuse me, in 2003, when the Iranians made an offer to the former Administration with respect to their nuclear program, there were 164 centrifuges. That offer was not taken. Subsequently, sanctions came in, and today there are 19,000 centrifuges and growing. So people have a responsibility to make judgment about this choice [to engage Iran].”
The heart of the matter is that Washington was not interested in engaging Iran — that is, until Barack Obama became president. Like an associate professor at the US Naval Postgraduate School at Monterey James Russell asked plaintively earlier this week, ‘Barack, Where Have You Been?”
No, Sir, Indian officials kept great distance from Iranians during the recent decade under the UPA government when the US-Iran standoff began hotting up. If they went anywhere near the Iranians, that was to attract American attention and to generate some diplomatic leverage vis-a-vis Washington — indeed, the Iranians understood it perfectly well, too — and even joked openly about our shenanigans.
And if like chameleons the Indian officials are changing colour today, the reason for that is not too difficult to seek — Delhi wants to be in the gravy train starting from Geneva under American supervision. If Washington engages Tehran, can Delhi be far behind?
The plain truth is that the Americans and Iranians began talking directly in great secrecy once Obama decided it’s about time to do that. Neither Washington nor Tehran needed prompting. Curiously,
Kerry himself used to be a back channel.
Neither the Americans nor the Iranians wanted any third party messing around with their secret contacts. The sole exception they made was for the enlightened Sultan of Oman, who was trusted in Tehran despite being a GCC leader.
Suffice to say, the Iranians always sought direct contact with the Americans and they were determined to have it — and under Obama’s watch they got it.
Where do our chaps come into all this? In fact, it was only fairly recently that the Indian foreign-policy establishment began figuring out that the US-Iranian standoff is steadily giving way to constructive engagement. If you look back, the UPA government has been having a roaring romance with the Sunni Arab oligarchies of the Persian Gulf through much of the past decade.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited Tehran alright but to attend the NAM summit, whereas he travelled far and wide in the Gulf Arab oligarchies seeking ‘bilaterals’. Wouldn’t Tehran have taken note? The PM bent protocol to go to the airport to receive King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia — the only time he did until then was to receive George W. Bush.
Indeed, UPA government made some big blunders in the West Asia policies — such as the mission undertaken by Defence Minister A. K. Antony to Saudi Arabia under the mistaken notion that we’re about to break the Saudi-Pakistani nexus. On the contrary, where do things stand today?
According to reports, Saudis are hoping to ‘buy’ — or have already bought a few Pakistani nukes. According to a recent Carnegie report, Saudis have subcontracted to the Pakistani brothers the task of training the Salafi fighters to be despatched to the killing fields of Syria.
Again, we refused to launch an Iranian satellite in 2009, while
agreeing to launch an Israeli spy satellite only a few months back. Have we forgotten that we attended the first meeting of the Saudi-sponsored ‘Friends of Syria’? The lay of the land was quite visible.
The Sunni Arab regimes of the Persian Gulf and Israel carried such immense clout with the Indian political and security establishment respectively to influence the UPA government’s West Asia policies, while the Iranians simply hunkered down and hoped that better sense would prevail in Delhi some day.
The big question today is whether the Iranians will easily forget all that happened. Clearly, India-Iran strategic relations, which were nurtured by then Prime Minister Narasimha Rao in the early 1990s and flourished through the NDA government’s rule till 2004 under PM Vajpayee’s leadership, have suffered huge erosion during the UPA I and II under Manmohan Singh. Why this happened doesn’t need much elaboration — both Rao and Vajpayee had a profound grasp of the history and the civlisational flow in our subcontinent through millennia. Looking ahead, fresh thinking is needed in Delhi toward Iran — and of course some hard work becomes necessary to repair the grievous damage that has been caused to the India-Iran relationship. No amount of spin can substitute that.
Avoid spin, train mind on new thinking regarding Iran - Indian Punchline
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I have a lot of respect for Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar. He is perhaps the sanest voice from India. He makes imminent sense, as I would expect from an educated Keralite.
Now let us wait to see North Indians go crazy over a very reasoned article.
