Miliband’s ‘aggressive’ style upsets Delhi

[waraich66]

Miliband’s ‘aggressive’ style upsets Delhi

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: It is unusual for the government to publicly criticise the views of a foreign dignitary on an official visit, especially before his trip to India is over. So when Ministry of External Affairs spokesman Vishnu Prakash issued a tartly worded statement on Thursday in response to a question about “certain views expressed by British Foreign Secretary David Miliband,” diplomatic eyebrows immediately went up. The assumption was that India was responding to the views expressed by Mr. Miliband in an op-ed in The Guardian or in his joint press conference with External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee.

Strident arguments

Senior officials told The Hindu on Friday the MEA statement was really the product of the irritation India felt with Mr. Miliband for the “aggressive” manner in which he conducted himself in his closed-door meetings with Mr. Mukherjee and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. In particular, South Block took offence to his strident arguments that the Mumbai terror attacks were really the result of the Kashmir issue remaining unresolved.

“He’s a young man and I guess this is the way he thinks diplomacy is conducted,” said a senior official. “In both his meetings, his posture and style of talking were a little too aggressive. The PM and EAM are much older and this is not what they are used to,” he added, describing the meetings as “quite an episode.”

Mr. Miliband, they said, was also clearly unaware of all that India and Pakistan had done on the Kashmir front from cross-LoC trade to discussing ‘soft borders’ before terror attacks like Mumbai slowed down and brought the process to a halt.

Apart from Mr. Miliband’s demeanour, what irked the Indian side was his insistence on drawing a link between Mumbai and Kashmir. Officials said he berated Dr. Singh and Mr. Mukherjee on this point and said that whatever India may wish to say on the matter in public, in private they must accept that they had to do more to work with Pakistan to find a solution to the Kashmir issue. “Yes, there is a Kashmir issue and we need to resolve it,” the Indian side told the British Minister. “But when a group like the Lashkar, which says it supports ‘global jihad,’ attacks Mumbai and kills Americans and Brits and Jews, what does this have to do with Kashmir?”

Annoyed

Mr. Miliband also annoyed the Indian side by warning the two leaders that Delhi should not even think of taking any kind of military action against Pakistan in the wake of the Mumbai attacks.
All told, say Indian officials, the two meetings with Mr. Miliband were “pretty awful.” India had no objection to the British Foreign Secretary publicly disagreeing with the Prime Minister’s statement that “some official agencies in Pakistan” must be involved in Mumbai. ‘Sovereign governments can and will disagree with each other’s assessments,” an official said. “But he needs to know that we do not take kindly to being hectored.”

What surprised the Government all the more was that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown had been “quite positive” on the issues which concerned India during his visit to New Delhi last month.

Reality, one bite at a time: Miliband?s ?aggressive? style upsets Delhi

India should realise kashmir dispute is the root cause of terrorism in pakistan and india

 

[kenchabhai]

David Miliband on Kashmir: more Baldrick than Bean?

DAVID Miliband, Britain's foreign secretary, is (completely predictably) in trouble in India over a newspaper article in which he implied that India should fix the Kashmir problem to choke off the grievances that fuel Pakistan-based Islamist terrorism.

What baffles me about this episode, however, is not Mr Miliband's comments themselves - on one level they are entirely sensible in theory and in consonance with British policy - but their extraordinary diplomatic insensitivity.

Did the Foreign Office (or Mr Miliband's team of advisers) really have such short memories that they don't recall how in 1997 Robin Cook single-handedly over-shadowed the Queen's trip to India for 50th Anniversary of Independence by offering to 'mediate' in Kashmir?

Legend has it that the then Indian prime minister looked Mr Cook icily up and down before advising him that he was the envoy of a 'third rate power' and that he shouldn't 'stick his nose in' where it wasn't wanted. Mr Miliband has been equally cruelly dismissed as a 'young man' by diplomats in Delhi.


More recently (in 2002) Jack Straw got a similarly hostile reaction when he re-stated British policy towards Kashmir, which conflicts openly with the Indian view that Kashmir is not an 'international dispute' but a strictly 'internal' one.

It is an basic axiom of international diplomacy that India is as touchy over Kashmir as China is over Tibet. Surely Miliband and his men knew that it's not possible to tackle this issue without causing offence and trouble in India. This is doubly true after last year's Mumbai atrocities which were almost certainly carried by members of the Kashmir-based Lashkar-e-taiba.

For the record, this is the 'offending section' of Mr Miliband's article:

"Although I understand the current difficulties, resolution of the dispute over Kashmir would help deny extremists in the region one of their main calls to arms, and allow Pakistani authorities to focus more effectively on tackling the threat on their western borders.

"We must respond to terrorism by championing the rule of law, not subordinating it, for it is the cornerstone of the democratic society. We must uphold our commitments to human rights and civil liberties at home and abroad. That is surely the lesson of Guantánamo and it is why we welcome President-elect Obama's commitment to close it."

That might seem perfectly innocuous, sensible even, but when (as my colleague in Dean Nelson reports) such remarks are 'welcomed' by a Lashkar spokesman, you can see how they would be viewed in New Delhi.

You can dismiss the Indians for being 'intransigent', 'chippy' and 'touchy' (as in private moments of frustration at the FCO, they often do) but, since India bears the cost in blood of the terrorism exported from Kashmir, you have to understand the way they feel.

This doesn't excuse abuses by Indian security forces in Kashmir - hinted at by Mr Miliband - any more than 9/11 was an excuse for water-boarding sessions at Guantanamo Bay, but diplomacy is not always about grandstanding, its also about getting the job done.

I'm therefore completely at a loss to know what Mr Miliband - routinely lampooned as England's Mr Bean in the Indian press - and his advisers at the FCO were thinking.

Either he was unaware of the offence his remarks would cause, which is itself truly, terrifyingly inept, given the recent Anglo-Indian diplomatic history on this touchiest of subjects.

Or he was fully aware and went ahead with the article anyway. This is equally baffling since such remarks could only produce a counter-productive backlash from India.

What did the foreign secretary think he would achieve by publicly sharing his conventional wisdom on resolving the Kashmir conflict?

Imagine if, during the height of the IRA bombings in London, an Indian foreign secretary had come to London and started lecturing Britain on how to resolve its dispute in Northern Ireland. He would, like Mr Miliband, have been told, in the nicest possible way, to p**s off.

So was this just rank incompetence from Mr Bean, or as Baldrick would have said, part of some 'cunning plan'. Perhaps someone at the FCO can explain.

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David Miliband: too ambitious for his own (and Britain's) good

AFTER a lot more puzzling over David Miliband's unfathomable behaviour in India, I can find only one plausible explanation for what diplomatic sources in India have called his 'tactlessness' and 'arrogance' during his recent trip.

As my colleague Rosa Prince reports from Westminster today, Mr Miliband's visit has come close to being a national embarrassment for the UK, such is the strength of the antipathy coming from New Delhi towards Mr Miliband.

It was not only his remarks in Kashmir which so riled the Indians, but also his decision to deliver a speech saying there was 'no such thing' as the War on Terror in (of all places) the Taj Mahal Hotel, scene of last year's massacre in Mumbai.

As Rosa Prince writes, this apparently surprised people close to the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, who went out of his way to thank President Bush for his efforts in tackling terrorism at a press conference on Monday.

I'm a long way from the Westminster Village, but I wonder if it this was precisely the point.

By making a speech and writing an article which deliberately echoed the views of the incoming Obama administration, Mr Miliband was using the world stage to identify himself with America's youthful new president and - by extension - distance himself from the out-going Bush presidency and - by extension again, surely - his own dear leader, the doddering Mr Brown.

Was this actually is a piece of domestic political ambition being played out abroad?

Given the furore which surrounded Mr Miliband's July article in The Guardian (which was widely perceived as a leadership challenge to Mr Brown) it is clear that Mr Miliband is a calculating political animal.

Trouble is, once again Mr Miliband miscalculated badly. In trying to play a bigger game - if that is what he was trying to do, and I really can find no other explanation in the light of the remarks from the Brown camp - Mr Miliband, in true Mr Bean style, tripped hilariously over his own political size 12s.

He utterly failed to understand that India has long experience of dealing with terrorism of all kinds (separatist and Islamist) and does so, to put it politely, in a not very squeamish manner. Of all countries, India understands the Bush approach to the War on Terror.

And despite the anti-American hullabaloo on the left, the current Indian administration enjoyed a healthy working relationship with the Bush White House which yielded India' last year's landmark Civilian Nuclear Co-operation deal on hugely advantageous terms.

Mr Miliband's howlers were therefore so awful, that I can only surmise that the foreign office mandarins and the people in the British High Commission in New Delhi must have tried to warn Mr Miliband about all these diplomatic man-traps, but the politicos from London (in true New Labour style) over-ruled.

The shame, in the true sense of that word, is that Mr Miliband's pursuit of personal ambition has knocked such a dent in Indo-British relations. If ever there were grounds for saying that Mr Miliband doesn't deserve the 'top job' in British politics that he so obviously covets, that would surely be it.

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[Jihad]

India upsets by "agressive" style of Miliband?
Jeez, I wonder how India's stance was so far with Mumbai, wasn't exactly "happy happy joy joy".
The govt. of India is simply upset that Miliband did not directly choose India's side and didn't favor them in the whole case, that's the only message I get from reading this.

 

[kenchabhai]

India upsets by "agressive" style of Miliband?
Jeez, I wonder how India's stance was so far with Mumbai, wasn't exactly "happy happy joy joy".
The govt. of India is simply upset that Miliband did not directly choose India's side and didn't favor them in the whole case, that's the only message I get from reading this.

Did you read my post ?
The british journalist here pointed out 3 things

1. Declaring WoT as not a war, at the site of a terrorist attack is a major faux pas
2. Calling for resolution of Kashmir, at such a time is insensitive.
3. Seeking to mediate in Kashmir issue when all previous attempts of his predecessors have been rudely rebuffed, is a diplomatic hara kiri esp when you are seeking close relationships.

 

[DarkStar]

Did you read my post ?
The british journalist here pointed out 3 things

1. Declaring WoT as not a war, at the site of a terrorist attack is a major faux pas
2. Calling for resolution of Kashmir, at such a time is insensitive.
3. Seeking to mediate in Kashmir issue when all previous attempts of his predecessors have been rudely rebuffed, is a diplomatic hara kiri esp when you are seeking close relationships.

Well, you'd better get used to western diplomats trying to mediate the Kashmir conflict. The new President of the USA comes with a huge mandate to solve world problems, and in the context of AFghanistan and Al qaida, the US has to make sure that the Kashmir conflict is resolved.

It is obvoius that Pakistan and Bharat need outside mediation, as bilateral attempts have failed abysmally.

 

[kenchabhai]

Well, you'd better get used to western diplomats trying to mediate the Kashmir conflict. The new President of the USA comes with a huge mandate to solve world problems, and in the context of AFghanistan and Al qaida, the US has to make sure that the Kashmir conflict is resolved.

It is quite clear that India will not and cannot be arm-twisted regarding Kashmir issue. Though regarding Obama's stance on Kashmir, I would wait and watch.
---

"New York: US president Barack Obama ultimately listened to his chief diplomat Hillary Clinton and agreed to take Kashmir off the South Asian envoy's job description, much to India's relief. "

""Fortunately, the Obama team recognizes the key to stabilizing Afghanistan does not lie in resolving Kashmir as some have tried to assert," said Lisa Curtis, senior research fellow for South Asia at the Heritage Foundation."
DNA: World: New US envoy's job excludes J&K

It is obvoius that Pakistan and Bharat need outside mediation, as bilateral attempts have failed abysmally.

I don't think at the moment it is in India's interest to address Kashmir issue with a view towards a permanent solution.