India's Pakistan policy is a 'work in progress'

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit to China, which starts today, will mark whether this Congress government has the ability to navigate through the diplomatic shoals that have so far remained a huge challenge.

Already foundering in the deep because of its poorly conducted public relations exercise in winning over a domestic constituency on the Indo-US nuclear deal, Singh's emissaries are having major difficulty in persuading the International Atomic Energy Agency to take in Indian concerns over a stoppage of nuclear fuel in the event of a test and determine the final quantity of its fuel reserves.

Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon insists India will be able to successfully conclude negotiations with the international nuclear watchdog by mid-January. Despite public protestations to the contrary, there remains an in-built hesitation in the international community to award India any kind of agreement that will break the nuclear apartheid that has shackled this country's search for cheap energy for so long.

Concessions on the nuclear regime have and will always remain Washington's primary carrot and stick to control wayward and upwardly mobile nuclear states. Varying degrees of confrontation have been used to bring Iran, North Korea and Libya into some sort of submission.

Those outside it like India and Pakistan face a different kind of heat. Some subtle, some not so subtle. Indeed, one of the many theories doing the rounds on "who killed Benazir?" is that Pakistan's former prime minister Benazir Bhutto may have made one too many U-turns on nuclear and related terror issues.

It was this that set off alarm bells in Washington. Not her almost certain victory which would have armed her against Bush's ally, the intrusive military, in a make or break third term that could in all probability have redefined the future role of the civilian-military relationship in Pakistan.

Reaching out

Reports by well connected insiders in Islamabad indicate that Bhutto reached out to Tehreek-e-Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud, not once but twice, after reports (he later denied making the threat) he was going to eliminate her.

Crucially, she also sent messages to the founder of Pakistan's nuclear establishment Abdul Qadeer Khan that she had made statements in London over handing him over to Washington for interrogation "under pressure", that Khan would know what she was talking about.

He is reported to have acknowledged it by saying she would always be "more than a daughter" to him. Bhutto's trip to Pyongyang when she was prime minister when she parleyed missile technology in return for nuke know how underlines Khan's symbiotic relationship with Pakistan's establishment, elements of whom had taken on jihadi overtones over the so-called Islamic bomb.

Any move to rock that boat would have rattled Pakistan's security establishment which has kept Khan under wraps for fear of what he could reveal on the involvement of the military in his grand proliferation racket.

Others say that he could also embarrass Washington which deliberately turned a blind eye when its anti-Soviet ally began the drive to acquire nuclear weapons technology in the illegal nuke bazaar. In an election year, no-one in the US wanted any more skeletons to come tumbling out of the cupboard. Bhutto's willingness to appease Washington and play footsie with the generals had vastly diminished on her return, when she may have mistakenly believed that she could break with both to forge an independent path, and that the people's support would be an armour against any future arm-twisting. On the nuclear, as much as the war on terror issue.

As for India, it continues to publicly back Pakistan's military over its political players despite the huge outpouring of grief and shock over Bhutto's assassination; some say, a much bigger conspiracy surely than a clean shaven sharp shooter on the left when the entry point that fractured her skull came from a laser gun to her right and blaming Mehsud, which raises questions on whether it was a contract killing parcelled out to so-called Al Qaida.

India's Pakistan policy like much else can only be flagged as 'work in progress'. As Singh seeks to redirect Sino-Indian energies away from contentious border issues, seeking commonality with the Chinese giant on the economic front, he must not forget that Washington famously used Islamabad as a springboard to reach out to Beijing to encircle Moscow in the 70s and 80s.

In the twenty-first century as Pakistan's military plays China against the United States, opening up its southern warm water ports to Beijing even as it wrings concessions from it's needy ally on funding, arms supplies and the latest technology, India and the mild Singh are indisputably Washington's card against a rising China.

The appointment of nuclear non-proliferation campaigner Zhang Yan as China's new ambassador to India is a signal that Beijing, averse to the IAEA making an exception for nuclear India is all too aware it must block Delhi by any means. Will Singh bring up the issue in his three-day visit? What will India have to give in return? Does he have a strategy to deal with the possibility of an incoming "Hill and Bill" double act in 2009? Carrots and sticks. They come in many forms and shapes.

Neena Gopal is an analyst on Asia.