Dr Singh may not be king, but he won

New York

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh may not be king again but he certainly can launch a guerrilla action or two. For a beleaguered and battered Prime Minister, undermined by his own party and hounded by the Opposition, Dr Singh managed to hang tough, talk tough and keep the focus on terrorism with both the United States and Pakistan in his recent visit to New York on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly meet. This was the strongest suit he had and he played it to the fullest. As a result he inoculated himself and his party to some extent against charges of holding a “dialogue over dead bodies” as the Bharatiya Janata Party leader, Sushma Swaraj, had so quickly characterised the most recent terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir. The twinning of domestic and foreign issues served the purposes of the Congress Party well even as its crown prince was being unruly. More concretely, Dr Singh’s visit achieved a significant breakthrough with the United States on defence cooperation. This may well be the new engine for pulling the relationship forward. The US has promised the transfer of “the most advanced and sophisticated defence technology”. It has also promised an “expedited” licensing and approval process to facilitate this cooperation. The joint declaration on defence cooperation envisages a relationship of allies without actually saying so. The two sides also concluded a preliminary contract for building a nuclear reactor — a long-awaited fruit of the Indo-US Civil Nuclear deal. This should help temporarily calm American nerves strung over India’s nuclear liability law. Both are pluses and neither may have happened at this time without the focus of a visit. A political push was urgently needed to whip things into proper order. The visit has put the Indo-US relationship back on the rails for the next government to carry forward and push further. This is no mean feat over a landmine-littered landscape. Everything that could go wrong did. An inter-continental ballistic missile named Rahul exploded hours before Dr Singh’s meeting with US President Barack Obama and a needless controversy created by a tendentious Pakistani journalist erupted the night before Dr Singh’s meeting with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. But the Indian Prime Minister soldiered on. Call it toughness or call it service to the party. Even though a certain edginess hung over the whole visit to the US, Dr Singh and his team managed to force the issue most important to India on the menu even when the other guests clearly wanted a different platter of goodies. The Americans wanted to focus on the need for India to undertake rapid economic reforms, clear the cobwebs on the Nuclear Liability Law and generally fall in line on various complaints collected over time. An unseemly campaign funded by the US pharma industry, complete with anti-India ads, greeted Dr Singh on his arrival in Washington. But it only made the US look maximalist and unreasonable. When a business lobby tries to dictate the agenda, it diminishes the strategic partnership the US Congress and the administration try to promote. And pressure is generally not a good weapon against India. On the Pakistan front, the fact that the Singh-Sharif meeting even took place is noteworthy. Dr Singh kept his date despite tremendous pressure to ditch Mr Sharif. The modest outcome was a commitment to lower tensions along the Line of Control through better mechanisms between the two military commanders. Even though Mr Sharif wanted more to take home, he can’t hope for a fuller dialogue when the Pakistan Army keeps all its “assets” in place and Hafiz Saeed runs free, spewing venom against India from public square. The New York meeting was a good, small step. And Dr Singh did it on his own terms. He prepared the ground — he declared Pakistan as the “epicentre” of terrorism from the Oval Office with Mr Obama by his side and both leaders called for “dismantling of terrorist safe havens” in their joint statement. In his speech to the UN General Assembly, Dr Singh declared there could “never, ever” be a compromise on the territorial integrity of India. The Indian message went out both ways — to the Americans who are soft-pedalling Pakistan-bred terrorism because of 2014 when their troops return from Afghanistan, and to the Pakistanis who want to have a dialogue while their Army pursues a different agenda.The need for concerted action against terrorism was Dr Singh’s central argument in all his major speeches and joint statements. Whether the message would resonate, propel action and elicit results is unclear. Better cooperation on intelligence-sharing from the Americans would certainly help.

The writer is a senior journalist based in Washington. She specialises in foreign policy.