How To Milk America: India’s Experience
Thursday, 25 November 2010
From day one India has played rough against Pakistan. Now it is playing with fire by assuming that it is at par with China. Let’s hope for sanity to prevail in Chanakyapuri.
HARRISS KHAN
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—Give the devil its due credit. An overwhelming majority in Pakistan considers India as a devil. Going by the idiom, India should be fully credited for sharp and foxy diplomacy for swaying the U.S to do the needful and fulfill their demands.
Obama started his visit by avoiding Indian media’s demand of demonizing Pakistan. But he ended the visit doing just that. He lost midterm elections because of economy. So it was a smart move to hedge his bets for 2012 by committing India to buy $15 billion’s worth of American goods creating more then 60,000 jobs back home.
The US is the largest spending economy followed by the Europeans. Since these markets are saturated, looking for new buyers makes sense. With a billion people, India is a legitimate consumer. That’s why more than 150 CEOs of large US corporations traveled with Obama to sell.
America needs to sell its weapons somewhere. The Iraq war theater has dried down and Afghanistan is next to melt down so why not ask one of the largest arms purchasers to buy some of the weapons lying around. Boeing sold some C-17s and G.E. (General Electric) offered engines to Tejas, the troubled Indian light combat aircraft that has been in the testing phase for years.
From economy to defense to diplomacy, the Indians smartly played their cards by keeping them close to their chest and exploited the superpower for its weakness: the ailing economy.
In return, the US committed itself in a joint statement to eliminate alleged ‘terror safe havens’ in Afghanistan and Pakistan and defeat all terrorists networks including the Kashmiri group Lashkar-e-Tayyeba (LET) plus getting a nod from Obama for his support of Indian bid for UNSC permanent seat. Net result: a win-win situation for India.
There is not shred of a doubt that Obama came out as a loser in the fast moving thriller.
In all of this, India did what it is best in doing: deception. Once a nonaligned leader, India today is assuming a role it is not equipped to take: play rough against china and Pakistan.
Indian policymakers committed a huge blunder by playing hardball against Pakistan and poking China during Osama’s visit. From day one India has played rough against Pakistan and is now playing with fire by assuming that it is at par with China. Sanity should now prevail over the policymakers in Chanakyapuri [a suburb in New Delhi where families of Indian ruling elite reside] as U.S is a shrewd practitioner of realpolitik. By playing along, India is expected to balance China. India and everyone else knows that’s a tough task for India.
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