M.D. Nalapat
Manipal, India — Iran's ongoing effort to master uranium enrichment technology, despite its denials, is likely to lead to a series of surgical U.S. air and missile strikes designed to cripple reprocessing capacity. The risks and rewards of such an action have been extensively detailed; hence the focus here is on a small part of the overall mosaic -- the response of India to such a strike.
Manipal, India — Iran's ongoing effort to master uranium enrichment technology, despite its denials, is likely to lead to a series of surgical U.S. air and missile strikes designed to cripple reprocessing capacity. The risks and rewards of such an action have been extensively detailed; hence the focus here is on a small part of the overall mosaic -- the response of India to such a strike.
Although Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is
solicitous of perceived U.S. interests, and has been working to create an
alliance between the world's two biggest democracies, geopolitical logic will
dictate that New Delhi will sit out a future Iran conflict, rather than follow
its instincts and back the United States.
In evidence that India-Iran strategic ties
remain in good standing, the chief of the Iranian Navy, Rear Admiral S.
Kouchaki, is on a March 4-9 visit to India, during which he will visit key
installations and discuss joint exercises.
The reasons for India to avoid conflict
with Iran are primarily four:
First is the Shiite factor. There have been
a little over 17,000 Muslim-Hindu clashes since India became independent in
1947, of which less than two hundred involved Shiites and Hindus. Almost all
such clashes have been Sunni versus Hindu, and 87 percent of these have been
Wahabbi-Hindu, as the more moderate sections of Sunni Muslim society seldom
adopt a confrontational posture with their Hindu neighbors.
During this entire period -- continuing to
the present -- the Shiite networks (as heavily permeated by Iran as the Wahabbi
networks are by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan) have remained quiescent, uninvolved
in the battle, including in Kashmir, where only the Wahabbi minority within the
Sunni population has been active in opposing Indian control over Kashmir.
Should the Iran-influenced Shiite networks go the way of the Saudi-Pakistani
Wahabbi networks in continuing the jihad, Indian security forces would face a
second front that would severely test their capabilities.
At present, unlike the United States in
Iraq and the former USSR in Afghanistan, India has beaten back the fanatics,
although at a very high human and financial cost. Provoking Iran by joining
hands with Washington against Tehran would go against the Indian interest in
keeping the Shiites out of the Kashmir jihad.
Next is the Afghanistan and Central Asia
factor. Because of U.S. links to Saudi Arabia, successive administrations have
backed the Wahabbi interests in both locations against those opposing them,
especially former communists. For entirely different reasons, both India and
Iran oppose the efforts at regime change spearheaded by these Wahabbi groups.
In Afghanistan, the United States and the
EU have consistently sought to marginalize the former "Northern
Alliance" in favor of the Pashtun Wahabbis that still form the base of
support for the Taliban. Tehran, Moscow and New Delhi back the former Northern
Alliance, as these three capitals have been doing since 1996, the year of the
Taliban takeover of Kabul.
In Central Asia, once again the three
capitals are in effect working in concert to keep Wahabbi elements from
wresting control of the (religious) moderates now in control, cooperation that
would be affected were India to side with the United States in a military
strike on Iran.
Third in the list of reasons why India
would decline to participate in a U.S. strike is energy. The country is
developing at a speed unmatched by major economies except China, and this has
led to a substantial increase in the demand for fossil fuels. Thanks to
corruption, (state-controlled) efforts at discovering oil and gas within Indian
territory has thus far been spectacularly unsuccessful, with periodic hype
about "major discoveries" being followed by complete silence on
exploitation. Unless Japan or another country can develop economical fuel-cell
technology to power the internal combustion engine, India will need to increase
its dependence on outside sources for oil and gas, and the closest major source
for both is Iran.
Recent Indian moves to side with Washington
(as expressed, for example, in India voting together with the United States in
the International Atomic Energy Agency) have led to the cancellation of several
contracts by an angry Iranian administration, and policymakers in New Delhi are
wary of provoking a fresh Iranian backlash that could adversely affect supplies
from that country. Recently, New Delhi has distanced itself from its earlier
embrace of Washington, hosting a China-Russia-India trilateral and making the
standard "non-aligned" noises about the efforts of the Bush team to
put in place a unipolar world order with the United States at the apex.
Manmohan Singh, who is the main votary of
the "Washington First" policy, has himself become weakened
politically, losing even the Sikh-majority state of Punjab to the BJP-led
alliance, despite being the first Sikh Prime Minister of India. Within the
Union Cabinet, Defense Minister A. K. Antony and Education Minister Arjun Singh
favor a return to the policy of "non-alignment" followed under the
Nehrus, while Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee is too canny a politician to
link his future to the pro-U.S. line adopted by Manmohan Singh, to the ire not
just of the Congress Party's communist allies, but the preponderant section of
his own party.
Like Mikhail Gorbachev, Manmohan Singh is
now far more popular abroad than he is at home, but unlike the USSR (where the
General Secretary ran the Communist Party), India is still a democracy, and the
Prime Minister's plummeting ratings have constricted his ability to stick to a
line that would ensure that New Delhi favor Washington over Tehran in the event
of a conflict. Indeed, the political currents now flowing within the country
are such that India may take a pro-Iranian line, rather than remain on the
sidelines.
The final reason why New Delhi will remain
neutral, or even Iran-friendly, in a future conflict is the fact that Tehran
provides the only land access that India has to Central Asia and therefore to
Afghanistan. U.S. ally Pakistan has continued to block India from gaining
access to Afghanistan, wary of an increase in the already significant Indian
presence in Kabul. In contrast, Iran has provided both rail and road access to
Indian manufactures to Central Asia and Afghanistan across its territory, a
lifeline that would be in danger of getting snapped were New Delhi to side with
Washington against Tehran.
Despite the many threats by U.S. lawmakers
that they would adopt an anti-India line were the country not to join hands
with the United States and the EU in the ongoing crusade against Iran, India's
own security calculus militates against such a policy. Unlike U.S. allies Saudi
Arabia and Pakistan, Iran has never worked against Indian security interests by
funding and training the proponents of jihad against the Indian state. For New Delhi,
Tehran has till now been part of the solution and not the problem, the reason
why Prime Minister Singh is unlikely to be able to execute a U.S. tilt in the
event of a strike by George W. Bush on Iran.
-(M.D. Nalapat is professor of geopolitics at
Manipal University in Manipal, India.)
