There is no escaping a strong sense of déjà vu surrounding the upcoming United States-India Strategic Dialogue to be held here this week. Both countries are poised, yet again, to do what they have done ever since President Obama took office, namely, skip through policy minefields while professing unwavering cooperation on a range of less exigent issues.
Much like the previous meetings, this one will not be about Pakistan’s inability or unwillingness to deliver justice through the prosecution of the masterminds of the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
Speaking before the talks Robert Blake, Assistant Secretary for South and Central Asian Affairs, said that regarding Punjab-based terror groups, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, “Pakistan has [acted against them] in the past between 2004 and 2007, and that laid the basis for a very significant expansion in relations between India and Pakistan.” Then why exactly did the Mumbai attacks occur? This “softly, softly” approach towards Pakistan may be wearing dangerously thin.
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Neither will this meeting recognise a fundamental dissonance within President Obama’s nuclear security and non-proliferation agenda — that powers such as the U.S. and Russia continue to maintain significant and less-than-secure arsenals even as they turn up the heat on
Questions to be raised
Would India dare remind the U.S. that it was on American soil that six nuclear warheads fixed to cruise missiles were mistakenly carried on a B-52 bomber in 2007, violating numerous Cold-War-era treaties? Would India even contemplate asking the U.S. to bring Israel’s nuclear programme into the spotlight as it has done Iran’s?
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Much like the previous dialogue, this one will certainly not be about understanding India’s views on third parties like Iran, regardless of India’s strategic closeness to that country.
Given its absence at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), India will have no say in the decision by the P5+1 group to mete out rough justice to Iran through UNSC sanctions, which completely undermine Iran’s promise to move low-enriched uranium off its soil under the fuel-swap deal brokered by Turkey and Brazil.
Global, bilateral issues on agenda
Instead, global and bilateral issues have been placed on the agenda which, though worthy of holding the relationship to a positive pitch, make a proverbial 200-pound gorilla of the other burning questions.
The most telling sign that the U.S.-India engagement is set to simmer but will never get fully cooked was a statement by Mr. Blake to a question on what the deliverables of the Strategic Dialogue would be. He said, “I do not want to talk about the deliverables now. But we are really not focused that much on deliverables.”