Obama’s November surprise can only be to our disadvantage

Bitter experience has convinced me that no good comes of dignitaries’ state visits. The best one can expect is the mouthing of pious platitudes, the worst is disaster. I am worried that Barack Obama’s visit to India later this week will end up in a major setback for India’s national interests.

There is a tradition of ‘October surprises’ in the US: just before the biennial November elections, one of the parties (usually the incumbent) is accused of coming up with some ruse — often a crisis — that enables it to come out smelling of roses, thus swaying public opinion in its favour, and thereby winning the elections.

This year, Obama and the Democrats may lose their majority in the house of representatives and possibly in the Senate as well. Just in time for his India visit, Obama will be seen as a lameduck with little chance of getting his agenda through a hostile Congress. He needs to get some foreign policy ‘victory’ in India. Yes, where else?

Obama’s record is mediocre, belying certain great expectations. In domestic matters, his handling of the financial crisis has been pedestrian, and there is severe job-loss and economic pain; his one victory, in healthcare, may yet be pyrrhic. The ‘change’ and ‘hope’ have amounted to nothing.

In foreign affairs, Afghanistan has truly
become a tar baby. The recent abject apology by the Americans for their killing of some Pakistani troops emphasises their helplessness. The ISI is running with the hares and hunting with the hounds most successfully.

Obama has been clear from day one about Afghanistan tactics: surge, bribe, declare victory and run like hell. The surge has happened, with little impact. Now Obama is running up against his ill-advised 2011 deadline for pulling out troops. The only option on hand is to bribe — that is, to bribe the ISI. So Obama has been showering largesse on the ISI, a billion here, another billion there, and surely more was offered during their latest strategic dialogue last week.

But money doesn’t seem to be doing the trick — perhaps the $25 billion that America has poured into Pakistan since 9/11 has sated the generals’ greed. They want a bigger prize now — their strategic intent — the dismemberment of India and the creation of their pet fantasy, Mughalistan.

And that is the carrot that Obama may offer them as part of his India trip. That could be the ‘November surprise’ for India. It is highly likely that when Obama is in India, Manmohan Singh will announce a new ‘package’ for J&K that would, marketing verbiage notwithstanding, hand over de facto, if not de jure, control to those inimical to Indian interests, Parliament declarations be damned.

The stage has been set for this for some time. Witness how American military men like Gen David Petraeus and Adm Mike Mullen have been stressing that Pakistan would be much more helpful if only it were ‘not worried about India’. So India should sacrifice its territorial integrity for the benefit of the Americans, with no obvious benefit to itself. Ironic, considering Americans went through the ruinous civil war to prevent their southern half from seceding.

But then, the UPA government has demonstrated in many fora that it is willing to accept Pakistani demands — witness astonishing cave-ins in Sharm-al-Sheikh, Havana, Thimphu.

More recently, its hand-picked interlocutors to the separatists are talking openly about azaadi and about amending the Constitution to accommodate them.

Ominously, Pakistani prime minister Yousaf Raza Gilani declared on October 16 (as reported in The Economic Times) that “there will be good news about Kashmir soon”. What could Gilani possibly mean other than Obama’s November surprise?

And in the middle of all this comes the
nihilistic histrionics of famous one-horse novelist Arundhati Roy. Roy reminds me of The Man Without a Country, about an American who declared that he hated the country so much that he never wished to see it, or hear the word again.

The Americans obliged, and put him on a naval brig, wherein he spent the rest of his life out at sea. Surely, India could offer Roy comfortable long-term accommodation on a brig in international waters?
But Roy is a sideshow. The real danger is that the Americans — who demonstrate daily that they have no leverage over Pakistan — seem to have some kind of a hold over India’s leaders, and the stage has been set for a grand bargain. Obama will then be able to declare victory in Afghanistan and go home.

Some think this a desirable outcome, and it will be sold as such to the Indian public, thanks to the known ability of the Indian media-politician complex to manufacture undeclared consent. A fait accompli is in the works, which, alas, will solve nothing. Jammu & Kashmir is merely an appetiser for the ISI.