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'US may pressurise India to resolve Kashmir issue'

Former US ambassador Robert Blackwill cautioned that India may encounter US pressure on the Kashmir issue because of the Obama administration’s focus on Pakistan.

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Former US ambassador Robert Blackwill cautioned on Tuesday that India may encounter US pressure on the Kashmir issue because of the Obama administration’s focus on Pakistan.

Dubbing Pakistan as the “most dangerous foreign policy problem” that Washington is facing, Blackwill said the Obama administration was devoting enormous thought to that country. “The possible effect of such a preoccupation with Pakistan may be rehyphenating US-India relationship.

The US government will see India largely through the lens of disturbing developments in Pakistan,” Blackwill, who was the US ambassador here from 2001-2003, said at a Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) meet on US-India relations here.

“This will produce an understandable and growing US interest in trying to defuse tension between India and Pakistan as the latter will argue that problems with India and the Kashmir dispute were preventing it from moving robustly against Islamic terrorists,” he said.

Blackwill said the Obama administration appeared to have downgraded India in the US’s strategic calculations and put China on a higher plane. Though it wants genuinely good relations with New Delhi, there can be a substantial change vis a vis the policies of the Bush administration and it would take “very hard work and skillful diplomacy” from both the governments to keep the US-India relationship on its current level, the former US ambassador to India said.

While former US president George W Bush looked at India as an emerging democratic power and a key factor in balancing the rise of China, “there are preliminary indications that the Obama administration has a different policy orientation towards India.

“Washington is naturally focused on US-China economic relations... so China today appears to me to be on a substantially higher plane in US diplomacy than India which seems to have been downgraded in the administration’s strategic calculations,” Blackwill said .

He said Afghanistan presents another set of potential differences between India and Pakistan. “For Washington to believe that India will not be a major player in the long-term future of Afghanistan is to ignore centuries of history, culture and mutual interaction between the two,” he said.
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