Men, Matters & Memories
M L Kotru
For someone so obsessed with winning friends and influencing people the peripatetic Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi appears to be less than willing to take a closer look at some of his country’s immediate neighbours. Yes, he has on occasions sought, somewhat half-heartedly, perhaps, to reach out to the country’s most querellous neighbour, Pakistan but only just that. For a Prime Minister who has visited some 30 countries in just about an year of his being in office, Modi has singularly failed to actively build on India’s ties with one of the country strategically important neighbours,namely Afghanistan. Indeed ,apart from the odd reference to the country in the context of the long delayed Charbahar India-Iran road link, supposed to pass through Afghanistan, there has hardly been any serious mention by Modi of the current state of India-Afghanistan relationship. We do on the odd occasion remember making a reference to the historical and cultural links between the two countries but for all practical purposes we seem to have given up on Afghanistan as it struggles to grope its way out of the post-American exit era.
India does nominally continue to have some ongoing interests in the country and an Indian presence is noticeable in some spheres of activity, not very significant though. The post-Hamid Karzai era and the emergence of president Ghani as a man with his own approach to his country’s problems, New Delhi seems to have lost out in a most spectacular manner with Pakistan and China very much centre-stage as Kabul struggles to ward off the Taliban challenge.
As I write the Taliban have staged some deadly strikes not in Kabul alone but in the north as well. I have had occasion to mention in this space the virtual disappearance of the previously significant Indian presence in the country; the fact is that president Ghani had half-guessed the truth much before Prime Minister Modi’s virtual cold shoulder; he looked elsewhere for the kind of support a Karzai may in the past have received from New Delhi; he had said as much when he turned to Pakistani academies for training Afghan security personnel. The Indians obviously didn’t think much of the switch from Indian training centres to the ones in Pakistan but it was a clear indication by far that president Ghani was not cast in the Karzai mould.
I am not trying to be judgmental but to me the Modi Government somehow didn’t put much store by the traditionally happy relationship between New Delhi and Kabul. Mr. Modi’s priorities obviously lay elsewhere. Pakistan which has traditionally viewed Afghanistan as an area of great strategic importance. From the days of the decade-long Soviet military intervention through the American expedition,including the emergence of the al qaeda on the scene, the Pakistanis have rarely stopped looking at the country as an extension of its own defensive mechanism, a land which its military leaders acknowledged lent strategic depth to its military requirements. One doesn’t really have to retail well known facts like the training of the Taliban in Pak training centres, the role the ISI and the Pak army played in making the Taliban a force to reckon with. Mullah Omar, the Taliban chief, a product of Pakistani terror factories, who continues to be a force to reckon with and truly calls the shots, as it were, from his Quetta base in Pakistan. And in the post Karzai Afghanistan it was only natural for Pakistan to carve out space for itself in the country. And make it appear even more significant, Islamabad was quick enough to draw its “all weather friend China’ into the Afghan ring.
And all this while, New Delhi managed to be no more than a mere spectator, willing to watch others as they fished in the troubled Afghan waters. And the Sino-Pak alliance has prospered. So much so that the two have even chosen to guarantee a peace deal between the Afghan Government and the Taliban the two sides have a full-fledged round of talks in the Pak hill station Murree earlier this month with Pakistan and China acing as brokers. The Chinese and the Pakistanis were on hand to ensure smooth parleying, ready and willing also to stand as guarantors of any peace agreement worked by the Afghans. The Chinese have officially stated that they are ready to work with the parties and play a constructive role in achieving broad and inclusive peace.
Further rounds of talks between the principals are envisaged and it is quite on the cards that a cease-fire by the Taliban and the Afghan Government may materialize soon . Much to the satisfaction of the Ghani administration Mullah Omar, the one-eyed Taliban chief, has expressed his satisfaction at the turn of events and he is likely to be involved in the peace initiative once the talks gather momentum. For their part the Pakistani and Chinese facilitators are happy that the two are trying to work out a mutually acceptable peace formula.
Happy indeed are the Chinese and the Pakistanis over the unexpected turn of events; they obviously had not anticipated such a quick breakthrough.And so here we are: China, once a virtual outsider, very much in the thick of things in Afghanistan and Pakistan, always wary of an Indian role, finding itself in a key role,unchallenged by anyone.
The Indians, who will swear to you by Rabindranath Tagore’s Kabuliwallah nowhere in the picture, sucking their thumbs. Literally so. Thanks to the “high priority” Mr.Modi had pledged to give to India’s relations with its neighbours.
And another neighbour is at the same time beginning to flex his muscles; the tiny Maldives, the nation made up of a string of is lands off our Kerala coast. Maldives is willing to lease its islands to anyone interested. And this is not to let hoteliers etc to come on in and open island resorts to attract tourists; China, always on the look out for such outposts more than welcome an island or two to set up a naval presence in our backyard, as it were.
Beijing has been eyeing the Maldives for long and indeed has offered doles to the country already. The prospect of having such naval outposts at India’s doorstep would indeed be a mouth watering one. As it is China has already made its naval presence felt in Srilanka and in Chittagong in Bangladesh and its ships are known to have intruded in to Indian waters a few times. That’s what encirclement is about.Think of the Karkoparam highway and the bigger one that is coming up there, another one, and also the one that will straddle our north east as the proposed highway moves down to Mynamar or wherever.
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