US offering carrots to India on Iraq

US offering carrots to India on Iraq
March 2003

In an attempt to ensure the Vajpayee government holds its counsel when Iraq is attacked, the US is holding out to India the carrot of a “major role” in the post-war reconstruction of that country.

In an interview with The Times of India, US ambassador to India Robert Blackwill said, “We hope you have a major part to play and we have conveyed that at very high levels.”

At pains to address New Delhi’s fears that the planned invasion of Iraq would not disadvantage India economically and politically, President Bush has phoned Prime Minister Vajpayee, Secretary of State Powell has spoken to external affairs minister Yashwant Sinha and US National Security Adviser Condolezza Rice has called up her counterpart, Brajesh Mishra. Blackwill has also met Deputy Prime Minister L K Advani, Defence Minister George Fernandes and also Mishra in recent days.

Blackwill said India with its “very well developed successful norms in civil society” had a role to play in the “construction of civil society” in Iraq and “economic reconstruction”. India, he said, had a “comparative advantage” over many countries because of three factors: Its “vital civil society”, its “long term ties with Iraq” and the fact that “India would be welcomed in that situation” where “not every country would be welcomed.” “So for all those reasons, we hope you have a major part to play and we have conveyed that at very high levels,” he said.

The ambassador, however, added that detailed discussions on this aspect had not yet been held with the Indian government because the US did not want to give the impression that it was “planning in detail for a situation which has not yet happenned.”

The US now had “a very clear perception of India’s substantive and serious equities in the region” unlike during the 1991 Gulf war, Blackwill said, claiming that India itself had also been able to influence US policy to some degree.

”Before September, in the summer, India was urging the Bush administration to take the UN route and to try and deal with Saddam Hussein peacefully... and it was one of the nations in the world that the United States listened most closely to and we took the UN route. I would just note the confluence between the president’s speech at the UN on the 12th of September when he announced we would seek a UNSC resolution and the fact that he met the Indian PM on the same day. So India certainly had influence, no doubt, on our decision to go to the UNSC.”