Playing ball with ‘new’ America

KP Nayar
Strategic analyst

The most important clue to how India will engage ‘new’ Washington was tucked away in a single sentence in the last paragraph of the last four press notes by the Indian Embassy in Washington on the visit of Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale to the US a fortnight ago.

‘Foreign Secretary also met Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and leaders of the House Foreign Affairs and Armed Services Committees,’ it said in an underplayed sentence, as if it was an afterthought. The underplay of Gokhale’s meetings on Capitol Hill was in contrast to the detailed information released by the embassy about the Foreign Secretary’s meetings with US administration officials.

New Delhi faces a ‘new’ Washington for the remaining nearly two years of Donald Trump’s current term in office. The President is no longer the all-powerful Chief Executive that he was when he was elected to the White House, with every instrument of state at his command. To both Republican chambers of Congress, coinciding with his own 2016 November election, Trump soon added the US Supreme Court firmly to his side by appointing two conservative Associate Justices, making it a court that is unmistakably Republican-leaning in its intellectual preferences.

From January this year, however, the House of Representatives has gone to Democrats following the mid-term November 2018 election. As two rebukes administered by the Republican majority Senate to Trump this month testify, this monolithic pro-Trump majority has cracked. A sizeable number of Republican Senators have broken free of their President and more may do so as the noose of Congressional investigations tighten around Trump and his family.

The US Congress has all along been India’s best bet in Washington since this country became a factor in US calculations in the 1990s following the end of the Cold War. The Foreign Secretary has tried to capitalise on this asset now that the ‘modus operandi’ for doing effective business in Washington has dramatically changed.

It was not surprising that information released about Gokhale’s meetings on Capitol Hill was sketchy: no names of interlocutors, no agenda or agreed outcomes, unlike with his engagements with the Trump administration. Such diffidence is because Indian diplomacy has its task cut out in the US Congress. Yet, much of what it intends to do cannot be done publicly and Congressional leaders will not acknowledge any of it openly even if they do play ball with India.

It is one of Washington’s worst kept secrets these days that Pakistan PM Imran Khan intends to visit the US this year. Of course, questions asked in Washington will elicit the formal reply that no such visit has been decided. The Trump administration is fully behind the proposed visit. But there will be many barbs during preparatory stages of such a visit as both sides try to get the best strategic bargains for each other during any Trump-Khan summit. The contours of Khan’s visit will be shaped by the progress in talks between the US and the Taliban in which Pakistan’s role is critical.

If Pakistan’s PM gets a red carpet welcome, it will be a self-inflicted slap on India’s face. Having created an illusion of domestic public opinion — with help from complicit sections of the media — that the US is an Indian ally, like the Soviet Union in the 1970s, images of Khan being feted in Washington will raise uncomfortable questions about Indo-US bonhomie.

Only the US Congress can be a spoke in the Trump administration’s wheel as it prepares to receive Pakistan’s PM whenever he travels to Washington. At inter-agency discussions behind closed doors, the State Department is for such a visit, the Pentagon more so, but most of all, are the Generals at the US Central Command in Tampa, Florida: Pakistan is a ‘CENTCOM coalition nation’. India is nowhere near that status.

Gen Joseph Votel, the commander in Tampa, has more than once publicly stated the importance of Pakistan for the region covered by the US Central Command. The commanders of US forces in Afghanistan, who feel the pressure of the Taliban every night, would do anything if Pakistan could alleviate their suffocation.

The Congress alone can mount enough pressure to scuttle the visit. If the visit still takes place, there are multiple ways in which Capitol Hill can take the sheen off Pakistan’s newly-minted PM. Hearings can be organised by various sub-committees of both chambers at which doubts can be raised amid a blaze of publicity if Pakistan is a friend of America at all.

The Congressional Research Service can be persuaded to issue a report that discredits Pakistan. The Congress, in any case, was unhappy that the sale of F-16s to Pakistan was done without adequate consultations on Capitol Hill. Such unhappiness can now be stoked after Pakistan used those planes against India, casting a shadow over the visit. 

One of the Congressmen who met Gokhale is Brad Sherman, Chairman of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Sub-Committee dealing with South Asia. In July 2014, Sherman led the effort to get newly-elected PM Modi — who was until shortly before under a US visa ban — to address a Joint Session of Congress three months later. Sherman mobilised 83 Congressmen to start the drive. Now, no one will be surprised if he does the reverse as the new co-chair of the Congressional Caucus on India and Indian-Americans if Khan expresses a wish to address the Congress.

All this is not to suggest that Gokhale’s visit has tied up these possibilities or that he will do any of this himself. He has only set this ball rolling. It is the Indian lobbyists in the US, working with a First Secretary at the Indian Embassy and acting in concert with Congressional staffers, who will get down to the nitty-gritty of these and other Indian objectives. It is a long, challenging road. But a start has been made with the Foreign Secretary’s visit.