Trump stirs the South Asian pot

THIS feeling, on this monsoon morning after Donald Trump announced the US had signed an oil deal with Pakistan, feels a bit like those mornings in the wake of India’s victory over Pakistan at Kargil back in 1999 — quiet, almost unreal. Except this time, the shoe is on the other foot.

Back in July 1999, Atal Bihari Vajpayee firmly told Bill Clinton to tell Nawaz Sharif — whom Clinton was seeing in Washington DC in an effort to end the Kargil conflict — that India would only compromise when the last Pakistani soldier walked back from the Line of Control across which he had walked into Kashmir. Nawaz Sharif had no choice but to agree. The Kargil conflict ended. A year later, Clinton was on a five-day visit to India, bathing in rose petals in Jaipur. On his way out, he stopped in Pakistan for five hours.

This weekend, as India examines the shift in US policy in favour of Pakistan — a shift so dramatic that heads should roll if it was not foreseen in the Indian establishment, from DC to Delhi — Pakistan will underline its new best friendship by importing one million barrels of oil from the US in October.

For the first time since 1989 — when the last Soviet soldier left Afghanistan and the Americans, soon after, flushed with the victory of having evicted the godless Communists from Kabul, stopped the pipeline of armaments and dollars to Rawalpindi — the Americans are returning to Pakistan.

It’s another roll of the dice in the unending great game, but this time around India is bound to get hurt.

Remember that Pakistan is an ally of China. Remember, too, that Trump began his second term by imposing wild tariffs against Beijing because he realised the Chinese had undercut the American economy from under its feet; bringing back manufacturing from China, Trump knew, was central to Making America Great Again.

But Trump changed the power equilibrium in South Asia this week by cutting a deal with Pakistan and slamming India’s “dead economy.” It must have been the heat in DC or something he ate in Mar-a-Lago, because he forgot that only five years ago, Modi had declared, “Ab ki baar, Trump sarkar” in Houston, sending the Indian-American crowd into a frenzy and delivering more than a few precious Indian-American votes into Trump’s kitty.

Make no mistake, Trump’s power play is certain to aggravate the international chessboard. It is too soon and too simplistic to say today that old friendships will rearrange themselves around a 21st-century version of the Cold War. Everyone will still talk to everyone, of course, especially in Quad meetings — there’s a summit in Delhi coming up in November, which means Trump is sure to show up. But with the US President having thrown Modi into the arms of the Russian bear (“the dead economies of India and Russia”), Modi may have no option but to warm up to Vladimir Putin.

The thing about friendships and foreign policy — which is, essentially friendships between nations — is that they have to be between equals. That’s why the unusual embrace between India and the US wasn’t just between the world’s largest and oldest democracies or that Indian Americans later grew to be among the most influential ingroup in America — from Sundar Pichai to Shantanu Narayen and Sanjay Mehrotra — but that despite the economic inequality, both nations weren’t afraid of treating each other as peers.

Roosevelt understood the uniqueness of India, even if Eisenhower didn’t. Kennedy understood — a photo of his friend and then Ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith, hangs in the tiny library upstairs at the Government Museum in Chandigarh, on the other side of the pillar on which MS Randhawa’s photo hangs — even if Kissinger didn’t.

And even when Kissinger openly defended his pro-Pakistan tilt and criticised the exodus of ten million Bangladeshis into West Bengal in 1971, K Subrahmanyam, an erstwhile top defence analyst, wasn’t afraid of admonishing him and asked if he remembered the escape of his fellow Jews from Germany. (In the wake of the 1998 nuclear tests, when the dust finally settled, India’s Ambassador to the US Naresh Chandra and Kissinger became fast friends.)

The opposite was also true. Vajpayee understood the incredible importance of the US — and described the two nations as “natural allies,” even when US anger over India’s 1998 nuclear tests had barely subsided. And when Manmohan Singh, that brilliant PM who hated public speaking went and told George Bush that “India loves you” — it was true in a Hollywood sort of way, because the US had brought India into the exclusive club of de facto nuclear nations with the 2008 nuclear deal.

Modi, too, with “Ab ki baar, Trump sarkar” in 2020 understood that flattery was the direct route to the White House. It boggles the mind, therefore, why External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar has stubbornly refused to give Trump the credit for ending the Op Sindoor conflict, including during the Parliament debate, though Trump has claimed this at least 15 times. (In contrast, the shrewd Pakistanis nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize.)

To be fair, India has always rejected third-party intervention in India-Pakistan matters, insisting that the bilateral track, via the Simla Agreement of 1972, holds supreme over everything else. But what happens when India refuses to have any communication at all with Pakistan, whether it’s over water-sharing or playing sports, leave alone a formal dialogue?

Here's what is really believed to have happened on the intervening night of May 9-10, when Modi unexpectedly gave the order to bomb 11 Pakistani bases. The IAF action shook the Pakistanis badly. The Pakistanis called the Americans and the Americans called Jaishankar. Tell the Pakistanis to tell us, Jaishankar responded. Which is when the Pakistani DGMO called his Indian counterpart on the afternoon of May 10 and both sides agreed to call it off.

But India, then, went ahead and insisted that “Pakistan,” not just the Pakistani terror group, The Resistance Front (TRF), was responsible for the Pahalgam attack — even as Trump was preparing to receive Pakistan’s Field Marshal Asim Munir for halal lunch at the White House. The Americans were not going to take that lightly.

Note that the US has, since, made a very fine, if distinct, difference by condemning “cross-border terrorism” and even naming TRF as a terror group — but Pakistan has never been named as the direct mastermind of Pahalgam. The rest of the international community has followed suit.

And so it ends, the world in a different place from when the week began. India’s leaders are rightfully taking a deep breath in the hope that the India-US relationship will stabilise soon, but the truth is that it will be a long haul.

And if there is ever an honest self-examination, the question the Modi government must ask itself is why Pakistan was able to trump the India story — when it’s a terror-ridden state, its economy is in the dumps, a former PM is in jail and the current PM is mortally afraid of his own Army.

Perhaps the honest question may yield some answers these monsoon mornings.