.India’s Terror Stance Vexes Obama Amid Voter Ire at Pakistan
Feb. 23 (Bloomberg) -- India’s 670 million voters may be about to set back President Barack Obama’s campaign against Islamic militancy in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
India’s ruling Congress Party, which heeded U.S. calls to avoid threatening its neighbor after November’s Mumbai terrorist attack, is heading for elections that might push it from office. The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, which accuses Congress of a “soft approach” toward terrorism, says India should consider blockading Pakistan’s main port and severing ties unless the government extradites 20 suspected militants.
A less cooperative India would hamper Obama’s effort to keep Pakistan’s army focused on fighting the Taliban and other guerrillas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
“The BJP is more hard-line now than when it was in power,” says Gareth Price, head of the Asia program at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. “There’s no question they would increase the pressure on Pakistan, and that would complicate matters for the Obama administration.” The likeliest outcome, he says, may be a weak coalition government led by one of the two large parties and including some of India’s burgeoning small parties.
This month, Pakistan ceded effective control of the Swat Valley, 250 kilometers (155 miles) northwest of Islamabad, in a truce with local Taliban. The Taliban’s gains threaten to further destabilize Afghan President Hamid Karzai -- and diminish pressure on al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who’s believed to be hiding in the region.
‘Listen and Learn’
The U.S. special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, visited all three countries last week to, in his words, “listen and learn.”
Holbrooke said last week on PBS’s NewsHour program that the administration was “troubled and confused” by the truce in Swat. Meanwhile, U.S. officials have criticized Karzai’s government, which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said last month is “plagued by limited capacity and widespread corruption.”
Obama on Feb. 18 ordered 17,000 more U.S. troops into Afghanistan as a first step in a new strategy likely to be unveiled late next month. By then, India’s election will be in full swing: Voting in the world’s most populous democracy is to take place in several phases and must be completed by May.
Congress enters the campaign without history on its side: No ruling party has won re-election after serving a full term since Indira Gandhi led Congress to victory in 1971. Since the start of 2007, the party had lost ground in nine of 11 state elections, before winning three out of six late last year.
Leadership Conundrum
It isn’t even clear who’ll lead the party. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, 76, was hospitalized last month for cardiac bypass surgery and had to reduce his workload. If he isn’t able to carry the party banner, the succession is murky.
Party leader Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born widow of assassinated Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, has declined to assume a direct role in government. Congress hasn’t said whether it will name her 34-year-old son, Rahul, to lead the party their family has dominated since India won its independence six decades ago.
“Rahul Gandhi is not ready,” political scientist and commentator Harish Khare wrote in the Hindu, a national newspaper, on Jan. 30. Congress, he said, should avoid “pitchforking the young man into the race.”
The campaign comes at a time when the global recession has crippled Indian exports, cutting growth in Asia’s third-largest economy to its slowest pace since 2003.
Job Losses
India has lost 1 million jobs, the government said Jan. 29, and companies such as Bangalore-based Gokaldas Exports Ltd., the country’s largest clothing exporter, predict more firings. Meanwhile, an accounting scandal at Satyam Computer Services Ltd. has undermined India’s appeal to foreign investors.
India’s benchmark Sensex stock index tumbled 50 percent in the past year, led by declines in Tata Motors Ltd. and property developer DLF Ltd. The rupee fell 24 percent against the dollar in the same period.
“The economy is the key to a very tough fight for Congress,” says Mahesh Rangarajan, a political analyst at Delhi University. A nationwide poll last week by India’s CNN-IBN television network found 32 percent of respondents named the economy as the main election issue, compared with 21 percent who cited security and terrorism. No margin of error was given.
India, with a population of 1.1 billion, will elect its lower house of parliament for a five-year term. Thirty-seven parties sit in the current chamber; since the early 1990s, governments have been coalitions headed by Congress or its main rival, the BJP, with smaller parties playing an increasing role.
Hindu Base
The BJP, which draws support from groups seeking to make India a more overtly Hindu state, criticized Congress’s patience with Pakistan following the Mumbai attacks, which killed 164 people. It suggested a naval blockade of Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, and on Feb. 8 urged Congress to consider breaking off “all trade, transport, tourism and cultural ties.”
No improvement in India-Pakistan ties is likely during a three-month election season because of political pressures, says Lisa Curtis, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a research institute in Washington.
“It will probably be more difficult if the BJP wins to get back to an Indo-Pakistan dialogue, but I don’t think it’s impossible,” Curtis says.
Musharraf Detente
Still, the BJP, headed by L.K. Advani, 81, might not bring a radical departure from Congress’s foreign policy. While the BJP-led government of then-Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee mobilized Indian troops against Pakistan after a 2001 guerrilla attack on India’s parliament, it later opened a process of detente with Pakistan’s then-ruler, General Pervez Musharraf.
“Under a BJP government, there’s no question the rhetoric and language will be much tougher and aggressive, but it will just be rhetoric,” says Olivier Louis, head of the India and South Asia program at IFRI, the French Institute for International Affairs in Paris.
The election probably will sustain the growth of smaller parties rooted in the ethnic and linguistic groups that dominate many of India’s 28 states, says Walter Andersen, a retired State Department India specialist who heads the South Asia Studies Program at the School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.
Rangarajan says “the unknown quantity” is the socialist- leaning Bahujan Samaj Party, which aims to mobilize minority and lower-caste groups. It swept aside Congress and other parties in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, in 2007.
With all parties seeking votes by showing their readiness to get tough on terrorism, the biggest challenge to the Obama administration’s calls for moderation would be another attack similar to Mumbai, says Vikram Sood, a former chief of India’s main intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing.
In such a case, “India would have to make at least a symbolic strike” on Pakistani targets, Sood said in an interview. In such a case, Clinton “should go to Islamabad and tell them to quietly take what’s coming.”
Bloomberg
That's all we need now, WWIII!
India’s ruling Congress Party, which heeded U.S. calls to avoid threatening its neighbor after November’s Mumbai terrorist attack, is heading for elections that might push it from office. The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, which accuses Congress of a “soft approach” toward terrorism, says India should consider blockading Pakistan’s main port and severing ties unless the government extradites 20 suspected militants.
A less cooperative India would hamper Obama’s effort to keep Pakistan’s army focused on fighting the Taliban and other guerrillas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
“The BJP is more hard-line now than when it was in power,” says Gareth Price, head of the Asia program at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. “There’s no question they would increase the pressure on Pakistan, and that would complicate matters for the Obama administration.” The likeliest outcome, he says, may be a weak coalition government led by one of the two large parties and including some of India’s burgeoning small parties.
This month, Pakistan ceded effective control of the Swat Valley, 250 kilometers (155 miles) northwest of Islamabad, in a truce with local Taliban. The Taliban’s gains threaten to further destabilize Afghan President Hamid Karzai -- and diminish pressure on al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who’s believed to be hiding in the region.
‘Listen and Learn’
The U.S. special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, visited all three countries last week to, in his words, “listen and learn.”
Holbrooke said last week on PBS’s NewsHour program that the administration was “troubled and confused” by the truce in Swat. Meanwhile, U.S. officials have criticized Karzai’s government, which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said last month is “plagued by limited capacity and widespread corruption.”
Obama on Feb. 18 ordered 17,000 more U.S. troops into Afghanistan as a first step in a new strategy likely to be unveiled late next month. By then, India’s election will be in full swing: Voting in the world’s most populous democracy is to take place in several phases and must be completed by May.
Congress enters the campaign without history on its side: No ruling party has won re-election after serving a full term since Indira Gandhi led Congress to victory in 1971. Since the start of 2007, the party had lost ground in nine of 11 state elections, before winning three out of six late last year.
Leadership Conundrum
It isn’t even clear who’ll lead the party. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, 76, was hospitalized last month for cardiac bypass surgery and had to reduce his workload. If he isn’t able to carry the party banner, the succession is murky.
Party leader Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born widow of assassinated Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, has declined to assume a direct role in government. Congress hasn’t said whether it will name her 34-year-old son, Rahul, to lead the party their family has dominated since India won its independence six decades ago.
“Rahul Gandhi is not ready,” political scientist and commentator Harish Khare wrote in the Hindu, a national newspaper, on Jan. 30. Congress, he said, should avoid “pitchforking the young man into the race.”
The campaign comes at a time when the global recession has crippled Indian exports, cutting growth in Asia’s third-largest economy to its slowest pace since 2003.
Job Losses
India has lost 1 million jobs, the government said Jan. 29, and companies such as Bangalore-based Gokaldas Exports Ltd., the country’s largest clothing exporter, predict more firings. Meanwhile, an accounting scandal at Satyam Computer Services Ltd. has undermined India’s appeal to foreign investors.
India’s benchmark Sensex stock index tumbled 50 percent in the past year, led by declines in Tata Motors Ltd. and property developer DLF Ltd. The rupee fell 24 percent against the dollar in the same period.
“The economy is the key to a very tough fight for Congress,” says Mahesh Rangarajan, a political analyst at Delhi University. A nationwide poll last week by India’s CNN-IBN television network found 32 percent of respondents named the economy as the main election issue, compared with 21 percent who cited security and terrorism. No margin of error was given.
India, with a population of 1.1 billion, will elect its lower house of parliament for a five-year term. Thirty-seven parties sit in the current chamber; since the early 1990s, governments have been coalitions headed by Congress or its main rival, the BJP, with smaller parties playing an increasing role.
Hindu Base
The BJP, which draws support from groups seeking to make India a more overtly Hindu state, criticized Congress’s patience with Pakistan following the Mumbai attacks, which killed 164 people. It suggested a naval blockade of Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, and on Feb. 8 urged Congress to consider breaking off “all trade, transport, tourism and cultural ties.”
No improvement in India-Pakistan ties is likely during a three-month election season because of political pressures, says Lisa Curtis, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a research institute in Washington.
“It will probably be more difficult if the BJP wins to get back to an Indo-Pakistan dialogue, but I don’t think it’s impossible,” Curtis says.
Musharraf Detente
Still, the BJP, headed by L.K. Advani, 81, might not bring a radical departure from Congress’s foreign policy. While the BJP-led government of then-Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee mobilized Indian troops against Pakistan after a 2001 guerrilla attack on India’s parliament, it later opened a process of detente with Pakistan’s then-ruler, General Pervez Musharraf.
“Under a BJP government, there’s no question the rhetoric and language will be much tougher and aggressive, but it will just be rhetoric,” says Olivier Louis, head of the India and South Asia program at IFRI, the French Institute for International Affairs in Paris.
The election probably will sustain the growth of smaller parties rooted in the ethnic and linguistic groups that dominate many of India’s 28 states, says Walter Andersen, a retired State Department India specialist who heads the South Asia Studies Program at the School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.
Rangarajan says “the unknown quantity” is the socialist- leaning Bahujan Samaj Party, which aims to mobilize minority and lower-caste groups. It swept aside Congress and other parties in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, in 2007.
With all parties seeking votes by showing their readiness to get tough on terrorism, the biggest challenge to the Obama administration’s calls for moderation would be another attack similar to Mumbai, says Vikram Sood, a former chief of India’s main intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing.
In such a case, “India would have to make at least a symbolic strike” on Pakistani targets, Sood said in an interview. In such a case, Clinton “should go to Islamabad and tell them to quietly take what’s coming.”
Bloomberg
That's all we need now, WWIII!
posted by madtom at 8:43 PM
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