Highly-placed sources have told Business Standard that the India-US joint statement to be adopted by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and US President Barack Obama on Monday will take the bilateral strategic partnership “to a new level across all fronts”.
The two heads of government are expected to have a meeting of minds on all the major areas that were part of the Bush-Manmohan joint statements of July 2005 and March 2006.
New Delhi expects cooperation across the board in nuclear energy development, high-technology — in all areas, including energy and agriculture — and a formulation that will implicitly endorse India’s claim to permanent membership of the United Nations Security Council.
Sources associated with the drafting of the joint statement seemed pleased at the final outcome.
As if to make up for not squarely addressing the terrorism issue in Mumbai, even when he met with victims of the November 26, 2008, attacks that had emanated from Pakistan, the joint statement is also expected to call for the elimination of terrorist havens in the Pakistan-Afghanistan badlands.
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Significantly, it will call for India and the US to jointly partner in projects in third countries such as Afghanistan and in Africa — an acknowledgement of the stabilising role that India plays in South Asia and beyond.
Highly placed Indian officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said in Afghanistan, India and the US could cooperate in areas like agriculture, while projects in Africa could be framed in e-governance, community communications networks and even the training of parliamentarians in India.
At the same time, officials said India did not want to be openly seen taking sides in the Afghan conflict. That was why its highly successful $1.3-billion aid programme over the last nine years had been deliberately fielded in non-partisan areas like building dams, laying electricity lines and rebuilding schools (including the well-known Habibia school in Kabul).
But as US troops begin to withdraw from Afghanistan in the summer of 2011 and civil war likely to erupt as a consequence, Indian experts in these non-combat areas would be at much greater security risk if they were associated with the US, the officials said.
“We certainly don’t want to become a junior partner of the Americans in Afghanistan, or anywhere else,” said one official, pointing out that India had so far done well on its own in third countries.
Ironically, New Delhi does not want Washington to pull out of -- or even draw down from -- Afghanistan, but recognises that it might have to do more than exercise traditional caution if it wants to play a greater role in the region.
“We don’t want US troops to leave Afghanistan because India will have to bear the brunt of the aftermath, with Al-Qaeda ganging up with the Taliban and both of them controlled by Pakistan’s ISI,” said the official.
Officials said they had noted Pakistan’s statement on the eve of the Obama visit, which had practically warned the US from upsetting the “regional balance” in South Asia.
In Afghanistan, India has created a unique string of around 100 small development projects worth $1 million each, which partner local village networks and district-level ventures in horticulture, water recharging, the dairy sector, craft redevelopment and even microfinance.
Significantly, a large number of these have been in the southern Pashtun strongholds, in an effort to diversify India’s Afghan linkages.
