Why Pakistan’s First Nobel Laureate Could Never ‘Rest in Peace’

Anand Kamalakar’s powerful Netflix documentary, Salam – The First ****** (Muslim) Nobel Laureate — a biographical account of  mathematician and theoretical physicist, Abdus Salam — is a poignant tribute to the genius who once saw himself as the world’s first ‘Muslim and Pakistani’ Nobel laureate, but had to have the posthumous ignominy of having “Muslim” ‘erased’ from his own gravestone, and reduced to a second-class citizen in his home country.

Grave of Prof. Dr. Abdus Salam (1926-1996) in Rabwah. In the English inscription the phrase “the first Muslim Nobel laureate” the word “Muslim” has been erased with paint.

(Photo Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons)

New York-based director Kamalakar, whose documentary was released on Netflix on 1 October, has handled a delicate and even controversial theme with great finesse, and as a result, the documentary has received several international awards and has been screened in over 30 cities across the world. But the driving force behind the documentary were its producers Omar Vandal and Zakir Thaver, who put in a decade’s effort to bring their project to fruition

Why Ahmadis are ‘Non-Muslims’ in Pakistan

Not many in India are familiar with the sectional strife within Islam, except the knowledge that there are Shias and Sunnis. In reality, there are scores of fault lines based on tribal and sectarian identities. But the Ahmadi sect to which Dr Abdus Salam belonged, has had a chequered history in Pakistan. Founded in the 19th century in Qadian, now in Indian Punjab, the movement strongly supported the creation of Pakistan. But the Ahmadis have since faced intense persecution in Pakistan because they believe that their founder Mirza Ghulam Ahmad is the promised Mahdi or Messiah awaited by the Muslims.

A central tenet of Islam is that Muhammad (PBUH) is the last prophet.

However, the Mahdi occupies a different and distinct position in Islamic history, but many Muslims believe that the Ahmadi belief is tantamount to heresy.

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Since 1974, a constitutional amendment has officially declared them to be ‘non-Muslims’ and have given them the status of ‘apostates’, something dangerous in Islam.

Also Read : Here’s Why Pak Ahmadis Have Boycotted the Elections for 30 Years

Abdus Salam: Typical South Asian Story of Hardship & Achievement

Salam’s was a typical story of South Asian achievement. Born in 1926 in a village in the Jhang region to middle-class parents, he studied by candle-light and saw electricity when he went to Lahore for higher education. He was fortunately nurtured by his family, and studied mathematics and won a scholarship to St Johns College, Cambridge. Upon his return in 1951, he was appointed Chairman of the Mathematics Department at the Lahore College University, at the young age of 25. But frustrated by the lack of any research, and, more importantly, the anti-Ahmadi riots of 1953, Dr Abdus Salam went back to the UK in 1954. In 1957, he accepted a chair at the Imperial College, a position he held for life.

This appointment, in turn, gave him a leg up in Pakistan, which then designated him as the Chief Scientific Advisor to the President, who was the military dictator Ayub Khan, and he worked for the government till 1974.

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Salam was the founder of the Pakistani Space Agency SUPARCO, and led the Theoretical Physics Group in the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission. Indeed, as the documentary shows, he was instrumental in the establishment of Pakistan’s first nuclear power plant near Karachi.

Also Read : Pakistan’s Medieval Blasphemy Laws in Desperate Need of Overhaul

Pakistani Nobel Laureate Abdus Salam’s Life Work

His role in Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme has been ambiguously presented in the documentary. But it does say that Salam was one of those who attended the secret meeting convened by Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Multan in 1972, where Pakistan decided to embark on a nuclear weapons programme.

But today, Pakistanis are unlikely to accept that an Ahmadi played a significant role in their nuclear weapons programme.

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Two years after the Multan meeting, Salam resigned from his government positions after Bhutto moved the Second Constitutional Amendment that declared Ahmadis as ‘non-Muslims’ in 1974. Salam’s Islamic faith became deeper, and he then became an avowed campaigner against nuclear weapons. But he did not give up on Pakistan and his fierce loyalty to it.

The documentary dwells on the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) that he founded with the help of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) even before he won the Nobel.

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The unique feature of this centre is to bring together physicists of the developing world with Western physicists, and carry on their research. In the era when there was no internet, this was a means of ending the kind of isolation Dr Abdus Salam had felt when he had returned to Pakistan from Cambridge.

People associated with Salam, his first wife Hafiza, his sons, associates and fellow physicists, his staff — all bring to life his work and personality. Indeed, some years ago, Pakistani physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy summed him up as being “strong, assertive, enthusiastic, vibrant, bluntly authoritarian, and with a mind sharp as a razor’s edge”.

Role of Religion in Abdus Salam’s Life

Religion was a central driving force in Dr Abdus Salam’s life. Indeed, he said in an interview, that ‘Tauheed’ or the one-ness of God, played an important role in seeking unity among four forms of energy — strong nuclear, gravitational, electro-magnetic and weak nuclear forces. The achievement for which Salam got the Nobel, was to show the mathematical link between weak nuclear forces and electromagnetism. Salam came up with this around the same time that Steven Weinberg of MIT did, and the two, along with Sheldon Glashow, shared the Nobel for Physics in 1979. In addition to this, he had several other notable achievements in other fields of physics and mathematics.

An interesting facet of the documentary is the part which notes that the young Salam was actually onto the research on the laws of parity, which led to major discoveries in elementary particles.

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But he was discouraged from proceeding because he was strongly discouraged by the celebrated physicist Wolfgang Pauli to publish his work. In 1956, Pauli publicly apologised to Salam for his role in discouraging him. The following year, two Chinese American physicists, Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee got the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957 for their breakthrough paper in the area.

Like so many ironies that featured in his life, the timing of the award, too, came at a time when General Zia ul Haq — who had seized power in 1977 and hanged Bhutto — “supplemented” the Second Amendment to add further the disabilities against the Ahmadi community. Zia did meet him, somewhat reluctantly, but Dr Abdus Salam was feted elsewhere, including the AMU in India.

The Erasure of Identity

Actually, if anything, the director has been a bit too subtle in showing the boorish manner in which Pakistan treated Salam. When he died in Oxford at the age of 70 in 1996, his body was brought back to Pakistan for burial in Rabwah, the hometown of the Ahmadi community, whose name has been forcibly changed to Chenab Nagar to erase its association with the Ahmadis. The state refused to get involved in the burial of this hero, and no official functionary attended.

Some ‘good’ citizens of Jhang, near Rabwah, were present at the funeral to ensure that no rituals or prayers associated with Islam were conducted. The tombstone said ‘Abdus Salam, First Muslim Nobel Laureate’. Soon after, the police and a magistrate arrived to erase the world ‘Muslim’.

The Quint October 14, 2019

All pomp, little to show

Prime Minister Narendra Modi spent a week in the US at the end of September. Ostensibly, the visit was to attend the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York, but fresh from his election victory and his Article 370 ‘surgical strike’ on Jammu & Kashmir, he decided to make it a larger exercise of displaying India to the world.

The most theatrical feature of the visit was the ‘Howdy, Modi!’ event in Houston. This was a strategy trade-marked by Modi in 2014, when he participated in a major rally at the Madison Square Garden stadium in New York. The loud political rally generated considerable attention in Washington DC by the time Modi arrived for his official visit. This was a riposte of sorts to the US for denying him a visa for more than a decade before.

This time around, fresh from his sweep in the General Election, Modi was in the capital of the Indian diaspora, Houston, and not only spoke to a larger and adoring audience of NRIs, but also had roped in the POTUS himself for the tamasha.

Houston was about messaging. Both leaders were talking politics to different audiences—Modi to the millions who would have been watching the wall-to-wall TV coverage back home. And Trump electioneering with a category of voters who had overwhelmingly voted Democratic the last time around. There was nothing more, though, than the glitz, as became evident as the week unfolded.   

Importantly, Modi was not able to strike a trade deal with the US. For some time now, Trump has been raising the issue of the trade imbalance with India, and in May, Washington revoked the benefits India was getting under the GSP. In July, Trump himself weighed in when he tweeted, ‘India has long had a field day putting tariffs on American products. No longer acceptable!’

There has been brave talk by people like Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal that India wants to build up export competitiveness, rather than depend on the GSP. But in troubled times such as these, the $6.4 billion benefit to Indian exporters is not insignificant. Expectations that his over-the-top ‘friendship’ with Trump would help persuade the US to back off were belied. Modi couldn’t even manage a waiver of the March 2018 duties the US placed on national security grounds on Indian aluminum and steel, several countries, though, have managed to get exemptions.

The Prime Minister did hold a glitzy roundtable with US CEOs and business leaders in Houston and New York, but the net result was the lone, and somewhat controversial, MoU between Petronet and the American oil and gas major, Tellurian. American majors do not seem to be too interested in investing in India, given the quirky ways of the government.

The most important context of the US tour was the Jammu & Kashmir issue. After the unprecedented informal meeting of the UN Security Council in August, there were worries about how it would play out in the UNGA.

India was on the offensive from the outset, when in Houston Modi attacked those who had ‘put their hatred of India at the centre of their political agenda’ and those who supported terrorism and ‘who nurture terrorism’. The time had come to ‘fight a decisive battle against terrorism and against all the people who promote terrorism,’ he said, and sought to draw Trump into the battle.   

But Trump was evasive. He did denounce the threat of ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ to applause from the audience. But later he clarified that he was thinking more about Iran, than Pakistan.

Modi largely stuck to the high road in his remarks at the UNGA, but he couldn’t resist returning to the issue of terrorism, which he said somewhat floridly, was a challenge to ‘the entire world and humanity’.

World leaders would have been bemused about the messaging here from someone who had just referred to Buddha’s message of peace. At a time when the world community was fixated on global warming, the Indian PM appeared not to want to let go of his primary electoral weapon—attacking Pakistan/Muslims on account of terrorism.

Despite efforts, the J&K issue has grabbed the attention of the world community. Beyond disclaimers by the administration, Trump remains fixated on his role as a mediator, most recently articulated before his meeting with Imran Khan in New York last week. Meanwhile, the US has also let it be known that its relatively benign attitude is conditional on India being able to rapidly lift the restrictions and release those who have been detained in the state.

That Kashmir has been internationalised because of the government’s ill-considered actions is apparent from the ambiguous position of the US, the stand of the UK Labour Party,  and the full-fledged support being given to Pakistan by Malaysia and Turkey. This may not mean much at present. But it is a needless distraction for a country that should be focusing on its economic growth and whose economy is in a difficult place. So, despite the self-praise and hype generated by a friendly media, the outcome of the US tour was, as they say, mixed. Neither the NRIs nor the CEOs or Trump himself have been persuaded to do something, except mouth nice words about India.

The Tribune October 1, 2019

J&K and PoK: Why MEA Jaishankar’s Comment Isn’t the Last Word

There is a bit of over-interpretation going on over Union External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar’s statement, that Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK) is a part of India, and the country expects to have “physical jurisdiction” over it one day.

What else is a Union Minister to say when he is asked at a press conference to comment on statements of his colleagues, that talks with Pakistan will henceforth only be on PoK and not Kashmir ?

The reason why India must insistently assert its claim is because the international community and the United Nations believes that Jammu & Kashmir is disputed territory, whose future needs to be worked out through dialogue between India and Pakistan. Were India to concede that, maybe, India would be content to live with the status quo; it would be a poor negotiation strategy to concede your final position at the beginning of the negotiations.

International Community’s Stance On J&K

If and when serious talks do take place between India and Pakistan, the position could change, as indeed it has in the past. India’s goal has largely been to go along with the status quo. For this, there are historical and demographic reasons, as well as realpolitik ones.

As for the international community, its position is summed up by the 8 August statement of the UN Secretary General, which notes that the position of the UN “on this region is governed by the Charter of the United Nations, and applicable Security Council resolutions.” But it also referred to the Simla Agreement of 1972 which says that the status of J&K be settled “by peaceful means, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.”

The current mandate of the UN comes from resolution 307 of the UNSC, which was passed 13 to none, with Poland and Soviet Union abstaining.

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This authorised the organisation to remain institutionally involved through the United Nations Military Observers Group for India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP).

Also Read : India rules out Kashmir talks with Pak, sets sights on PoK

Why India Failed to Recover ‘Azad Kashmir’ Through Military Means

The primary reason why India failed to recover the band of territory called ‘Azad Kashmir’ through military means, is that it is populated by non-Kashmiri speaking Muslims who were strong supporters of Pakistan. In 1947, the Indian Army quickly cleared out the areas of the Kashmir Valley occupied by the indigenous ‘raiders’. But when they tried to go beyond Uri, they found the going tough.

Further, by the end of December 1947, the political leadership had to worry about the safety of Poonch, Naushera, Rajauri and Jammu. The fall of Mirpur and the horror stories of Hindu women being raped and sold, persuaded the government to put all the efforts to shift the initiative to the region.  This was not an easy task — intense fighting took place in the region around Kotli, Jhangar, Naushera, and Poonch itself was besieged for nine months.

The Indian Army had to worry not just about the Punjab border, but also the ongoing issues with Hyderabad.

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For this reason, they lacked adequate forces to recapture Gilgit and Skardu. The Indian Army was hard put to defend, though it eventually retained Kargil, Dras and Leh.

Also Read : Pak condemns India's statement on taking back PoK

PoK & the Big Demographic Question

Today, even if Pakistan were to quietly hand back PoK to India, things will not exactly be easy. True, India will have a border with Afghanistan and break the overland connectivity between Pakistan and China. But it will be faced with holding down a population that is not — by any stretch of imagination — favourable to India. Indeed, the 44 lakh strong population of the sliver of territory called ‘Azad Kashmir’ is populated by a mix of Sudhans, Gujjars, Jats and Rajputs — a mix of martial groups who are hostile to India.

The 20 lakh people of Gilgit-Baltistan, notwithstanding claims to the contrary, too, are not too inclined towards India, and over the years, Sunni migration has reduced the salience of the Shias in the region.

The big question, of course, is whether the BJP, which is not particularly inclined towards Muslims anyway, will be happy with the addition of 65 lakh more Muslims, to the 125 lakh population of Jammu & Kashmir — of which 67 percent are Muslims.

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Beyond its specious political claim on J&K, Pakistan has its military compulsions for strongly holding on to ‘Azad’ Kashmir. A look at the map shows that if India controlled the region, it would be just 35-50 kms away from Islamabad and the Pakistani heartland. For this reason alone, the Pakistan Army will strongly defend the region.

Balakot is One Thing — Physical Re-Capture Is Another

These days there is a lot of fantasy about how the Indian military can recapture the territory through a war. If the past has lessons, this is unlikely to happen, and attempts in that direction could lead to disaster. There is nothing in the balance of forces to show that India can overwhelm Pakistani defences in the region. You can carry out strikes like Balakot, but physically recapturing the region is another thing.

An important consideration for ceasefire by December 1948 was that by that time, India controlled the Kashmir Valley and the road to Ladakh. There was a feeling that maybe Pakistan would be happy with what it had.

But in the ensuing years, Pakistan —which was beset by issues of unity — decided to make Kashmir its raison d’être.

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Subsequently, it developed a fake narrative which decreed that Kashmir was the ‘unfinished business of Partition’.

Even so, faced with the need to get India to release Pakistani POWs after the Bangladesh War, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto agreed to work towards making the ceasefire line into a permanent border. To this end, the Simla Agreement of 1972 was renamed as the ceasefire line, a military fact, into a neutral-sounding ‘Line of Control’. This may have been one reason that led to his overthrow by Zia ul Haq five years later.

Again, between 2001-2007, the two countries, under Prime Ministers Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh on the one hand, and President Pervez Musharraf on the other, were near an agreement that would have frozen the borders where they were. Unfortunately, Musharraf lost traction in Pakistan, and that was the end of that.

In these circumstances, you can be sure that Jaishankar’s declaration, no matter how vehement, is not the last word on either Jammu & Kashmir or its Pakistani occupied portion.

The Quint September 18, 2019

By Detaining Farooq, the Centre Signals its Contempt for Kashmiri Representation

The detention of Farooq Abdullah under the draconian Public Safety Act is a mockery of the law and the constitution.

The 81-year-old former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir has been under arrest since the August 5 lockdown that preceded the reading down of Article 370. But the decision to formalise his detention under the PSA came in the wake of MDMK chief Vaiko’s habeas corpus plea to the Supreme Court.

It is not as if the Supreme Court has covered itself with glory by going along with the government’s specious approach on Jammu and Kashmir. On Monday, while hearing another matter, a bench  comprising Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi and Justices S.A. Bobde and S. Abdul Nazeer ordered, “The state of J&K, keeping in mind the national interest and internal security, shall make all endeavours to ensure normal life is restored.”

Also read | ‘Urgent, Disturbing’: PIL in SC on Kashmir Children ‘Illegally Detained, Maimed’

Instead of worrying about national interest and  making theatrical gestures like promising personal tours of the state, the honourable judges should be doing what their job is — upholding justice, which has been under severe strain in J&K. On the floor of parliament, on August 6, Union home minister Amit Shah had claimed that Farooq had neither been detained nor arrested, saying “He is at home on his own will.”

Now, suddenly, the government has discovered that the National Conference patriarch is a threat to public safety. Just what is this threat that requires his incarceration is not clear, unless it is the simple matter of not allowing him to express his opinion on the course of events the government has set in motion. As if this were not bad enough, it appears he has been confined to a single room in his house as part of his PSA detention.

Like all human beings and politicians, Farooq is not perfect. But he has, more often than not, been more sinned against than sinning.

The current dispensation is probably not well versed in history, so they may have forgotten the chain of events that led to the destabilisation of the Valley’s politics in the 1980s.

Also read: Modi and Shah Forget that Kashmir is No Tibet, India is No China

After the death of  Sheikh Abdullah in 1982, Indira Gandhi, in her wisdom, decided that Farooq Abdullah and the National Conference should ally themselves to the Congress party in the state assembly elections of June, 1983.

Realising that this would severely dent his credibility in the Valley, Farooq Abdullah resisted and instead allied himself to Mirwaiz Farooq. Their alliance swept the polls, but then Abdullah made the fatal move of calling an all-India Opposition conclave in Srinagar in October, 1983.

Farooq Abdullah even took a break from active politics, returning only when autonomy of J&K was relatively assured by the Deve Gowda government. Photo: PTI/Files

Indira Gandhi retaliated by having Arun Nehru and Mufti Mohammed Sayeed organise a coup (with the help of Governor Jagmohan) that led to defections from Farooq’s party and his replacement by his brother-in-law G.M. Shah as chief minister in July 1984.

Three years later, going against his better judgment, Farooq agreed to an alliance with the Congress in the 1987 elections. The elections were rigged to the point of irrelevance. In these circumstances, governance of the state took a major hit. Both the Union and state governments seemed unable to stem the decline, marked by the virtual boycott of the 1989 Lok Sabha elections in the Valley. It was in these circumstances that Pakistan  fanned the youth revolt that led to the rise of the insurgency in 1989-1990.

Even so, when the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front launched its armed struggle, Farooq kept his wits about him. This came through when Rubaiyya, the daughter of the new home minister, Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, was kidnapped by JKLF elements demanding the release of their leaders in jail.

Also read: Kashmir – They Call It Peace

Farooq strenuously argued against any dealings with the JKLF. He used his contacts to pressure the JKLF to release Rubaiyya and had nearly succeeded when he was ordered by a committee of new Union ministers – Arun Nehru, I.K. Gujral and Arif Mohammed Khan – to release the JKLF leaders.

It was this single action that lit the fires that have ravaged the state since.

Between January 1990 and May 1996, Farooq stayed away from the state’s politics. In any case, this was a period when gunmen dictated the dialogue.

The Union government, increasingly desperate to show that normalcy had returned, continued to woo Farooq, aware that no election minus the NC would be deemed credible. It was only after a United Front government under H.D. Deve Gowda took office in New Delhi and promised “maximum autonomy” after the elections that Farooq relented.

He contested the elections, which was swept by the NC in September 1996.

Farooq’s father Sheikh Abdullah addresses people in Kashmir. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Perhaps the most questionable aspect of the Modi government’s Kashmir policy is its decision to place all mainstream Kashmiri parties and their political leaders outside the pale of the country’s laws or for that matter, political processes. Only that can explain the pattern of detentions which range from a CPI(M) leader to the leaders and cadres of the NC, Congress and the People’s Democratic Party.

With the parties that upheld the country’s flag outside the pale, who does the government expect will take up the task of providing political leadership to the people in the Valley?

That is, unless the Union government is planning to treat the Valley as some kind of an internal colony of the country.

Representation in a legislature, both state and Union, is a basic right of the citizens of the country and the key building block of our democracy. Talk of Panchayati Raj just doesn’t cut it. Even with its forcible demotion, there is or will be a J&K assembly and most of those elected to it will be from the three major political parties.

So what can the government be thinking ?

The Wire September 17, 2019

Too close for comfort

The developments in the Persian Gulf have taken a sudden turn for the worse. A drone strike on two major Saudi oil facilities has halved the kingdom’s daily oil production. The Houthi rebels, who are facing a brutal Saudi military campaign in Yemen, have claimed credit for the strike.

But US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blamed Iran, which has rejected the charge. In a tweet on Sunday evening, President Trump said, without naming Iran, that the US was ‘locked and loaded depending on verification’. The Americans may carry out strikes on Iran, but, given the credibility of the administration, there will be few takers for its version of the events anyway.

The region has already been on tenterhooks ever since the US launched its ‘maximum pressure’ policy against Iran. The US blamed Teheran for attacks on commercial tankers in the Persian Gulf in June. Amidst mounting tension, Iran shot down a US spy drone that it said had intruded into its airspace. At the time, Trump said he had called off an attack at the last minute because it would cause needless collateral damage.

US strikes and Iranian counter-strikes are a real possibility and could endanger the entire region. India could well face the biggest impact as it relies on the region for oil and gas. India imports 80 per cent of the oil it consumes, and of this, two-thirds comes through the Straits of Hormuz. In addition, the region also provides half of India’s liquified natural gas (LNG). Since the June crisis, Indian ships passing through the waterway have been assisted by Indian Navy vessels. However, should there be an outbreak of a larger conflict, the Indian Navy would have no option but to pull out from the area.  

The impact of the disruption of production in Saudi facilities could be limited and of short duration,  but should the situation deteriorate, besides the issue of oil supply, India may have to confront with much higher oil prices. According to one calculation, a $1 rise in the price of oil results in a Rs 10,700 crore annualised increase in the oil bill. Last year India spent $111.9 billion on oil imports alone. Currently, the oil prices are between $50 and $60 per barrel, but there is speculation that it could climb to $100 soon.

The blame for the current state of affairs must squarely rest on President Trump. He unbalanced US policy towards the region by precipitately pulling out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action to freeze Iran’s nuclear programme. Then, he went out of his way to tilt US policy towards Israel and Saudi Arabia, personalising it in the form of Benjamin Netanyahu and Prince Mohammed bin Sultan (MBS).

The latter has gone out of his way to disrupt regional calm. He blockaded Qatar, kidnapped the Prime Minister of Lebanon and intensified the war against the Houthis in Yemen with a brutal air campaign that has led to untold suffering for millions of Yemenis. Remarkably, western newspapers reporting on the drone attack on Saudi facilities, played down the fact that this could have been retaliation for the wanton attacks faced by Yemeni civilians at the hands of the Saudi Air Force. MBS has done all this and more with the US looking the other way. In fact, Trump has vetoed two Bills calling for the end of US support for the war in Yemen.

The Trump turn on Iran has, in addition, blindsided New Delhi. India has been forced to cut off all oil trade with the country, which is the most proximate source of oil to the subcontinent. Further, it has dampened Indian enthusiasm for the Chabahar project. The volume of trade with Afghanistan remains low and there are no signs that India is going to keep its promise to build the railway line to connect Chabahar with Zahedan, the entry point for Afghanistan. The net consequence of New Delhi following Washington’s lead is that it has thrown the game in this strategic neighbourhood to China.

Notwithstanding its massive military superiority over Iran, the US is unlikely to take things casually. Iran is not Iraq, and its armed forces have been preparing for asymmetrical combat with the US for decades. American bases in the region are within the range of Iranian ballistic missiles which, in any case, can also rain down on Saudi and Emirati cities causing mayhem all around.

As with all things Trump does, there is a parallel track in which the US can make up with Iran and teach the Saudis a lesson. Recall that he sacked his National Security Adviser John Bolton because the latter opposed relieving some of the Iran sanctions earlier this month. Rouhani had made it clear that he would negotiate with the US only if economic sanctions were lifted. Thereafter there was talk of a possible Trump-Rouhani meeting at the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York. On Sunday, despite the heightened rhetoric of the President himself,  White House Adviser Kellyanne Conway refused to rule out the Trump-Rouhani meet.

So, here we are, a few steps away from what could be a geopolitical catastrophe with major consequences for India. But if you were to look for signs that New Delhi was concerned, you would be unlikely to find them.

The Tribune September 17, 2019

Europe’s geopolitical shift: Its thaw with Russia holds out hope for a world not dominated by US and China

The exchange of prisoners between Russia and Ukraine earlier this week is a signal, albeit faint, that the European geopolitical tectonic plates are also shifting, along with those in Asia. This has consequences for India. Bitterness between the West and Russia over the latter’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 seems to be abating.  

The shift began with the election of Trump who refused to go by conventional thinking on Russia. His persistence in rebuilding ties with Moscow is apparent from his recent invitation to Moscow to attend the next G7 summit to be held at Miami next year. European Union (EU) and American pressure pushed Moscow to overcome its geopolitical wariness and embrace Beijing. The two built up a trading relationship based on growing energy exports to China, while Russia perforce has begun to rely on Chinese finance and manufactured goods.  At the heart of this partnership is the need to deal with their primary adversary – the US – and not worry about their backyards. But Russian weakness brought on, in part, by its EU quarrel, has pushed Russia to a junior status in its relationship with China, and Moscow knows it.

India has had to face a double whammy here. First, China has displaced India as Russia’s “go to” defence partner. There was a time in the 1990s when Russia ensured that India got the highest level of weapons systems that it exported – the Sukhoi 30 MKI, the Brahmos missile, technology for a nuclear propelled submarine and so on. Now China has that privilege, having been the first to receive the Su-35 and S-400 missiles last year. Second, India has to contend with the US Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions (CAATSA). The US is unlikely to ever supply India with a class of weapons like nuclear submarines or hypersonic missiles to counter China. The only country that would is Russia, and arguably France. Whether it is Russia or Iran, the US also wants India to subordinate its regional policies to align with those of the US.

Now there are signs of a thaw in American and EU ties with Russia. On September 9, France held 2+2 talks with Russia in Moscow.  It is not entirely a coincidence that all this is happening as the most hawkish anti-Russian country – UK – is leaving the EU. Germany-Russia relations, too, are much improved, witness the numerous high-level visits of German leaders, including Chancellor Merkel to Russia in the past year. The thaw has boosted the Normandy format meetings between Russia, France, Germany and Ukraine to resolve the crisis. On Monday, President Trump said he was not averse to joining the talks whose next round could take place at the end of the month. The stage is set for a possible compromise on Crimea. Other things could then follow.

In all fairness, both sides need to take a step back and look at their own conduct. NATO’s eastward expansion could not but have rattled Russia. In turn the latter built up a web of links with right wing and radical forces across EU. Paris was not amused when Marine Le Pen, leader of the right-wing  National Rally, confirmed that her party had received a 9 million euro loan from a Russian bank some years back, and that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.  Europe and Russia understand the value of their relationship very well. Part of it is shared history, part is the present where Russia is the largest oil and natural gas exporter to EU and the latter is its largest trading partner and source of FDI.

Given its location, India has both continental and oceanic interests. European shifts in conjunction with a possible thaw in Iran-US ties will be a boost for India’s Eurasian interests. After taking Indian policy unconscionably close to the US, Modi is discovering the virtues of multi-polarity. A strong and stable Russia and EU would certainly be a better option than a world dominated by the US and China.

The Times of India September 14, 2019