Not easy, this friendship

There are apprehensions that New Delhi may be manipulated on the Kashmir issue and forced to send troops to Afghanistan to fight the American war

Sanjay Kapoor Delhi, Hardnews

On a sunny, but exceedingly cold Washington afternoon, Barack Hussein Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States of America. This minor statistic does not reveal the important fact that he is the first African-American president with a Muslim middle name and a surname that sounds similar to that of America's enemy number one: Osama.

His birth, religion and colour may be an issue with countries, communities and people whose perceptions are contingent on these factors, but for multi-ethnic, differently-hued and religiously diverse India, President Barack Obama's inauguration is fraught with fears and huge expectations.

Recent opinion polls show that Obama is generally viewed favourably in India. It is, however, clear that the pollsters did not speak with the country's strategic and foreign policy establishment that is disturbed by some of his remarks about Kashmir during the run up to the November 4 elections. In an interview to Time magazine, Obama had said that Kashmir is a place he wanted to "devote serious diplomatic resources to get a special envoy in there, to figure out a plausible approach".  Selig S Harrison, director of the Asia programme at the Center for International Policy, in his article in The Washington Times, had pointed out that a Kashmir initiative by America, -- however "veiled" -- can undermine improving Indo-US ties. In the reckoning of Harrison, Obama had made the first big foreign policy mistake.

The Mumbai terror attack and its wall to wall coverage in the US and other parts of the world apparently changed Obama's perceptions about India and its protracted problems with terror. After the Mumbai carnage and the cold Indian response to Obama's proposal, the new administration chose to appoint an envoy only for Afghanistan and Pakistan. India was de-coupled, for the time being. It chose to put on hold suggestions put together by a group led by General David Petraeus that had experts like the Pakistani author, Ahmed Rashid. This group had suggested the importance of Kashmir if  Afghanistan had to be stabilised.

Rashid, an authority on Taliban and Pakistan's troubled frontier, has not been intellectually challenged by the Indian strategic establishment. While the transitional regime in the US chose to sympathise with India, the government of Britain gave no such relief. It basically built its argument based on the writings of authors like Paul Cruickshank in The Guardian who said that the Mumbai attack "was carried out by Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Kashmiri group".  Cruickshank comes to the conclusion that the "key here is Kashmir, a conflict relatively neglected by Washington".

The issue has been perceptively highlighted by strategic affairs expert, Ramtanu Maitra, in a recent article: "The fact remains that the LeT was created by the Pakistani ISI in the 1980s, it is not a Kashmiri group, it is active not only in India, but in Chechnya, Sudan and Britain." He adds that there is hardly a Kashmiri in the LeT. Most of them are Pakistanis from Punjab and the tribal areas, with a smattering of British Muslims.