With Perks
like These, Says Indian Media, Let Pakistan Have
Those F-16s
By Sandip Roy
Pacific News Service
San Francisco
While India publicly fumes
that America's offer of F-16s to neighboring Pakistan
is "disappointing," the mood behind
the scenes in New Delhi is actually one of quiet
satisfaction. According to the Indian media, what
New Delhi is really reading into the US announcement
is a radical upgrade of a strategic partnership
between India and the United States.
As the Indian Express newspaper headlined it,
"US gives Pak F-16s, India gets F-16s plus
plus." The "plus plus" includes
F-18s, a wider array of weapon systems and the
ability to produce them in India, offers of nuclear
reactor technology, space cooperation and proposals
to expand New Delhi's role in Asia Pacific Economic
Cooperation (APEC) and the Group of Eight industrial
countries.
The Times of India quoted unnamed Bush administration
officials who said the strategic dialogue with
India would be on levels "you would discuss
with a world power."
The Hindustan Times described the "potent
Cold War symbolism of the F-16s" as obscuring
a real policy shift. The key US statement, it
writes, has nothing to do with F-16s. It is that
the United States has stated "its goal is
to help India become a major world power in the
21st century."
Not everyone is quite so optimistic. "Beware
of Uncle Sam when he comes bearing gifts,"
editorializes The Telegraph newspaper. Writing
in the online news site Rediff.com, Kanchan Gupta
denounces the sale as more of "Washington's
mollycoddling of Pakistan" and dismissed
the offers to India as a "laughable lollypop."
According to the Economic Times, even Republican
Sen. Larry Pressler, who now serves on the board
of Indian IT giant Infosys, described the arms
sales as not just a "strategically bad move"
but also "the day we lost India."
But in an editorial the Times of India pointed
out that the selling of F-16s to Pakistan was
just "the restoration of an earlier arms
supply relationship between Washington and Islamabad."
On the other hand, the twin offers of combat aircraft
and nuclear reactors to India "constitute
an unprecedented breakthrough in Indo-US relations."
By that move, the writer K. Subrahmanyam reasoned,
the United States left no room for any "miscalculation"
on the part of Gen. Pervez Musharraf that the
United States was throwing its weight behind Pakistan
on the Kashmir issue.
In fact, Subrahmanyam pointed out, on her recent
visit to South Asia, Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice made it clear that the Bush administration
was not satisfied with Pakistan's explanations
about the nuclear proliferation network run by
the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, A.Q.
Khan.
India watchers have been seeing the tide turning
for a while now. "No bilateral relationship
in George W. Bush's first term changed as positively
as that between India and the US" writes
Robert Blackwill, former Ambassador to India in
the Wall Street Journal. Despite the attempt to
appear even-handed with respect to India and "war
on terror" ally Pakistan, Blackwill writes
that the United States is increasingly moving
away from "myopically" viewing India
through the lens of New Delhi's relationship with
Islamabad.
The signs of this uptick in relations are already
evident. Lockheed Martin is already promising
"exclusive" F-16s upgraded to India's
particular specifications. The deal, estimated
to cost $6 to $7 million, projects supply of 18
aircraft in fly-away conditions and the other
108 assembled in India under technology transfer,
reports the Times of India. Ambassador Blackwill
now calls on Washington to offer India an even
bigger plum -- permanent membership of the UN
Security Council.
But a survey of letters to the editor to the reputed
Indian daily The Hindu shows ordinary citizens
are a little more skeptical about Washington's
motives. "The CPI (Communist Party of India)
has rightly cautioned New Delhi against falling
into the trap of Washington, which is only encouraging
an arms race in the region to boost its own arms
industry," goes one letter. "By ostensibly
playing the balancing game, the US is only trying
to make money."
There was one spot of unequivocal good news for
Pakistan though. Its visiting cricket team trounced
the Indians to win the third and final test match
in Bangalore.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
