New Delhi, July 3
The Atal Bihari Vajpayee government is highly circumspect about sending an Indian stabilisation force to Iraq at this juncture. With consensus remaining a far cry, the issue has been put on the back burner and the central leadership is in no hurry to take a decision in this regard.
Officially the refrain remains that “no decision has been taken on sending troops to Iraq.” However, authoritative sources insist there are “several critical questions which need to be clarified and answered to our satisfaction before we reconsider the issue of sending a division strength of Indian forces to Iraq.”
The sources said the political leadership was acutely aware of the inherent dangers in acceding to Washington’s request of despatching an Indian stabilisation force to post-Saddam Hussein Iraq which continues to be in turmoil.
Clearly, the prevailing environment in Iraq under the US-led allied forces and the absence of a political and administrative mechanism in that war-ravaged country coupled with the ambiguous and non-explicit United Nations resolution on troop deployment has compelled the Vajpayee government to go slow and bide its time.
“Consultations are on with friends in the region as well as major powers which is time consuming before a decision is taken one way or the other,” the sources observed. Then, the monsoon session of Parliament begins on July 21 where the issue of sending troops to Iraq will inevitably be raised.
Sources in the imposing South
Block housing the Prime Minister’s office and the Ministry of External Affairs maintain that the request for deploying Indian troops in Iraq should come from the Iraqis. Otherwise, considering New Delhi’s extremely good and long-standing relations with Baghdad “we can be dubbed as being part of the invading or occupation force.”Questions for which convincing answers are difficult to come by pertain to the command structure in Iraq and whether the Indian troops will be under UN supervision as well as their role besides the funding which will be considerably high. Then there is the serious question of casualties should that arise in Iraq.
Given the popular sentiment in the country that Indian troops should not be sent to Iraq, Mr Vajpayee has affirmed that he will like to evolve a consensus before moving forward.
The Congress and other opposition parties have strongly urged the Centre not to be part of American occupation in Iraq. Such a move will not only amount to total subservience to the US military but will also be an infringement of parliamentary privilege.
Congress president Sonia Gandhi in a letter to Mr Vajpayee on June 5 stressed that her party is totally opposed to the deployment of Indian troops in Iraq under any arrangement other than a UN command or as part of a multinational peacekeeping force that has explicit mandate of the UN.
The Left parties, Samajwadi Party, Rashtriya Janata Dal, the JD(S) and Ram Vilas Paswan’s Lok Jan Shakti Party warned the government against engaging the US administration over the possibility of sending troops to Iraq. They said the government’s present exercise was against national interest and an affront to Parliament which had adopted two resolutions calling upon the UN to ensure that reconstruction (in Iraq) was done under its auspices.
Intellectuals and senior academicians have cautioned that deploying Indian troops in Iraq will send a terribly wrong message to the people. They said “we cannot be identified as an occupying imperialistic force. It will be a mission for war-making, not peacekeeping.”
Meanwhile, Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal has stated in Washington after his discussions with American leaders, including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz that there will be no adverse impact on Indo-US relations even if New Delhi decided not to send troops to Iraq. He said the George Bush administration understood India’s political and popular compulsions on the issue.
