Washington still knows how to rattle India

Other than showing India its place for pursuing strategic autonomy, Donald Trump may have another motive in getting closer to Pakistan.

It has been an axiom in Washington for more than three decades that ‘it is so easy to create a storm in New Delhi’. This week is no exception, with the west wind prevailing from Pakistan, fanned by its new best friend, United States President Donald Trump. The maxim’s authorship is attributed to Robin Raphel, who served as the US Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia in the first Bill Clinton administration.

In 1994, with the aim of disrupting the diplomatic status quo in her new charge of South and Central Asian Affairs, Raphel deliberately and calculatedly questioned Kashmir’s Instrument of Accession to India. “We view Kashmir as a disputed territory. We do not recognise the Instrument of Accession as meaning that Kashmir is forever an integral part of India,” Raphel declared. The result was a political storm in India, which is easily triggered by Americans in various public offices when they want to provoke India. Raphel then marvelled how easy it is to set off a political storm in New Delhi.

Trump’s actions and remarks on Pakistan in the last three months are meant precisely to incite India. With these, Trump hopes to put India in what he thinks is the place it deserves in South Asia and on the global stage. It is a sign of weakness and immaturity in India’s political leadership to have risen to Trump’s bait.

Trump’s highly provocative latest statement on Pakistan, in relation to India, is at the fag end of an announcement on social media on US-Pakistan collaboration on developing the latter’s oil reserves. Trump claims these reserves are “massive”. He wants Pakistan to sell that oil to India in future.

The announcement and Trump’s opinion are full of holes. It is a pity that quarters in India, which ought to know better, are reacting to it all. New Delhi has not responded to it in any official capacity. Hopefully, such wisdom will prevail because India ought not care about what the US does with Pakistan’s potential for oil.

Pakistan has made no mention of this oil deal at all so far. Only Trump has done so. Normally, Islamabad leaves no stone unturned in giving maximum publicity to anything that suggests an uptick in its relations with the Trump administration. It uses such opportunities to validate a resurgence in US-Pakistan ties, which had bottomed out during the Joe Biden administration. The only hint by Pakistan is in part of a sentence from its embassy in Washington announcing a trade deal with the US on Wednesday. “This deal marks the beginning of a new era of economic collaboration, especially in energy, mines and minerals, IT, cryptocurrency and other sectors.” It has not echoed any of the big claims by Trump.

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif also did not mention any oil deal while thanking Trump for “his leadership role in finalisation of the historic US-Pakistan trade agreement.” The silence may be explained away by past failures in drilling operations by international oil companies to find any significant quantities of oil in Pakistan. The US said on August 1 that Pakistan’s tariff rate will be 19%.

Other than showing India its place for pursuing strategic autonomy, Trump may have another motive in getting closer to Pakistan. In Washington’s growing rivalry with Beijing, Trump may be incentivising Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir to reduce their dependence on China. If the Trump administration can make headway in weaning Pakistan away from China, its all-weather friend, it would be a strategic achievement. Indians like to run down Pakistan at all times to the point of making grave miscalculations. But the worldview of Pakistan is that of a nuclear weapons state, a country of 240 million Muslims, which must be prevented from being wholly radicalised at all costs.

Six months of Trump’s foreign policy — even trade policy — has mostly been a combination of farce, comedy, fantasies, and bravado. To list them would need more than one column. Truth be told, India would have lost nothing by thanking Trump for his administration’s keen interest in ushering in peace in all global flashpoints and for the hectic South Asian diplomacy of US Vice President J D Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio in defusing the post-Pahalgam flare-up between India and Pakistan. Prime Minister Narendra Modi could even have added to the Washington farce and told Trump that he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. After all, why shouldn’t Trump get the prize, for which the Nobel committee shamelessly found Mahatma Gandhi undeserving! India did much worse things to be liked by Trump in his first term.

New Delhi’s mistake is that it has now allowed Islamabad to take pages out of its own copybook instead of barefacedly continuing to pander to Trump’s ego. For now, Pakistan has won this contest.

(K P Nayar has extensively covered West Asia and reported from Washington as a foreign correspondent for 15 years.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.