Jaswant-Albright ARF meet to be cynosure of all eyes

When Singh represented India at the ARF last year in Manila, it was the first international summit New Delhi was attending after going nuclear. Then the chairman’s statement had made a critical reference to the tests, largely in deference to the Western community and China.

This year, the applause for India on Kargil will be led by none other than the US itself. Even as the lay public marvels at the sea-change in international opinion within the space of oneyear, New Delhi has already posted its strategy beyond Kargil: as Singh said at a recent talk at the IIC here, for India the Asia-Pacific is a “natural” constituency.

Singh is not about to reinvent former Congress PM Narasimha Rao’s 1992 “look east” policy, not when elections are around the corner. But the debate within the Ministry of External Affairs over how to deal with Pakistan — to cultivate it assiduously or to simply, ignore it — has been revived with some enthusiasm after the Kargil conflict.

Singh’s first bilateral takes place tomorrow with Indonesian foreign minister Ali Alatas. On Sunday, Singh will meet the foreign ministers of the US, China, Thailand and Vietnam, on July 27 he will meet Russian foreign minister Igor Ivanov and on July 28 Japanese foreign minister Masahiko Komura.

The Jaswant Singh-Albright meeting is the cynosure of all eyes, not only because of the US support on Kargil but also because Washington has openly come out against Pakistan’s covert support to cross-borderterrorism in Kashmir. The changing relationship is already being dubbed the `Kargil spring.’

Ministry officials said the hour-long meeting between the two would include a stock-taking on recent bilateral developments, including an “update on the Kargil situation.”

Asked what India’s response would be if pressed to undertake a dialogue with Pakistan, the officials said Islamabad would have to “take certain steps to repair the breach of trust that has taken place with New Delhi.”

Not surprisingly, Britain has followed Washington’s cue with great alacrity, castigating Pakistan and its terrorist links in Kashmir in London only yesterday. At the ARF the European Union representative, the Finland foreign minister, is likely to make a similar point.

The meeting with China will take on from Singh’s visit to Beijing in mid-June, when Chinese foreign minister Tang Jiaxuan had proposed a bilateral security dialogue with India. Further, both sides are likely to discuss how to celebrate 50 years of theestablishment of bilateral relations next year as well as impart economic content to the relationship.

The meeting with Komura is likely to be one of the highlights of the visit. Japan has been the only major power to have had sustained misgivings on the source of the “infiltration” at Kargil, having cited “insufficient evidence” for the same.

Recently, however, the Japanese ambassador to Delhi took great pains to underline the fact that Tokyo remains fully with the Indian position on Kargil. The invitation to Singh to visit Tokyo has been reissued. Japan, as the largest aid donor to India, however, has still not unfrozen its yen loans to New Delhi.