When the US led by President Richard Nixon and his foreign policy major domo Henry Kissinger cut a deal with communist China using Pakistan as a conduit in 1970, India was left out of the loop in a detente that changed the geopolitical dynamics of the region. Some four decades later, India is front and center in the American reconciliation with Iran, an event that when fully realized is likely to bring about an even greater seismic shift in Asia.
New Delhi may not have directly played errand boy or secret channel in the latest diplomatic upheaval that Pakistan's Yahya Khan played in 1970. But almost every interlocutor who worked on the US-Iran agreement has an India connection — from William Burns, the deputy secretary of state who initiated and led the secret talks (he also wrapped up the US-India nuclear deal) to Puneet Talwar, the White House national security council staffer who did the grunt work for the agreement, to Thomas Pickering and Frank Wisner, both former US ambassadors to New Delhi, who opened the back channel with Teheran going back to the Bush administration.
More important than the personnel involved, however, the reconciliation carries multiple benefits for India, which has the second largest Shia Muslim population in the world after Iran. In fact, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Indian officials has often pointed this out during discussions with US officials whenever the subject of Washington's difficult relationship with Teheran came up, suggesting that a reconciliation would redound to the benefit of all sides — from making US draw down from Afghanistan smoother to relieving India, which has close civilizational ties with the Persian power, from suffocating pressure on the energy front.
Read Full Article here- Times Of India
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