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Brajesh Meets Cheney, Rice

Brajesh Mishra, principal secretary to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and India's national security adviser, met United States Vice-President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and a slew of top American officials and lawmakers over the past two days "as part of the new phase in Indo-US relations to move the relationship forward".

Mishra's trip followed close on the heels of the visit by Indian National Congress president Sonia Gandhi, who also met Cheney and Rice.

According to sources, Mishra was in Washington at Rice's invitation. Rice had written to Mishra in the third week of May asking him to come over to discuss strategy on how to further metamorphose the already growing ties between New Delhi and Washington.

The invitation for Mishra had thus gone out before President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan was invited to New Delhi by Prime Minister Vajpayee and had nothing to do with the upcoming summit, the sources said. The summit did, however, permeate Mishra's discussions with US officials.

Among the others he met were Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick, Cheney's chief of staff Scott Libby; Deputy National Security Adviser Steven Hadley, Torkel Patterson, special assistant to the President in the National Security Council and head of the Asia division, and the Afghanistan-born Zalmay Khalilzad, the President's special assistant for the Near East and Southwest Asia at the NSC.

He also met Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defence Dov Zakheim, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs Christina Rocca and Assistant to the President on Economic Affairs Lawrence Lindsay.

Mishra also went up on Capitol Hill to meet Senator Joseph Biden, Delaware Democrat, who chairs the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Senator Sam Brownback, Kansas Republican.

Brownback is the minority member of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs and the author of the Brownback Amendments, which gave the President a permanent waiver to lift the sanctions imposed against India and Pakistan after their tit-for-tat May 1998 nuclear explosions.

On the House side, he met Representatives Gary Ackerman, New York Democrat, Tom Lantos, California Democrat, both members of the International Relations Committee, and Porter Goss, Florida Republican, who chairs the Select Intelligence Committee, which oversees the Central Intelligence Agency.

Mishra also met CIA Director George Tenet at the spy agency's headquarters in Langley, Virginia, but this meeting was not reflected in the official handout distributed at the Indian embassy about his meetings. A CIA spokesman also refused to confirm or deny if the meeting took place.

Sources, however, downplayed the meeting, saying Mishra was simply reciprocating Tenet's visit to New Delhi during which he had specially called on Mishra.

Other sources said Tenet and Mishra discussed strategies for sharing intelligence, particularly vis-à-vis the activities in Afghanistan and on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border by terrorists associated with Saudi dissident and international fugitive Osama bin Laden that now pose a threat to both the US and India.

They said there had also been a brief discussion of Tenet's recent trip to the Middle East, where he openly engaged in some shuttle diplomacy between the Israelis and the Palestinians to alleviate the violence on the West Bank.

Mishra also hosted a breakfast at the Watergate Hotel, where he was staying, for staunch Republican Party activist and Tampa, Florida, heart surgeon Dr R Vijayanagar, who is close to President George W Bush and his brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

Evidently, Mishra's meeting with Vijayanagar was aimed at cultivating this long-time GOP stalwart who could always come in handy, considering not only his closeness with the Bush family, but also with other Republican leaders who matter in the administration and Congress.

Also at the breakfast were Ambassador Lalit Mansingh and Shekhar Tiwari, one of the founder members of the Overseas Friends of the BJP and head honcho of the RSS in the United States.

The sources said Mishra's discussions with the top American officials were "substantive" and covered the "whole gamut of Indo-US relations" including political, strategic, commercial and economic".

Mishra, according to the sources, was "fully satisfied by the tenor of the talks, the content of the talks", and was further convinced that "a firm ground" has been established on "which to base future Indo-US relations".

But the sources said it would "be wrong" to think that the relations had suddenly blossomed after the advent of the Bush administration on January 20. "The process has been going on for over two years," they pointed out, and followed the dialogue between Strobe Talbott, deputy secretary of state in the Clinton administration, and External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh, which was "one of the most intensive dialogues ever".

The sources said there was a clear acknowledgement in the talks Mishra had with Cheney and the other Bush administration officials and lawmakers that "there is an opportunity to advance to a qualitatively high level" the Indo-US relationship.

They took issue with the contention that the sanctions against India that are still to be lifted "is an albatross" and "a dampener" in bilateral ties, but acknowledged that "it is an impediment to the realisation of the full potential of our relationship.

"But we can't say that because of the sanctions nothing is happening," they argued.

Mishra had not raised the issue of sanctions with the administration, "but publicly we [India] have said it and the prime minister also said it publicly when he came here last year", the sources added.

There was also no indication whatsoever that Washington is engaged in a strategy to cultivate India as a counterweight to China. "I don't think they are looking for a confrontation with China, and there are going to be some high-level visits from China to Washington very soon," said a high-level source.

"The economic content of the US-China relationship is so large" that not only is the US eschewing a cold war with Beijing, but so is the latter with Washington, he noted. "The message the Chinese sent through [Russian President Vladimir] Putin was that the Chinese are also not looking for a confrontation" with the US.

The sources also categorically denied that any of the US officials in this or the Clinton administration had ever "talked about mediation" in Kashmir. "This is absolutely incorrect that they are urging mediation on us," one source emphasised.

The sources said that in the wake of the meeting of the Joint Working Group on Terrorism, Mishra and the US officials had also discussed the scourge of international terrorism, particularly that emanating from Taleban-controlled Afghanistan.

India also has a JWG on Terrorism with Russia, just as the US does too. And while these countries are not consulting jointly, they are consulting, the sources said, "because there seems to be a commonality of purpose as far as the Taleban is concerned. But how this will develop, I don't know."

In the talks with Zoellick, Mishra had strongly raised the issue of restoration of the General System of Preferences for certain industrial goods that had been denied to India since 1992.

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