After five long years as the Administration"s point person for the subcontinent, Christina Rocca, the Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs, may be deprived of the opportunity of accompanying President Bush on his first visit to the region in March.
Last month, Bush nominated long-time career diplomat and erstwhile State Department spokesman Richard Boucher as his new Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs.
If he is confirmed by the Senate before the President"s trip to India and Pakistan, it will be Boucher and not Rocca who will be on Air Force One as part of the Administration delegation accompanying Bush.
State Department officials told India Abroad that Boucher"s confirmation hearing by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is expected to be sometime this month - and indications are that his speedy approval by the Foreign Relations Committee and confirmation by the full Senate is likely to be a formality, since he has already been vetted several times, most importantly when he took charge as Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs.
Boucher has not served in any South Asian country, and is considered more of a European hand - but sources said that his long stint, first as deputy spokesman and then spokesman for six different secretaries of state (an unbroken record as the longest serving Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs), and the fact that during this period he was regularly provided with guidance on questions pertaining to the subcontinent, made him familiar with region and the issues that permeated it.
The sources also said that with regard to US-India relations, it was now dealt with not by the South Asia bureau but at a much higher level, with Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns serving as point person.
That in fact is interesting - a separate South Asia Bureau was first established in the wake of legislation proposed by then New York Democratic Congressman Stephen J Solarz to give India a higher profile and ensure that it was not lumped in the Bureau of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs.
In any case, with Burns essentially handling India affairs and reporting directly to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Rocca had been relegated to looking after the smaller nations such as Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Maldives and Bhutan, and on occasion Pakistan and Afghanistan, though much of the affairs of the two last named nations also fell in Burns" lap.
Besides South Asia, Boucher"s responsibilities will also include the Central Asian Republics -- Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
"It will make the South Asia bureau bigger," one State Department official explained. "The office which currently manages relations with the "stans" is the European Bureau."
There was, the official said, no immediate sense of what Rocca will do - whether she stays with government or leaves for private practice. "We have absolutely no idea," one State Department official said. "I would assume she will make an announcement to us, but nothing yet has been conveyed to us. I haven"t even heard a rumor to be honest."
Rocca, a former CIA research analyst, was the South Asia advisor to Senator Sam Brownback, Kansas Republican, who in 2001 was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs. It was from here that she was tapped for the post of Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs, much to the surprise of Brownback who didn"t know about it till President Bush made the announcement. This, officials pointed out at the time, was largely thanks to the patronage of then Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, a close friend of Rocca"s father from their days at the CIA.
The soft-spoken Rocca, who during Congressional hearings was often asked to move closer to the microphone, never acquired the high profile of her immediate predecessor in the second Clinton administration, Karl F Inderfurth, or the controversial personality of the first Assistant Secretary of State Robin Raphel, who at her very first briefing at the Foreign Press Center raised the hackles of New Delhi by declaring that the US does not recognise the instrument of accession of Jammu and Kashmir to India.
Rocca, unlike Inderfurth, and even Raphel, who remained combative with the Indian press during her tenure and held regular briefings, hardly interacted with the media. She typically shied away from holding press conferences, even though the first exclusive interview she granted after she was confirmed was to India Abroad - an interview she followed up with two more during the Bush Administration"s first term.