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Isolating India will not help US: experts

C K Arora in Washington

Three US experts, including Brookings Institution foreign policy studies director Richard Haas, have questioned the rationale behind President Bill Clinton's action in imposing economic sanctions on India and instead wanted him to negotiate with New Delhi on a mechanism to contain nuclear and missile proliferation.

''Isolating India will not serve the US economic or strategic interests nor would it weaken a government that has taken a step applauded by most Indians, who wonder why the world is prepared to live with China's nuclear arsenal but not India's,'' Haas said at a media briefing on 'India's tests: how to limit the fallout?' in Washington yesterday.

Haas, who served as special assistant to President George Bush between 1989 and 1993, said, ''Instead of slapping the sanctions in great haste, President Clinton should have taken advantage of the 30-day waiting period provided in the legislation, under which sanctions had been imposed, to strike a deal with Congress on a limited set of penalties against India.''

He was for building international support for narrow sanctions that target the immediate problem, namely India's nuclear and missile programmes, ''but that do not go so far as to turn a friend into a foe''.

Haas said it was difficult to see how the same sanctions that failed to deter India from testing would now cause it to back away from a nuclear weapons option. ''Sanctions are very blunt foreign policy tool and will affect a large portion of Indo-American relations,'' he added.

They, however, disapproved India's nuclear tests. And blamed the Clinton administration's pro-China attitude as a contributory factor to this development.

All the three -- Hass, Professor Stephen P Cohen of the University of Illinois and former US ambassador to Pakistan Robert B Oakley -- wanted the president to stick to his upcoming tour of south Asia.

Haas was against the US breaking its diplomatic ties with India and said recalling the US ambassador from New Delhi was natural but not necessarily wise reaction.

Professor Cohen said there was an impression in New Delhi that the US was hostile to India. They considered the US as the 'ring leader' of the 'Beijing-Islamabad axis'.

No US president had cared to visit India in the last two decades. ''People over there believed that Washington considered India only a market for its goods.''

During his last visit to New Delhi, he pointed out, he found great frustration in India over its isolation in the United Nations over the issue of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which a section over there linked to the country's security. On the CTBT issue, it was supported by only two countries -- Libya and Bhutan.

Professor Cohen, however, made it a point to mention that India gave up the late prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru's socialistic economic policies in 1991 and now, after the nuclear test, it had bid a goodbye to the 'Nehruvian foreign policy of restraint and caution'.

Oakley saw in the Indian nuclear test a failure of the Clinton administration's policy in developing relations with New Delhi.

He was more worried over the US credibility in the region.

The impression in Islamabad is that the US is pro-India and in New Delhi it is considered pro-Pakistan, he added.

UNI

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