By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Feb 11 2004 (IPS)

India’s eagerness in cultivating a new friendship with Israel will likely stop short of making common cause over the revelation that rogue scientists in neighbouring Pakistan have been leaking nuclear technology to some of Tel Aviv’s worst enemies.

”The Israelis are naturally nervous that countries in its immediate neighbourhood have been acquiring nuclear technology from Pakistan, but India has to be more circumspect,” P R Chari, director of the prestigious Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies (IPCS), told IPS in an interview.

Speculation was rife in the capital that Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom visit to India – he leaves Thursday – aims to further growing defence and technological cooperation between the two countries in the light of the new revelations from Islamabad that nuclear technology had indeed been sold to Iran and Libya.

In brief remarks to the press late Tuesday, Shalom said that nuclear proliferation from Pakistan had the potential of ”destabilising the entire world” and that efforts had now to be mounted to prevent extremist groups such as the al-Qaeda from gaining access to ”nuclear weapons”.

Shalom called on democracies around the world to ”do everything we can in order to disarm all those regimes that would like to bring destruction to their enemies or their neighbours and we should do it against states, countries, organisations”.

But India’s Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha, who was present at the briefing that closely followed a meeting with Shalom, chose to limit his observations to saying: ”We have shared our assessment of views on developments in the Indian subcontinent as well as in West Asia.”

Shalom called on Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Defence Minister George Fernandes on Wednesday.

India and Pakistan have, since the beginning of this year, been trying to put behind them five years of difficult, roller-coaster relations that followed tit-for-tat nuclear tests they carried out in May 1998.

The following year, India and Pakistan fought a brief but bloody war at Kargil on the Line of Control that divides the territory of Kashmir disputed by the two neighbours. Most of 2001 was spent in a dangerous military confrontation that saw the massing of close to a million troops along their common border.

It required the intervention of Washington to prevent the Kargil war and the military confrontation from escalating into a possible nuclear exchange.

Along with weaponising India’s nuclear technology, Vajpayee’s right-wing and ultra-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has also drastically changed India’s long-held policy of championing the Palestinian cause to seeking close defence ties with Israel.

The Kargil war triggered off increasing involvement by Israel in India’s efforts to counter cross-border militancy in Kashmir as well as negotiations for weapons and surveillance systems – such as the Green Pine radar system, unmanned aerial vehicles and the Arrow anti-ballistic missile defence system.

Israel is now rated as the biggest arms supplier to India after Russia. Shalom’s visit also closed a deal worth 1.2 billion U.S. dollars for the sale of Phalcon early-warning radars to India, which is seen to give New Delhi an edge in conventional weaponry over regional rivals China and Pakistan.

In September, Ariel Sharon became the first Israeli prime minister to visit India at a time when there were still doubts as to whether the Phalcon deal would go through because of objections raised by Washington, which was sensitive to the interests of its close military ally in the region, Pakistan.

Sharon’s visit with a 150-member delegation, including representatives from its defence industry, drew protests from Islamabad, which along with other Islamic countries does not recognise the Jewish state.

Chari said that while India was expanding its military cooperation with Israel, it could not also afford to ignore the fact that it was home to the world’s second largest Muslim population in the world and that it had close friends among several Islamic countries and in the Arab world.

Vajpayee has, on several occasions, made it clear that India would not abandon the Palestinian struggle to regain their homeland.

Sinha, responding to questions on the construction of a security barrier within Palestinian territory, said India had voted in the United Nations against the erection of the wall. ”The only thing I would like to tell you at this point of time is that we continue to deal with this issue according to our best judgement,” Sinha said.

India, which has been home to small Jewish settlements that date back to the diaspora, recognised Israel in 1950 but refrained form establishing full diplomatic ties until 1992 out of deference to the Palestinian cause and its own anti-colonial stance.

Dependence on petroleum imports from the Middle Eastern countries and a large expatriate population in the Arab countries have also been a factor in India’s recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) as the ”legitimate representative of the Palestinian people”.

In 1980 at the height of the Cold War, India, which was allied to the former Soviet Union, granted full diplomatic status to the PLO mission in Delhi. In 1982, the Israeli consulate in western city of Mumbai was closed down.

But in a sign of the change in political times, high on the agenda of Shalom’s visit was the reopening of Israel’s consulate in Mumbai.

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